1964

Organization: NYC NET

********************************************************* WARNING * WARNING * WARNING * WARNING * WARNING ********************************************************* The content of this work is essentially angled toward an adult male homosexual readership. If you're a person not yet past eighteen years of age please read no further and be advised that your reading or perusal of this material is expressly prohibited by law.

A NOTE TO THE READER: All characters and incidents within this work of fiction are purely of my invention. Any resemblance herein to actual events or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental. Throughout this story the character's dialogue may contain language, distinct and obvious relations of alternate lifestyles and attitudes that may prove offensive to some. Verbal depictions of sexual acts are intentionally quite graphic. If you're of the sort that's easily offended or disturbed by literature of such nature read no further. Additionally, I've written nothing herein without reason as regards the shaping of this piece, however no slights are intended toward any race, gender or group through the manner of this tales unfolding.

Thanks. All comment will be happily received by: Harry_Schultz@nycnet.com,Internet

1964 - Part 1

The crowded city bus that ran downtown into South Philly along Twenty-third Street, whined and hissed its way to a halt at Bainbridge not long past four that freezing Wednesday afternoon. Harlan Creely, standing first in line, planted a foot on the first of the little set of steps that automatically opened the bus's rear door. Hesitantly descending, he finally set one foot, then the next onto the curb.

Moving much like the brown leaves following the chase the November wind's fancy led that day, the other passengers exiting the bus swirled impatiently all around the tall, walnut skinned youth. He'd abruptly come to a dead halt in their midst.

The whole of the little throng of shoppers and workers hastening downtown to their homes after tending to business on Market Street manufactured a swift changing, nearly kaleidoscopic pattern on the sidewalk as they scattered all around the handsome yet strangely expressionless and immobile boy. Clad and bundled up to satisfy individual requirement for thwarting cold, each on deciding his or her own path hurriedly disappeared from Harlan's sight either up, or down, or across the street.

Although the largest part of his attention had been set off-hinge by preoccupation of the deepest kind, Harlan's gaze slowly swung this way and that as people moved off. The plaintive sigh that followed the tall youth's survey of the street bloomed like a cloud of cotton in the chill air. The crowd's dissipation painfully accentuated the greatness of the distance Harlan already perceived there to be between himself and the rest of the human race.

Despite its growling roar, Harlan was barely aware that the bus behind him was pulling away. He dully shook his head to roust his memory from the leisure it had suddenly elected with respect to his whereabouts. Somehow the street and every house in view along it all at once seemed foreign and unfamiliar even though this was a neighborhood the teenage boy knew very very well. Widening in minor alarm over this sudden loss of his wits, the anxious youth's butterscotch eyes snapped hard right, then left, as he attempted to get his bearings. Yet unsure of what move he should be making although the surrounding scene slowly was taking on clarity again, Harlan remained stock still in the last of the dissolving crowd.

It took a rough shove from the cold wind to move the tall, long-limbed boy on. But not before he'd made a more comfortable arrangement of the several textbooks he toted under an arm. His free hand quickly hoisted the fleece collar of his tan leather jacket higher about his long neck.

Then came but a second or two more of blank-eyed self-counsel and Harlan resolutely commenced the walk, four blocks east, to the church he and his family had attended for as long as he'd owned memory.

Step by step, the fall of his feet landed on cement soldierlike; brisk and steady-paced. No matter how even the meter of his gait, within, Harlan faltered round and round a circuitous route of travel inside a dank and dim cenotaph of perturbation. Troublesome visions hung across his path of thought like cobwebs.

In the dull light of this gloomy mood, he'd groped his way about the inside of anguish the entire day. Harlan still continued attempting to struggle out on his own but all sides of the thing engulfing him appeared to remain far too high for climbing.

The same as since that morning when Harlan had begun to fumble his way through the day, all the gears in his thought processes continued to gum up, to refuse to mesh. Likewise, every check and balance which might have held his perspective in better calibration remained inoperative.

He stood helplessly at the cliff edge of fright as bewilderment rolled in all round him like thick, encroaching fog. As he walked, the anxious nineteen-year-old took to repeatedly hounding himself all over again; meaning to prompt his hasty orchestration of some final solution to the the thing on his mind. The tonic note on the staff of change had yet to ring out clear through the haze in his head.

Considering all things possible, the leggy youth none too lightly courted notions that, maybe, through some unintended slight on his part an unknown but significant force with a hand in the forging of the bigger plan of things had angled an eyeful of vengeance expressly his way. As he covered the next block, Harlan speculated this possibility as an explanation for the curse that seemingly had brought to bear the sealing off of all ends of every avenue of reasoning which might well have permitted the easy commerce of solutions to his problem.

Frustrated, he'd quickly come to find as he knew he would, more silliness than sense in such a thought. His full lips tightened. "Damn," he swore softly into the stiff breeze coming at him as his plight yet stood seemingly unsolvable. Though most of his elders would have right off assumed him far too young to hold an appreciation of what real pain was, the pain the sad-eyed youth bore that day had a bite as hard and deep as the chill wind.

One thing was sure. Harlan intended to begin, as best he could, to learn how to put an end to the ache inside him. He'd made up his mind, from that day on it must surely be he and only he who stamped the deeper concerns of his life with the final word as to how they'd be resolved. This decision had been settled by the unanimous vote of one he'd cast early that morning. He'd elected himself sole chooser of his paths on his walk through life. He'd choose for himself what to take, how to give -- and where to leave his love. For a moment as Harlan again thought on the decision he'd made, the flicker and glow of slight hope again struck him as he briskly kept walking on. The Dark Ages were long past, he realized. After all, this was the Twentieth Century wasn't it ... it was Nineteen-sixty-four.

Though the weight of it had been carried with quiet resignation until this certain day, the youth's quandary over the specifics of right flavors of the mind continually nagged him. All the questions that the weighing of things wrought had rested heavily on Harlan's shoulders well before they'd grown anywhere near as broad or strong as then. Thus, worry had unfailingly lingered as near him as his adolescent awareness of himself. It continued disconcertingly tolling like a great bell in his ear.

The truth which the oval-eyed teenager kept hidden had become adamant for his overt recognition and uncompromised final reconciliation with it. Strong as the need for food or the urge for sex, that Wednesday, an inner need to feel free had set to haunting Harlan the strongest it ever had.

The presence of longing this giant-sized was quite an overwhelming thing for Harlan whom had never been told any more of life by his parents than they believed fit for a child to know. And childlike the broad-shouldered youth was with respect to the feelings going on inside himself. He was ravenous from curiosity. Nonetheless, as though the frighteningly overpowering impact of a scene's suspenseful unfolding might somehow be lessened, just as a kid front row at a scary movie furtively peeks at the action taking place on screen through gaps in tiny powerless fingers, oft times Harlan found himself barely able to glimpse at the full face of his need.

However, Harlan somehow had come through all right. He'd made the passage from boyhood, to where he stood ripe and on the verge of full manhood, unwarped despite the experience of living with fact he often found unnerving.

He'd come all the way from birth to nineteen going on twenty the bearer of a warm heart and an extremely kind and even nature. This nature had seldom been deemed overly adverse when authority that governed his upbringing made its usual requirement of his immediate and unquestioning obedience.

At high school and around his neighborhood in West Philly, Harlan had developed no friendships conspicuous enough to have been looked on as particularly intimate even by his watchful mother. Notwithstanding, the soft-spoken, devastatingly good-looking youth was well liked. As well, inside of the beehive of the very carefully organized adolescent existence which sequestered him -- planned church and school functions, chaperoned parties and outings -- he'd always been one of the gang and accepted by both his male and female peers. Thus, Harlan bore little wisdom of what it meant to make one's own way other than how he'd been told. Early on he acquired the strong belief that life was indeed a very hard thing to live. This was because the young man's self-conscious preoccupation with desires and emotions he deliberately endeavored to leave undefined prevailed and grew.

But that didn't matter anymore, that Wednesday all aspects of his life were to undergo great change. Harlan Creely had without doubt got it in his mind that a turnabout was to come because at last he'd made the decision to not turn his face from anything, great or small, that lay inside himself ever again.

Of course, making a decision's much easier than acting on one. The youth's fears often towered over him in sporadic flare-ups as the day of near wintry cold slowly poured itself out. However, since morning, over and over he'd recited under his breath, "The truth shall set you free ... nothin' but truth ..." It would indeed be the telling of the truth that opened a door the handsome brown-skinned youth had thought would be forever closed to him.

Singular, anxious deliberation over where to seek enlightenment regarding the stirrings inside he'd come to know well but didn't understand, had been prevalent in the light-eyed youth's troubled thinking for several weeks prior. From the very first, Harlan had pondered whether his purpose could be served by putting his confidence in the young minister heading his church, the Reverend Clay Adderly. Then again through a sizable caution heavily tinctured with foreboding by way of all the adamance with which his father had instilled the code of family in him, Harlan thought for a long time on whether to break or conform to the rule. He was eldest son and heir and had even more so been made to know, coming to his parents was to his first action toward the remedy of any predicament he might occasion; his duty no less.

Yet Harlan knew seeking counsel inside the Creely family's framework bore sure odds of a hellish approach with his father Frank. even to the outskirts of the matter. Carefully rethinking the worth in that alternative, Harlan came to an alternate answer. `Go someplace where there's real understanding to be found,' he'd heard himself say. Thus, he took a course opposite the one he knew his father would highly prefer. It fostered his motivation for the walk crosstown in South Philly that was to come that cold afternoon.

For Harlan, the apprehensiveness he felt was a mosaic of fragments of fear and doubt strewn on that day's face. The youth's picture of his troubles was redrawn every time his recall of time and place returned like a disturbing wind. It never let him claim a sense of calm for long but he walked on. Nonetheless, Harlan was determined to prove himself man enough to face, boyish desperation gusted about the heart of him like the stiff winds that whipped round the cold streets.

The boy's first solution's inception hadn't jelled until Harlan had exiled himself to a removed corner of Edmund E. Gerard High's cafeteria. It became clear to Harlan that his only chance to gain any peace inside lay in finally relinquishing the secret he kept to the wisest and most willing ear he could find. He believed his fears would be stripped of their power over him once he at last heard himself speak of the thing out loud.

Chair set back from the table as if making a study of the worn oak planks on the old school cafeteria's floor, Harlan had sat there quite some time gazing past the dark knot his clasped hands formed in his lap. But, his countenance somehow connoted a completeness of focus; as though in his head he might be carefully summing up of a column of large figures.

The true mathematics of Harlan's mental exercise were meant to adduce the mean of his chances through the counting and figuring of plus/minus comparisons ... his ironhanded father's all too familiar rigid mettle and, on the other hand, the charity of spirit he believed made up his minister's. It took but a little time before Harlan rationalized his best chance as being a talk with the one person he yearned to speak with most all along -- Clay Adderly. "Him ... it has to be ... him," he'd resolved at last. "How could it be anybody else but him?"

The large electric bell above the cafeteria's swinging doors loudly clanged and called for the next period's commencement. Without thought Harlan had risen, collected his books, and his barely touched tray of food. Merely a look attested to the teenager's deeper interest in the taste of the fare off his contemplation's menu than the fish sticks, peas and potatoes lying cold on his plate. Once he'd returned the tray, Harlan determinedly put forth an effort to bury worry beneath a look of steely calm as he started for his next class. For a while he drove off the doubt he felt wafting in the air all around as he went ...

Long-legged and athletic, the youth easily sprinted across Twenty-first Street hurrying on though still quite preoccupied. A horn blasted and a large truck rumbled past with its haul just as he leapt onto the curb. The sounding horn blasted a fanfare for the sudden return of Harlan's father's stoic visage as it once more loomed large inside his head for what seemed the hundredth time that day.

Harlan halted, then scanned the greying sky thoughtfully. For a moment, as he'd found cause to do many times over the last few years, he seriously pondered the depth of what he felt for his father, Frank Creely.

In the aftermath of some out-and-out conflict between them, if feeling especially wronged and therefore seeing himself set in a right enough place from which to indulge his contained resentment, Harlan would fashion rough inventions with which to probe his soul and the raw hate he'd feel begin to bloom.

All his life he'd been given good food, warm clothes, but no right to anger. "Honor thy father," he'd always been lectured. The smooth field of his high forehead would crease when he'd sometimes jam shut those tan-colored eyes of his and out of darkness form a luminous picture of his father lying flat on his back, stone cold and dead. With this vision in mind, he'd put himself to the test. "How bad would it hurt me if he up and died tomorrow?" he'd ask himself. "Would I break down cry about it? Would it make me feel like I was all busted up inside? Would it be like I couldn't see some way to keep on livin' `cause somebody real important was lost forever ... the way it's supposed to?"

Employing the like for many such examinations of the rickety relationship his father and he dwelled inside generally left Harlan feeling confused and guilty. He'd lived his life in Sunday school and never before had seriously made an attempt to fit his hand to rebellion's guiding wheel. That a father was to be honored and obeyed but not questioned was all Harlan knew. So when "Of course," the obvious answer he'd assumed any father's child would give to such a self-query didn't instantly come to mind, Harlan first felt himself a derelict son.

Harlan's surely industrious father was head deacon and trustee in charge of Greater Thesselonian First Baptist's financial affairs as well. Once the reaping and counting of the offerings and tithes gathered up from the congregation in the collection plates and baskets was done and set aside, Deacon Creely displayed a most visible stern piety and apparent abandonment of worldly things. At least that was so full-time on Sundays and part-time come week-night prayer meetings.

However, day by day with the use of the remainder of his time, the uncannily shrewd businessman was quite content to reroute the energy he applied to his devotions to works more beneficial to his own gain than that he anticipated as heavenly. The management of his insurance business was one.

No one would ever deny Frank Anderson Creely was and had always been, a hard working, self-declared no-nonsense man. A "pull yourself up by your own bootstraps brand of a man," he'd often say of himself none too shyly. Therefore, no more than this tall, wiry man's nature allowed him to ignore for a moment the strategical value of his placement in a crowd, would it let him lay aside part or parcel of a narrow philosophy.

Frank would have absolutely nothing to do with anything that missed the mark in jibing with the stringent logic he'd learned by rote off his own father's slate or that opposed any judgements his forebear had bestowed as to proper living.

It was this same manner of sentiment that brought to bear Frank Creely's choke-hold frugality as regarded his allowance for latitude in his toleration of fooling around in life's grey areas. That applied not only to himself but to all under his dominion. "You either do or you don't, boys. You hear what I'm tellin' you? It's no more simple than that!" Words to live by...

In the ministering of this his gospel, "You either do or you don't," was likely the most presented of the not necessarily luminous pearls of wisdom the deacon constantly sermonized to both his sons. Although his delivery of the message never qualified as charismatic even in essence, neither Harlan nor Buddy, Frank's youngest, had much difficulty remembering. In the course of any given day, Frank without fail would minister this phrase either to one of his sons or an unlucky employee at the insurance office he owned and ran on his detection of some dereliction of duty.

About to turn twenty, two days past the coming Christmas, Harlan was even more keenly aware of the expanding void between himself and his father. He was a ship about to drift away from the dock. Little remained of the fast fraying family ties strung across the chasm between himself and his father. Only a few last taut threads of connection sometimes quite naive Harlan himself had spun out of sentimental, wishful inventions remained in the teenage boy's sheer embroidering on the bands of the shared familial existence he very much needed to believe in.

With graceful quiet the age of twelve or so Harlan, quite a handsome boy, met the onset of his metamorphosis from child to adult. Since then not only had his body markedly showed all the expected but surprising signs of change, the concerns that led his thinking proved entirely new manifestations as well. Along with the deepened timbre of his voice, his mind experienced a change of depth all its own. His questions changed formed, growing more of size and like his body adopted secondary traits of a man. By circumstance quite as natural in its occurrence as his physical transfiguration, Harlan grew less and less a complaisant believer in his father's truths.

Harlan's fertile mind was a vast field for the new feelings, desires and curiosities that sprouted in him as swift in speed as the upspring of the patch of kinky, black hairs that came to thickly cloud the very base of his smooth brown belly like an oasis all around the newly veined and thickened length of man-flesh rooted in the meeting of his thighs. All of it was so normal -- so usual as became any boy becoming a man.

But as with all processes, mysterious turns are made in the making as they push on toward completion. Harlan's arrival at the limbo that prefaces manhood sometimes struck him as more a backward step toward infancy. Overly simplistic juvenile queries, "Why? ... Why not? ... How? ... What if ...?" all embarrassingly continued coming into play whenever he sought to take a position of weight when in discussion with his elders. It wasn't often the innately bright youth considered himself speaking with knowing confidence.

In earlier times, the son had been quick to come running to call upon his father in the pursuit of the elusive final word on life, living, and the meaning and placement of manly emotion. Sadly, it wasn't long in his listening and later comparison that Harlan found Frank's theories on any issue, other than propagation of money unenlightening and, quite often ... useless.

"No! ... no! ....Daddy's just about the worst one to go talkin' to. There's nothin' I've got to tell him that he's ready to listen to anyway .... When could anybody ever talk to him? Dag man" The wind's cold, open hand wiped his face, smudging the resolute color of that soft utterance as Harlan's step speeded up as he covered the last block to the church ...

"Who? ... Come on ... Come on!" A little bit annoyed at hearing the faint knock at the door of his study as he hurriedly made ready to leave for home, the Reverend Clay M. Adderly wheeled about in response as he extracted his heavy overcoat from a rather old and scratched enameled wardrobe just beside the closed door to the pastor's study. Nonetheless, the tall, young, square-jawed preacher's face abruptly bloomed bright as day on his instant recognition of the light brown eyes peering shyly just past the squeaky office door's edge as being Harlan Creely's. The young minister chucked the tweed coat he clutched in his large hand onto the leather armchair near his desk and went to pull the door open, wide as it would go. His strong hand flew to Harlan's shoulder as he ushered the youth just inside his small office's doorway.

Clay's broad smile proved the instant progenitor of Harlan's. Although he was all at once pressed hard under the thumb of his shyness, all the worry the youth had been traveling with suddenly withered. Harlan brightly beamed back a smile at the husky, bull-necked young preacher who'd come to lead the large church almost three years before. For a moment, the aura of this warm, most approachable man he'd long thought much of was more than enough of a source of protection to proffer him escape from the urgency that had compelled him to come.

"Hey there man, how you doin'?" The thin dark line of Clay Adderly's well-kept mustache traced his broad smile. It continued shining on Harlan as the strikingly handsome young preacher reached forward and sandwiched one of the teenager's cold hands firmly within the warmth of his two.

"Well sir," Clay said cheerily, "looks like the good Lord sure nough does move in manners mysterious. Don't he?. Can't call this nothin' less than a welcome surprise. Since goin' on ten o'clock this mornin' all I've heard is a plumber cryin' to me, Rev, that thing over there ain't so good, this one's worse, and the one over there ain't good as either one.' Got to be plain to just about anybody, I've been in line for some kind of uplift to head my way all day. And right here it is -- you've just done the trick. Really man ..."

Clay Adderly's light line of conversation was abruptly severed on a keen edge of the anxiety sighted coming into view on his young parishioner's face. Subtle and politely cautious, the broad-shouldered young preacher folded his arms and leaned back a little to look Harlan up and down with a gentle eye. "Just where is it you're comin' from -- West Philly?" he inquired quietly.

"No, down from North. I ... I came straight from school." The last remnant of the smile Clay's exuberant greeting had elicited from Harlan somberly faded from sight.

Clay hadn't been sure of it at first but within moments it was impossible for him to mistake the heavy pall of significant sadness on Harlan's face for the flimsier trappings of simple teenage worry . "Harlan, what is this? Tell me what is it that's got hold of you? ...Tell me. For the life of me, you look like you've been tusslin' with the very Devil himself man ... and pretty hard too." The handsome man with skin as rich a color as honey paused a second to gently bring the troubled youth's chin aloft with the top of his slow rising big balled-up hand.

For a long moment mercifully unburdened by voiced questions, the preacher painstakingly explored Harlan's eyes for signs of his particular affliction as his other broad hand reassuringly squeezed the boy's shoulder. Clay resumed his offer of comfort in a gentle, earnest tone. "Now, youngblood, come on out with it and tell me what it is you need. It don't matter what it is `cause nobody's set me down here to be your judge. It positively ain't a hill of beans to me what the problem is. All that really matters is how I can help -- that's the thing I'm here for."

Harlan, silent and anxious, still hadn't come all the way into the office. He stood before the puzzled clergyman, head hung down again as he shifted his weight foot to foot. An amalgam of disparate emotions -- need, fear, and guilt -- laid on him from behind like a heavy weight that rendered the youth incapable of doing that which he wished most; to simply look up into the tall and strong preacher's eyes and somehow know everything could surely be set right.

Harlan's proud chin trembled. "I ... I ... I want to talk with you Rev," he stammered on the verge of tears. "I mean I've got to. It's real important."

A look of concern that bespoke an unfathomable depth of feeling, flooded over the confused young preacher's face swift as a river. "Well sir ... I sure can see that ... yeah ... I can see it's some kind of serious."

Harlan trembled, frightened that an attempt to say more would not only unleash a landslide of words but also precipitate a torrential fall of the stinging tears he fought to hold in abeyance. He tightly clamped his lips together and stiffly nodded in confirmation.

Just about to fall completely away, Clay's big hand reversed its downward drift and ascended once more. That hand, warm and strong, tenderly caught and cupped Harlan's trembling chin. "Come on now youngblood, don't you worry none," he said gently. "All of it's gonna work itself out." Some of Harlan's sorrow exited his eyes.

Very next moment, Clay shot a glance up at the round black clock that hung on the wall adjacent the place of a gold-framed white Jesus who wore a rainbow for a halo. "Look here my man, best thing to do is get ourselves out of here and go somewhere," the handsome preacher suggested in a tone so light its lift immediately furthered the revival of Harlan's confidence. "Matter of fact," Clay said without waiting for Harlan's reply, "why don't you head up to the house with me. We can talk this whole thing out up there ... just you and me; won't be another soul nowhere `round. We'll have all the time in the world and ...," he chuckled, "might even feed you -- if you feel like eatin'. Although I'm not known to be much of a hand in the kitchen, I believe I can find somethin' I can fix for us that I can't burn up. Okay with you?"

Harlan looked up. His eyes met Clay's and his smile slowly resurrected. "Okay," Harlan consented with the soft, willing finality of one who truly trusts.

"By the way, do Deacon Creely and your mother know you've come down this way?" Clay asked cautious but quite scrutinous.

"Uh-uh."

"Well then, wouldn't be too bad an idea to ring home so somebody knows where you're at," Clay said, pointing to the old phone on his desk. The telephone had weathered many years and many preachers and their trials there in the old churches study. Its black casing had no shine left at all.

A call home was indeed in order. It was the middle of the week -- a school night. A quick nod of Harlan's head indicated his immediate understanding of that. Yet, his snail-paced approach to the preacher's cluttered desk, heaped high with books and Bibles and papers, suggested the greatest reluctance. The slender youth steadily gazed at his slim fingers while, painstaking and slow, he dialed seven digits one after the other.

There was only a few seconds' wait. Harlan turned his back to Clay and leaned over the desk -- "Mom?...Yeah, I'm okay. I'm all right I said. I just called `cause there's somethin' special I've got to do and I'll be home kind of late. ... Well, I can't say exactly what time ... Anyway, it's nothin' really; just somethin' I need to see about, that's all ... Just somethin' Mom ... No -- no homework tonight ... I won't forget ... Huh? ... The thing off the TV? ... I don't have it. Buddy's probably gone and put it someplace again and forgot where ... Yes ma'am, I've got my key with me ... Yeah ... Yeah ... See you later..."

Harlan found Clay sitting on the arm of the chair as he slowly straightened and turned from the phone.

The clergyman had used the time just passed for a tactful inspection of the slightly worn edge of one of his only winter coat's lapels. However, the big man had shot glances toward his desk, now and then, from the corner of an eye. Supported by the one long arm he'd braced himself, he'd seen Harlan all the while wearily lean over the large desk as he'd conversed with his mother. By Clay's immediate impression the youth seemed surely a soldier too long on the battlefield.

Young Reverend Adderly's ear had been put to as keen use as his eye. He'd listened as his young parishioner had ever so carefully maintained his guard on the telephone. Clay searched the vacant expression that had wiped Harlan's countenance clear of any telling emotion once the phone's receiver was back in its cradle.

"Harlan, is it all right to ask you somethin'?"

"Yeah, Rev. What?"

"I'm not tryin' to press you `bout your business but why didn't you just straight out tell your mother you're comin' up to Germantown with me?"

Harlan's reasoning, in reply, was of too painfully honest a weight to allow his voice to rise above the whisper that forced out, "It would mean a whole lot of questions later."

Clay, turning inward himself as he hastily resumed donning his coat and hat, neither asked nor said anything else until a minute later to end the trespass of the hindering silence that came. Giving Harlan a firm pat on the shoulder, "Well, youngblood, let's say we get in the wind," he said and they exited the church through the dimmed sanctuary.

"Come on man hurry up, the cold out here's a killer. Right now's time for some quick steppin' `cause it's a mite too chilly for strollin' like it's still summertime," the Reverend Adderly shouted as he hurriedly headed on to his car with Harlan in tow. Outside in the street, laughing as they put distance between themselves and the locked up church, the hardy, well-built minister and his athletic young congregation member raced on foot two blocks north to where the minister's conservative black Buick sat shining in the last of the afternoon sun.

Clay's sides shook with laughter as he stood beside his car catching his breath. "Good God, youngblood, wonder what's goin' on with me. Maybe I need to see about shapin' myself up a little. Little bit of a run like that used to be nothin' for me back in college."

Harlan's smile was quizzical but he withheld his opinion in regard to Clay's state of fitness. He knew the muscular young preacher's college days hadn't been that long past because he'd seen Clay's diploma on the wall behind his desk. There was no one he saw as more strong or vital than Clay.

Collected and ready to be on the move an instant later, Clay quickly unlocked the passenger side of the car for Harlan and commented loudly about how brisk the wind was as he trotted around to the opposite side of the large sedan he drove .

"I never was a man with a likin' for cars plain lookin' as this but folks -- specially church-goin' folk -- seem to see this kind of car as more dignified for a preacher." Slamming the car door hard once he'd pulled the tail of his heavy coat all the way inside and settled himself into the leather nest behind the steering wheel, the big man continued thoughtfully. ""Maybe -- maybe not ... I'll never like em but lookin' dignified and lookin' proper seems to be what this world is all about lately; yep, means everything to whole lot of folks."

As Clay leaned forward to slip the key into the ignition, the young preacher said almost absentmindedly, "Like always -- I go right along with the program."

As the big black car rolled northward to Germantown, Clay tried to keep the subject of conversation light despite all the concern Harlan's troubled face was rousing in him. "I'm a bachelor again. Been left on my own for the next ten days -- maybe two weeks. The wife's gone down to Memphis for that women's conference at Reverend Haley's church. Brought her down to the Greyhound station late last night. Means to see some of her people too."

"I know," Harlan informed him. "Mom mentioned. She had it in her mind to go too but there wasn't time enough to change up any of her vacation days." Harlan hesitated cautiously though he knew what he'd say was not news. "Besides, you know by now how Daddy is -- `Best service anybody can give is the service he renders for those at home.' "

Clay nodded empathetically but did not want to appear other than neutral where a son's criticism of his father was concerned. He shrugged his broad shoulders, uneasy at even a slight acknowledgment of Deacon Creely's overbearing ways, and refrained from verbal comment.

"So tell me now, how Sister Creely feels about her boost up in the business world," the preacher inquired, changing the subject.

"Can't say I know for sure. You never hear Mom say all that much about work once she's in the house. Seems pretty happy about it though."

"And rightly so. Penn Industrial's not a bad-sized company. Bein' made a department supervisor certainly can't be said to be too bad a thing for somebody colored in Philadelphia ... especially these days.

"Of course I know you've got to see there's a bigger meanin' inside it, young man," the preacher chided the youth with a gentle shove on the shoulder from across the car. "It's a sure `nough a beginnin' -- enough of a beginnin' of somethin' to feed us folks some hope with a dream or two piled on top. Not so much for ourselves but for you young'un ... for you," Clay said quite seriously. "It's a hard world out there and your gonna need every dream you can get."

Optimism came back to warm every inflection of the young preacher's deep voice and bloomed wide as his grin. "We've all got our eyes set on a great day when we'll be lookin' to see you sittin' at the head of any table you want -- anywhere."

Harlan's pondering glance toward the driver's side of the car housed silent, questioning doubt.

"I know, Harlan ... yeah I know," Clay quickly conceded the immediate look of relations between black and white in respect to current events.

"Lord alone knows how bad things seem from all the mess that turns up on the TV news -- all them sheriff's and dogs; firemen turnin' their hoses on folk. Sure must look, to anybody young as you, as if we'll never be able to just sit down and say we're satisfied. Like we'll always be out there fightin' ... and waitin' ... then havin' to fight some more but ... but ..."

This time it was Clay's turn to glance, sidelong, across the car. The caramel-colored eyes that every Sunday without fail sent him the reassuring comfort of unconditional trust from the front pews as he preached weren't focused his way. Instead, they gazed steadily through the windshield off into the darkening sky above. The curious preacher hastily brought his own eyes back to the street ahead and guided the black Buick farther on, devoid of the vaguest notion of the answer that Harlan sought out on the horizon.

Oblivious to everything beyond the borders of a his spontaneous deliberation, Clay Adderly's young companion slipped quietly away to some other place.

Tempted to take just one more stab at making benign patter, it struck Clay Adderly bottom line, "Common sense'll tell you, nobody speaks on a thing until he feels good and ready. Keepin' up nothin' but a whole lot of useless talk ain't about to do any doggone good."

That duly considered, the minister instead opted for the resumption of his own hushed speculation. Though clueless, Clay continued endeavoring all on his own to divine the root of what it was that was going on with Harlan. Then, rethinking this pursuit too he brought himself up short with a silent reprimand. "Cool it! Just cool it and leave Einstein to bein' Einstein. Let it all rest a spell. `To everything there is a season ...,' " the young theologian dutifully reminded himself.

Clay quietly mulled over a few events in the more than three years that had gone by since his arrival in Philadelphia as a newly ordained, young minister with his wife, Joyce.

Greater Thesselonian's edifice, a huge, regal stone structure, was one of the city's oldest and most venerated black churches. The intricacies of its protocol, no less in mass and importance than the edifice itself, had it that the responsibility for an incoming minister's briefing in regard to the management of church business could only be entrusted to either the church's head deacon or trustee. Frank Creely haughtily sported both hats.

Clay Adderly and Frank Creely met, for the first time, at the church to discuss preliminaries the very same Tuesday afternoon Clay had driven in from Lancaster with the remainder of his and Joyce Adderly's belongings.

Joyce, Clay's wife of two years by then had already preceded him to Philadelphia nearly a week prior, to put the renovated and properly tuck-pointed red brick house they'd rented in order. The ensuing constant shuttling of essential details and questions via telephone as well as in person since Clay's arrival soon brought him, and Joyce too, into close ongoing contact with the deacon and his family.

Cleotha Creely, Frank's wife, was a short, soft-spoken woman with a body nearly as stout as her spirit. In her free time, she tended to much of the church's secondary affairs and clerical matters. She kept them set to right with steady-handed and dutiful thoroughness.

From the start, she'd much impressed the church's new preacher, in contrast to her vociferously fussy husband, by the quiet, unassuming fashion in which she moved around the church, task to task.

As earnest a parent as church member, at that point in time it was never uncommon to find Cleotha and Frank's brood of two in close proximity to any site where their mother's hand was being applied. And so, domino effect, common events led to a string of circumstantial first meetings that eventually brought about the new preacher's introduction to Harlan a week after his arrival. It was late morning the Saturday abutted against the day he'd deliver his premier sermon. Even then, first handshake, each had taken a liking to the other ...

Clay remembered well the quiet, beautiful unassuming boy he'd met who even then had stood nearly as tall as he.

Waiting for the yellow cab just ahead to move on, Clay reflected on how he and Harlan had seen the other grow; each from his respective side of the pulpit. In quiet undefined friendship each had given to and taken from the other in unacknowledged, respectful ways of the spirit ...

Just the year before with his gentle assurance of good things to come, it had been the young preacher's strong arms that had cradled Harlan's head and broad shoulders and gently let the lean youth down into the baptismal pool and borne him up again into the world, clean.

In turn as Clay, himself young in age and the ministry would opine of faith and angels before the church's large congregation, from the corner of an eye the preacher often drew much needed assurance and inspiration from the well of silent support and admiration that always lay in Harlan's attentive gaze.

At the next stoplight Clay curiously thought on that -- the full meaning of Harlan's apparent admiration of him -- and then thought again. "Man, don't go jivin' yourself ... ain't no such thing ... can't be. Got to be losin' your mind," he cautioned himself suddenly uneasy with his own meditations. "Anyhow, don't let foolish thinkin' get in the way of providin' what he needs most-- real help."

As far away as he seemed, Harlan was only removed from the big man beside him by his silence. At that moment, Clay Adderly was the axis of all his doubtful thoughts' orbits. Though he'd come to know the busy minister as well as anyone else in a congregation so large might have the chance to, Harlan had yet to learn there's no earthly difference between a preacher and an everyday man.

"If I ask him to, he'll keep it to himself. Mom or Daddy won't have to know. But what am I doin'? He's a man with a wife; what in the world would he know to tell me about somethin' like this?" Harlan considered, anxious and skeptical all over again. "There's no way on Earth he understands a damn thing I feel. He's probably not even interested in hearin' it I bet." Harlan's long, soft sigh was not heard above the drone of the Buick's engine.

"Good God, sweet God ... please ..." inaugurated a silent and desperate teenage prayer. Harlan felt fear start to crawl all over himself again. "I need to have him somehow understand ... got to," he prayed. "So no matter what else, don't let openin' my mouth go and mess up this one thing on me. Please, let just a little bit of somethin' stay the same. Let me tell him the truth and at least have the man still look at me with that smile ... like always ..."

A visitation of no less reverently beheld vivid images, holy to some and not to others, broke Harlan's train of thought when he envisioned Clay's wonderful smile. Harlan's thinking shortly plummeted from the lofty place from where he'd lifted his prayer. "Wonder just what he'd say if I told him how he stays on my mind at night," he asked himself.

Late into the prior night as thought and fantasy forestalled sleep, Harlan had lain restless in bed across the room from his sleeping younger brother. The long-limbed youth had turned from his back to his belly, to his side to no avail. Though he'd tried hard to allow the veil of sleep to fall down about himself, Harlan continued to lie there wide awake and aware of his agitated body. His closed eyes were crammed full of what seemed the count of a thousand brilliant pictures of Clay; all from a continually unfolding collage inside his head.

That night the door of Harlan's imagination was well-oiled and open wide. It was easy for him to usher Clay, in naked phantom form, inside the still, darkened house to his room. An open-eyed dreamer, Harlan used every shred of precious recollections to weave the sorcery that drew the object of his passion to the stairs and into his bed. Recall of the contours of Clay's muscular form, the bass register of the young preacher's kindly voice, his scent, put no hard demands to the youth in the effort.

And so, the lean young dreamer lay close with Clay's mirage as his dick slowly firmed and grew. His scrotum lay loose and slack couched on his intermittently tensing thighs feeling as if it was a storehouse for fire. For what seemed hours, he made drowsy pledges of love to his invisible companion.

Side by side in the darkness, young Harlan and his lover lay in the twilight where dreams come out to play saying things. Things -- such wonderful things -- they'd alternately whispered one to the other. The same bewitchment of anticipation that foretold to Harlan what he'd hear his preacher man someday say added a preciousness to his dreaming that was as priceless as the gold of Clay's skin.

From the core of his musing's rapidly mushrooming inventions, a very malleable passion had burst upon Harlan. Body thoroughly kindled by it, he lay acutely conscious of all parts of his lean, strong body. His ex need, stirred up and more and more real than the ghost he lay in bed with, instigated Harlan's barter of bedroom assumptions for the greater comfort to be had in a self-surrogate tactile communication of the moment's meaning.

Harlan slowly submerged his hands into the sea of heavy covers that had lain over him through the wintry night. Once against his bare burning teak-brown skin he'd set them free, quite willingly giving them their leave for a slow and familiar migratory descent past his waist.

On the way there the tips of his slim dark fingers gently brushed the taut, velvet smooth skin on his chest and the ridged plain of his abdomen. His hands, like blackbirds gliding low, moved on and at last took roost where the young man's want had made itself obvious as it throbbed fully alive and aching for touch between his legs.

Emitting a boyish gossamer grunt, Harlan arched his supple back and wiggled his slim hips as he quickly pushed down his white cotton briefs, all he wore. He then began to make his fantasy real, in the only way young men left to solitary longing know how ...

Traffic in the narrow street before them grew heavier. The going was slow light to light. Harlan rode along only half-cognizant of the activity going on in the world outside the warm cocoon of the moving car. His mind would not let go of the hand of the remembrance he courted from the prior night and the overpowering arousal that had been spawned by Clay's seductive apparition.

Car horns and other realities persistently delivered light tugs at the hem of the reverie robing Harlan, bringing about the preemption of his daydream. It was his own silent question that drew him back toward current reality. Harlan, curious, wondered at its answer. Had Buddy been roused by the frenzied creaking of his bed's springs or the shuddering groan he'd been unable to rein when his fantasy had grown too great and unruly to be controlled and at last had overwhelmed him?

Just at that point of thought, full-force reality yanked Harlan all the way clear of dreams' and pondering's reflecting pool. Ruminations of the past night's solitary climb to satiation had, with quick success, produced physical evidence of how real they'd been.

A large hill loomed between his long legs. The accompanying sweet and specific ache that emanated from the site, though definitely not similar in type, was equal in strength to the ache he'd felt inside. A rush of hot blood gushed up to Harlan's face as, sprawled in his seat, he returned fully to his senses. With awkward haste he jammed his knees together, then drew one leg across the other. The embarrassed youth bit his lip and grunted when he banged his knee against the car's dash in the process.

Harlan nervously snatched one of his books off the seat and pressed it into his lap just as Clay turned his way in response to the sound. Desperately ashamed, he hoped the preacher hadn't noticed.

"Harlan."

Harlan quickly straightened up and shook himself, deciding to turn no more of the pages of his daydream.

"Yeah, Rev?"

"Turn the radio on -- go ahead -- I mean, if you feel like it. Pick out any station you want."

Relaxing a little in relief that no discovery of his hard-on had occurred, Harlan quickly leaned in the driver's direction to reach for the silver knob at the middle of the dash panel. He turned it and a click set the small numbered rectangle on the radio's face flashing like a smile in the dimming light inside the car as dusk continued to deepen. Keeping in mind that after all he was riding with a preacher, in polite deference, the teenager's wary first intention was to turn straight to the local gospel station. Then again remembering his pledge to truth and to honesty, Harlan changed his mind and searched the dial for music that better suited how he felt about the moment.

The ends of the youth's slim fingers danced quick-step along the row of silver buttons just beneath the radio's lit dial until ... "Yes, I know it looks all wrong." The singer repeated herself twice more and ended phrasing, "But my loneliness is gone ... And I feel for sure ... that tonight this love is right."

The music played on as Clay braked for another a red light. Mindful of the traffic in the street ahead, Clay caught a glimpse of dreamy-eyed Harlan as he appeared to be once again slipping away; this time sinking into the peaceful sea the soulful song provided.

The young cleric jerked his gaze from the street and back again. He listened a little more carefully, then gave the steering wheel a light tap with the heel of his hand. Clay felt he'd finally comprehended. "So that's what it is! Youngblood's a man in love," he thought, grinning to himself, "Well, well, well."

Though reluctantly revealed, a look at a time not all that long passed flooded the young preacher's mind in a surging rush too great to allow him time to open himself to its pleasure or steel himself against its pain. His days of tutelage at the seminary came into view, and so did Dan and all of it ... all over again. Frowning, Clay shook his head and shooed the invading past away...

The remainder of the ride was silent save for the radio's soft playing.

It came to an end a few minutes later as Clay swung the shiny black Buick off the street and into the common drive at the rear of his house.

1964 - Part 2

"In you go," Clay enjoined his guest and once more cheerily snatched up the reins of conversation. "We'll get ourselves in out of this cold air right quick and see what's good for eatin' in my kitchen cupboards." The tall preacher hurriedly locked the car on Harlan's exit. He led Harlan along a short flagstone walkway to the backsteps of the house, then quickly ushered the youth in once he'd dredged his overcoat pocket for his house keys and swung the back door open.

The click of the light switch on the wall just beside the back door initiated a clean and warm kitchen's bright exhibition as the fluorescent ring centered in the ceiling flickered on. Familiar to Harlan by its strong resemblance to his mother's, the large kitchen smelled of fresh made bread, pepper and sage and sweet spice. The resulting sense of safety he gained in such a benign environ naturally alleviated some of Harlan's nervousness as he silently took a longer look around the preacher's kitchen.

"Hey, it just came to me; this has got be the first time you've been out this way," Clay realized as he rested a yet gloved hand on Harlan's shoulder. "The deacon stops by here every now and then as need arises you know -- even Sister Creely's been by two or three times." Pulling off his gloves to stuff them in the pocket of his heavy coat, the minister paused his speaking.

"Well then," he began again affably, "if that indeed's the case, Mr. Creely sir, I bid you welcome to my humble home." The tall man's quick salutary nod accompanied his offering of hospitality. Smiling reassuringly at his visitor as though no matters for concern existed, the young preacher's strong right hand shot out equally as quick in welcome and he gave the warm nape of Harlan's neck a firm squeeze.

"Put your books any place you feel like over there," the preacher said, pointing to a round white dining table ringed by four high-backed chairs at the kitchen's opposite end, "and let me get hold of that jacket. I'll take it up and hang it with my stuff."

Harlan momentarily stacked his books on the floor between his feet and, quickly removing it, handed his fondest possession, his leather jacket over to Clay. The preacher disappeared from the kitchen it and his own coat. Taking a seat, Harlan settled himself at the table and stretched out his long legs, not wanting to think.

The young minister returned to his guest and again broke into friendly banter as through a series of little inspections, he began to select and transfer a few foil wrapped items from inside the refrigerator to the kitchen's countertop. Looking up as he searched , Clay eyed the clock over the stove. "Say buddy," he asked, "feel like givin me a hand? I sure could use one if you don't mind. Plates are in this cabinet just by me and the silverware's right over there in that drawer left of the sink."

Harlan had been sitting anxious at what to say in his anticipation of the advent of some serious talking. The far braver side of himself, ready to see a change made, eagerly awaited the coming discussion while his more fearful half tried to blind itself, meaning to void his mind of the thought. Thus, any task offered him would have proved a relief.

Immediately, the tall and comely youth rose from his seat and began gathering together the table's necessaries. He set his books aside in a corner and carefully laid places for two. Though himself never known to be an eager hand in a kitchen, this seemed a very special time; the tw them alone together. Harlan left the table for Clay's side at the stove asking anyway, "Anything I can do over here?"

Clay gave Harlan the same wide grin he always easily granted him. "Youngblood, thank you kindly for askin' but when it comes to shufflin' pots and pans it's probably best you let me get myself in trouble alone. Besides, everything's just about ready anyhow."

Quite true. Within the next few minutes, Clay was quickly setting out a pan of hot, aromatic baked chicken wings along side a bowl of steaming greens, some rice and store-bought bread at the center of the table

Automatic in their response, once seated, both Harlan and Clay's heads solemnly lowered as, aloud, the young minister thanked his God for bounteous goodness. The blessing said, Clay then jabbed his fork in the direction of the hot food waiting on the table. "Dig in," he generously encouraged Harlan.

Straight off, it appeared each had found a perfect companion in the other. Both ate heartily and contentedly followed as table conversation roamed whim's free and easy paths. Harlan sat happily far removed from his worries, for a time.

It wasn't until they were standing side by side at the kitchen sink, cleaning up the last of the dishes, that Clay gently informed Harlan, "You know youngblood, nowadays there's every kind of sadness imaginable in this world -- whole lot of it too. Yet sometimes a problem's not the uncrossable river we might make it out to be. Then again sometimes it may well be but usually you'll find you can begin to see your way around it if --"

"I can't see how I'm gonna find a way past this ... ain't none," Harlan suddenly blurted out. "Rev, right now I feel like I might as well lay down and die."

"Why is that? Tell me," Clay gently demanded to know but no explanation came. The minister thought on it and then asked, "Harlan did you get yourself in some kind of trouble with a girl? Is that what's got you so upset?"

"Huh?" Harlan's face momentarily masked the alterations his woe had made upon it as he almost raucously snorted out a laugh. But all it took was a second's worth of his own thinking to cause the teenage boy to turn his beautiful face from Clay as his cheeks began to burn red hot. He searched for strength as he replied with a quavering voice, "No Rev, that's my whole problem. I'll never be in trouble with girls." The dinner plate he'd just washed slipped from his soapy fingers back into the dishwater.

All at once, the handsome arrangement of Harlan's fine, winsome features was twisted awry by an overwhelming rush of pain. The dam that had held back the vastness of his pent-up tears and emotions until just that moment crumbled and collapsed. All his sorrows began to cascade down his burning cheeks in a flood.

The young preacher instantly enfolded this young member of his flock's slim, shuddering frame within both his strong arms and pulled him tight against himself. Holding the weeping youth close as a baby despite his size, the tall, muscular preacher rocked the youth side to side in the gentlest way as he stood leaned against the sink cabinet. "Go `head, let it out ... let all of it out," he softly whispered in Harlan's ear.

Harlan, helpless to throttle his tears, hid his weeping eyes away at the warm junction of Clay's thick neck and broad shoulder. He cried for quite some time as Clay held him close, a big hand cradling his bowed head.

Eventually, the more the sorrowful rain of the youth's tears gradually abated, the more obvious it became to Harlan just how near they stood. Despite all the hurt he felt inside, sensory pleasures invoked by their bodies closeness as he drew on the tall man's solace all at once set its spur to his volatile teenage sensuality. The requirements respecting the remedy of his distress were sudden and decisively being reprioritized by rapid degrees.

The comforting strength of the young preacher's arms was imbuing a feeling of security in youth again the same as they had that day he'd been baptized. It seemed just then to Harlan, no meanness, no misunderstanding lying beyond the cozy realm of Clay's kitchen could ever touch him as long as he was there bound up and sheltered in the young preacher's arms. The youth sensed his healing beginning.

Nonetheless, it was in strange, surprising manner that his anguish commenced to turn itself inside out.

This deft execution of acrobatics by emotion despite the great girth of his misery was as amazing to Harlan as it was frightening. All in one involuntary convolution, the feeling in him kept its size but changed its face. Harlan was no longer yearning to be free of pain but, instead, wanting to be quickly taught how to express love.

Hot-cheeked and shaken, every muscle of Harlan's lean, hard frame suddenly stiffened near as rigid as the rip-roaring erection that ached like all hell as it strained full-blown against his pant leg. Though there was no doubt that his each and every dream, daytime ... nighttime, often put forth for display brightly painted depictions of moments exactly like this in Harlan's head, the youth stood completely stunned and surprised at how self-control had become so slippery in his grasp. Long and strong as it had grown, he was certain his hard-on had to be obvious to Clay because of the tight press of their bodies.

Fear of the rawest and most elementary kind goaded the bewildered teenager to break free and run before an avalanche of the preacher's scorn and scathing judgment could begin to fall upon him. However, his legs suddenly felt devoid of strength and way too weak to support him.

Trembling and too terrified to peer into the frame of outrage he believed he'd find about Clay's face, Harlan let his own remain hidden away since the big man had yet rescind the shelter he provided and push him off. It was with the greatest fear that he slowly raised his gathered brow off the young preacher's shoulder. His glistening oval eyes were wide with horror and his young, gentle countenance was marred by ribbons formed from the salt trails his tears left behind. With some effort, Harlan at last brought his eyes to Clay's and stammered piteously, "Oh my God! I'm so sorry Rev. Real sorry ... I didn't mean to -- but I --"

Clay slowly let him go but made no move to break the close contact of their bodies. Instead he gently clasped Harlan's face betwixt his big hands and said, "Hold steady youngblood. It's okay." With fatherly tenderness the big man deftly whisked away the track of a tear's wet sheen off Harlan's cheek with his thumb. "It's somethin' that's understandable. Just about every young man's full of nature bustin' to be let out. Every now and then that nature'll boil up on him and --" Clay cut his counsel short.

As though a sentinel alerted by some sound faint and distant, Clay Adderly's brow lifted as he stopped to consider a peculiar scent riding the wind just that moment as he kept Harlan close. And all in that moment, the handsome preacher's broad chest abruptly swelled even wider as he gasped. "Wait!" His voice swooped to a low disbelieving whisper. "Youngblood; is that what you been tryin' to tell me all along -- that you're --"

Harlan's chin quivered once more as he nodded an affirmative to Clay's unfinished question.

Suddenly, Clay hugged the youth hard himself and his sides shook as he began to laugh out loud. "Aw man come on," he chuckled at the absurdity he assumed to be inside the silent admission as he began to rock the teenage boy side to side again and rub his back with the comfortingly firm press of his hand. "You think you're that way; young as you are? You can't know nothin' `bout no such a thing. What makes you think so?"

" `Cause I feel it all the time, Rev! I feel it right now for you," the Harlan cried out desperately, seeming almost ready to surrender to tears once more as he confessed, "and I always did."

Though taken by surprise again, Clay continued to hold onto Harlan but tilted his own head back for a deeper, more serious gaze into Harlan's eyes. "Me?" he asked. A hazy cast was lain on his voice by pure amazement. "You've got feelin's for me youngblood ... somethin' like sex?"

"Uh-uh, more than that Rev -- somethin' like love," Harlan heard himself whisper before he could detour his words.

It was then that Harlan Creely came to make the greatest decision of the day; the one that would effect him for all his life. Despite the youth's amateur rank with respect to matters of the heart, he willingly gave in to the inevitable belief in miracles that beguilement leads those seeking love to count on. Suddenly made brave, in a headlong rush Harlan mashed his full mouth against Clay's. And so, the handsome youth gained his very first exposure to the sugar sweet contagion of the madness that inherently infects a lover's kiss. Awed and hungry from this first experience of the electric velvet of Clay's lips, Harlan compacted his mouth harder against the young preacher's and kissed him as deep as he knew how.

A flash flood of fire swept all through Harlan's veins. Swollen stout and seemingly about to burst, the lean youth's manhood twitched and ached, its considerable length agonizingly bent askew inside the confines of his pants. Accordingly, the heat of sex came to gain a height of degree for Harlan beyond any test by the virgin youth's previous imaginings once he began to see it wasn't just the walls of his own reserve that were being ripped down from the inside. He hadn't, after all, found himself forsaken in light of the rash manner of his revelation of himself. There he was still tightly gathered up in the handsome preacher's hard arm's.

His own emotions gone renegade too, Clay had begun to seriously invest himself in the urgent kiss, ardently reciprocating Harlan's soft, full lips' offering of pleasure as his hold on him grew all the more fast.

Merely an Earthly man, the preacher had never known a time in his thirty-two going on thirty-three years when any of the inner components that made the whole of him had ever come into alignment. That proved never more true than just that instant. Due to the separate nature and pursuit of each, the young minister's reason, faith, heart, and the compelling, electrifying arousal of his body chose up sides leaving it to some unkown sector of the man he was to decided where he'd stand.

Clay Adderly found it impossible to pull his mouth from the salted sweetness of the lips of the slim, hard-bodied youth he clutched so hard against himself as he meant to. With every rise and fall of the wide span of his heaving chest, jet blasts of breath raced through the tall man's flared nostrils as though he were a stud bull suddenly in full run toward the nirvana of a mounting. Yet all the while, reason and faith naggingly prompted the handsome minister to let go of his desire and Harlan. seek and accept a pious victory by a leap to thoroughfares higher than the common supply road for pleasures of the flesh.

However, such protest to his actions was proved of no avail. The desperate ache in his heart and the burning of his man parts straining to rise up from between his hard, muscular thighs were undoubtedly fostering an easy win for the temptation he was fighting. It became obvious that, as a man, Clay would not be able to resist one more press of Harlan's stumbling lips.

Invisible forces made a free-style game of ping-pong with the tossing of torturesome feelings. In volleys coming swift and continuous, the young minister's affection for the youth he somehow couldn't seem to release, his fear for his soul and the ball of carnal fire smoldering hot at his loins were lobbed back and forth across the table of his awareness. Despite the fire storm of passion his fevered mind was caught in, the young preacher knew full well that everything respecting the moment and both their lives rested on the same high table of decision.

From the very onset of his ministerial training, it had been ingrained in Clay Adderly that a man of the cloth was bound to his work by vows even more sacred than those he'd, one day, make to a woman when he took her for a wife. As the young cleric himself would be expected to teach, he'd been taught that the prescribed recourse in the face of trial and temptation was the remedy of strict obedience abetted by prayer that was bolstered by careful propriety. The well-trained soldier in himself adherent to that teaching, loudly wailed out cautions of ruin and recompense's closeness at hand should he leave his lips on Harlan's a moment longer. But, Clay had waited too long.

In love, sexually aroused, and thoroughly confused all at once, the virile young preacher found his gut a mass of knots. In truth, as any man engulfed by an earthly need, Clay harbored no immaculately conceived desire to have either his heart or body's outcry pass Harlan unheeded. Alternate to everything the calling of the church demanded of him, this side of himself was willing to hazard just about anything for that one small opportunity to take a taste of a happiness he'd always wanted.

Yet ... love proves itself in the strangest ways ...

It was all in one a fell swoop that the preacher broke the lock on the kiss that had melded their mouths for the last several minutes. Furious with himself for not immediately resisting but gasping like a drowning man fighting the undertow of Harlan's kiss, Clay abruptly shoved Harlan away; forcefully enough to leave the bewildered teenager suddenly standing on his own, startled.

"Harlan ... baby ... I want you to think about this. You've got to," Clay panted. "Are you sure -- really sure? How in the world do you know you really want somethin' like this? Who's been with you?"

"Nobody -- ever," Harlan replied, his own muscular chest heaving wildly as Clay's eyes, gone stern, painstakingly traversed his face for signs of the truth.

"Well then seems to me, the best I could do for either one of us right this minute is lie. Yeah, lie ... and lie big time," the suddenly wild-eyed, good-looking man mumbled as he stood half-dazed just outside the gates of a hellish confusion. "I ought to come right out and say ain't no way on Earth I'd have a doggone thing to do with messin' with you. Think about what I'm tryin' to say youngblood."

The tone of Clay's voice rang frighteningly resolute in Harlan's unwilling ear as the young preacher arched an eyebrow and leaned forward to put forth a question that apparently already bore an answer.

"Ain't that right? Shouldn't it be me tellin' you it's one hundred percent wrong to have this happen; that it's wrong for you whether it's with me -- or with any other man? Boy, shouldn't I be smackin' you cross your lean behind and sendin' you home?"

"Good God almighty, youngblood. One day, somebody's goin' to look me straight in the eye and say plain and clear, if not for my own sake then surely for yours -- you bein' nowhere near grown -- that that's exactly the thing I should have done if you wouldn't show sense enough to get up and get out of here on your own. Come that day, they'll be right. Yes, they will. And, guess what else; after all's said and done, they're goin' to say the weight of the sin in this rests on me `cause, in spite my havin' a knowledge of the Word, I helped you break laws set above any of those of man's."

"But..."

"But nothin! Please ... please! Just you hold your peace and hear me out." Clay ordered as his thick, splayed fingers flew up to Harlan's lips, nervously fluttering there as if his hand was a great bird seeking a to roost. Though gentle, the press of his fingertips did weigh down the protestations just about to rise from Harlan's lips.

Mystified as the panorama of all there was to be considered grew wider to him, the befuddled young preacher sighed heavily and then went on. Eyes all at once full of helplessness he said, "Lookin' at the thing the other way, at least now I know what the feelin' of bein' really close with you's like. Most of the wonderin' I felt no right to come to you with is over. You were right here inside these two arms," the big man said as he hoisted his big arms and dreamily gazed between them genuinely mystified at what they'd just known. "Yeah, -- I've found it out for myself now and never another moment in my life'll seem as sweet and I don't want to have to let you go," he continued with a sigh as he let his arms fall to his sides once more. "I want it to be for forever just like all those Motown love songs and the TV stories you young'uns pay so much attention to. Wrong or right, youngblood, that's the genuine truth; I swear."

"And worst thing ... I can't do a durn thing about it. It's almost like I can step outside my skin and see me here just like ol' Sampson, gone and got his hair cut. That's how it is. I feel no strength in me at all as far as you're concerned, youngblood ... not a whit's worth of strength." The big man's strong broad hand trembled leaflike as he slowly lifted it to allow the tips of his fingers to longingly trail along Harlan's smooth cheek. "Sweet, sweet youngblood," he murmured fervently, "there's not even enough power in me to hand you your jacket and those schoolbooks on that table over like real love's supposed to make me do."

Yet endeavoring to master his desire, the muscular, gold-skinned young preacher shook his head, rallying himself for another round. "Exactly where you go for comparisons of such situations I can't say, cause it's been a long time gone since I came cross anybody sharin' this same kind of feelin' `cept you and me. Even so, there's a significant difference between us you see. For whatever there appears to be to me sizewise," his open hands demonstratively swooping from his head and down his broad upper frame, "I don't think in all my life I've ever been as brave as you just now Harlan -- save for one livin' man -- I've yet to let a single soul know.'

"Not that I didn't want to, I've always known what was in my heart, what I'd have liked to have, what my real nature was. Then again, it was always plain to me, without needin' it drummed in my head, just how much the world's willingly going to give me permission to own.

"Won't claim I've been standin' down here long enough to consider myself a voice of deep wisdom but I've seen enough to know a man can end up payin' serious consequences if he reaches out meanin' to take more off the table than this nasty, low down ol' world we're livin' in feels he's ought to have.

Thoughtful, Clay shrugged his broad shoulders. "Who knows my man, might be that's my problem," his sigh tellingly rueful. Maybe I'm runnin' scared; too scared to take a long shot chance on somethin' wonderful. But, my oh my, look at you," Clay added as he took the Harlan by the shoulders and began to grin at the youth as with pride. "You're full enough of a hot-blooded spirit to come right out and say you think you love me. Dead in front of me I see the risin' nature a young black warrior's surely got to have if he's of a mind to conquer. You've showed me all that just now in a kiss and for all the rest of my natural days I'll not forget it."

"But you're so young;" the handsome preacher stated with a sad groan, "way too young to have the scarcest idea of what it is you're askin' to be allowed to snatch off that table I'm talkin' about. Hold on now, don't you go shakin' your head -- You think I'm standin' here sayin' all this just to here myself talk? Listen to what I say."

Clay once again sternly cut off another protest. "Shh! Listen! Right now, let me try my level best to guide you to a way out. Let me do the right thing and boost you up to higher ground before we end up swamped in somethin' there'll be no way to climb out of.

"Believe me, everything I feel for you inside here --" he said, turning a big, thick finger to his broad chest's center, "burns as big as any fire my wantin' to lay down with you could ever set ablaze in me. The very same way I burnin' for you in my body, I need you for my heart. It's because I do care that there's still that little bit of right left in me that's makin' me say, `Think it over one more time.' "

"Youngblood, you can go home. We can stop the whole show right here, right now, before we commence dancin' to this music ringin' sweet in our ears. No denyin' the tune I hear playin' is the same you do. Sure sounds real pretty too but don't you be deceived. Uh-uh! Even though it's mighty, mighty sweet to us -- kissin', touchin' like we've just been I mean, -- more than likely, we'll soon see a fiddler at the door lookin' for his pay, my friend. Then what? You startin' to understand what I'm sayin' Harlan?

"Go ask somebody else to pick a name for that tune playin' for us now. They'll give you names aplenty. And I guarantee you, not a one's gonna sound nice. There's no doubt in my mind you want to call all this sweet romance ... true love ... somethin' like that. But, that's you," the young preacher chuckled dryly. "They'll tell you ain't but one name for this song -- wrong," Clay said flat voiced and earnest. "That's why I'm askin' you if you're really sure you want to own what you say you feel?"

Harlan refused to keep silent any longer. "Yes! Yes, I'm sure," was his first blast of fiery insistence. Yet, for all the brave appearance of the bold, soldierly face he'd put on, suddenly fearing he was about to be sent off forever, the anxious young lover desperately grabbed two handfuls of Clay's shirtfront like a little boy frightened of falling. With all his might, he slowly drew his lean body against the rocklike, reassuring firmness of the preacher's once more. Meaning to make a convincing demonstration of reasons for Clay to let him remain, Harlan mashed and nuzzled his smooth cheek against the thrillingly rough stubble on Clay's. He held on as he rubbed his smooth temple against the young preacher's thick neck with relish as he sucked in the scent of the man and remnants of that morning's splash of aftershave eagerly into his nostrils. "I don't want to go ... don't send me home now," the youth whispered in his hero's ear.

Like a novice attempting to learn the attitudes of a ritual dance', eagerly the tall, lean youth awkwardly coiled his own strong arms about Clay's thick neck and, clearly pronouncing each word, told him, "I don't care. Do you hear me? I don't care.

"Huh?" the minister asked without attempting to push his young parishioner from his body.

"No matter what name anybody else gives it and even if I've never had a chance to hear it turned up loud before, the music I hear is the music I like and it's sweet to me -- every note ..." Harlan peered deep into Clay's eyes. "It makes me want to dance to it and I don't feel like waitin' ... no ... not now. So, whatever the cost comes to, I'll pay up if and when the time comes -- if that's the way it's just got to be."

The little radio on the windowsill at the back of the kitchen was unplugged. No music at all drifted into the kitchen save for the one note drone of the refrigerator. Nonetheless, pulling Clay along as he showed him how, Harlan began to lead a clumsy, comic waltz. "Doesn't make a bit of difference to me Rev, long as ... one-two-three ... one-two-three ...," their feet slowly shuffled on the kitchen floor, "long as I'm dancin' with you."

In time their dance slowly came to an end but the enchantment of it did not. The two reluctantly parted themselves to sit face-to-face across the table.

"Can you tell me why it seems everybody thinks you've got nothin' but air between your ears just cause you're young?" Harlan quizzed Clay once he'd judged his thoughts sufficiently ordered. "You know, just cause I'm not some old man with false teeth for a badge of merit, doesn't mean I'm so young I can't make out the way the pieces sit on the board. I do."

Curious at what he had to say, Clay sat back.

"Even though the picture doesn't look too pretty, there's still this feelin' in me and I don't mean to fight it anymore. Love this, love that. Love your fellow man and your neighbor, love your father, love your mother, love your brother, love your sister," Harlan recited. "Then it's all about love, ain't it?" he asked of the young minister a second later. "Well then that's why I want to look at this love I feel to find out for myself what it really is; to see if I can enjoy it -- even live with it ... live with this love. I just have to Rev."

Harlan sighed and straightened in his chair. "You know, I've never even tried seriously discussin' sex and stuff with my father; especially anything about this. Even so, it won't matter whether I tell him or not. Daddy never leaves anybody else's business alone for long. He always goes nosin' round in every darn thing, makin' your plans for you without askin' first; settin' everything the way he thinks it ought to go. It's a sure thing one day he's going to find out I'm a --"

Hesitant, Harlan first frowned and caught his lip between his pearly teeth. Then, the handsome youth suddenly drew his wide shoulders all the way back and sucked in a chest full of the kitchen's spice scented air the instant before he made himself describe himself with the only serviceable word he knew, "... faggot," for the very first time.

All in the turnover of the next moment Harlan, greatly relieved at this small step forward, smiled shyly, suddenly feeling warm inside as his thinking happily led him back to the kiss. He set that thought aside to continue

"Maybe I'm goin' crazy but just this minute I don't feel afraid of what my father might say or do `cause, same as you, at least one thing I've wanted to be has happened and it's turned out to be even better than I'd dreamed." In transient silence, the teak-hued youth sat quite thoughtful as he lightly traced the edge of his bottom lip with two fingertips. "No -- I almost can't believe it myself," Harlan said, his eyes bursting with light.

"That's where my problem starts, huh?" Harlan quickly added not wanting his golden man to, after all, take him for a dreamy-eyed boy. "Hmm, if I can hardly believe it, how could anybody else understand it?"

Harlan's full mouth abruptly thinned and stretched into an uncharitable slash across his handsome face. "All my life, Daddy's done nothin' but preach, `Boy, your duty plain and clear is to listen and obey,' " the son, bitterly contemptuous mimicked his southern born father's pompous manner of speech.

"No matter how hard I've tried, Rev, I can't get him to recognize me, to see me, to know me. Even in simple stuff."

"For months now I've been tryin' to make him see I'm no way interested in his tight-assed way of livin' or the plans he's got for me and his insurance business. I've been tellin' him over and over I don't like it, I don't want it. But does he hear me? No. He just keeps on pushin' me along anyway, like I'd never said a word to him."

"You can bet your last money, if the man even had had a half-idea of what's in my head he'd have hauled off busted my back in two by now. I know without even guessin' how my father's gonna take it, if and when it comes to light.

"It'll be somethin' like the atomic bomb bein' set off in West Philly. Deacon Frank Creely's never goin' for leavin' me to be with who I want to -- or leavin' me to anything else I intend doin' my way and not his.

Not now, not in the next thousand years -- meanin', my father will be first on the list of people I'll have to ... How do those big business guys say it? ... oh yeah ... I'll have to rack him up as a loss."

"As for my mom ... what she'll do ... what she'll say ... I don't know." Worry again registered on Harlan's face. "She loves me I know but with Mom and me it's been nineteen years of her pushin' me in back of her while she stands back and lets Daddy always have his way. Whatever I've wanted to do, whatever I've felt I should have, with her it's always been, `Ask your daddy.'

"She's not goin' to like any of this one bit and won't be able to understand it either, but maybe she'll still love me anyway ... maybe ... she's my mom.

"And friends -- Shoot no sense in studyin' about them either. Who could I run to? Not one. None of them could get a handle on somethin' that's this out of sight. It hardly even crosses their minds. I ought to know, I've been around `em all through school."

"Every other guy I've grown up with can't be beat if you're looking to learn how to set up a jump shot or fake out somebody on a basketball court. And every one's got more than a page worth of lines to get girls to let you mess around feelin' on `em and stuff. But, for anything serious -- they know nothin'; especially if it comes around to somethin' as way out as a guy havin' feelin's for another guy. And they don't want to know either.

"You don't hear stuff like that come up until all of a sudden somebody gets a dirty story goin'. Probably, it would be easier to tell one of my good friends I'd come down with some kind of bad disease than to come out and say, `Hey man, I'm sweet'. No way," the youth shook his head resolutely decided he was right. "As far as friendship goes I pretty much expect I'll be left on my own in that department too."

"And ... if everything ends up fallin' apart at home and my friends won't stick by me," he leaned forward drawing Clay's eyes up from his folded hands as the pain of knowledge cast clouds on his own, "I can't look to you. Where can we go beyond tonight, beyond just now?. You've got a special life all your own and -- you're married. See, I've got the picture real clear."

"But at least we could have tonight -- couldn't we?" Harlan asked guardedly, though as his face brightened like a boy in hope of convincing his father to take him for a ride on a ferris wheel. "I admit all this is somethin' that's finally got its chance to breath just tonight but it didn't just come from out of nowhere. I know it and so do you. It's been there all the time, right between us, waitin' to be born and owned up to. Hasn't it? Can't you tell it?"

"So, even if it's got to live and die all in this one night, I'll never be sorry. Wrong or right -- I'm glad the feeling's alive? Can't you see it on my face? You can't tell I really do believe this thing I'm feelin' inside is good, that it's okay? Uh-uh Rev," he continued, soft but stubborn, "no matter how rough it comes down on me I won't run. I'll stand and take my licks but, swear to God, you'll never once hear me say it was for nothin' because there'll have been this special thing that happened with you. But it can't be with just any old body -- It's got to be with you!"

Stammering as he began, Harlan spoke more deeply of his secret. "I ... I get so scared ... just can't help it sometimes. I feel as if I don't find myself somebody to be with I'm ... I'll... oh, I don't know. I've thought about tryin' it with somebody for a long time but I never have.

No one else would do anyway.

"Since the very first time I saw you, seems all the dreams I dreamed have been about what touchin' you would be like, what it would be like to feel you touchin' me. To know if it feels the same to you ... you know when you ...," Harlan blushed, not finishing what he wanted to say. "Honest, I can't help it," he said with finality. "I wonder about you all the time."

Putting truth to the test emboldened Harlan in speech yet, skittish, his light eyes often avoided Clay's direct gaze. "Day and night I keep on thinkin' and thinkin', " he continued, turning his face away, "even though I've heard a truck load of dirty jokes and stories bout guys --gettin' on each other -- about some of em even actin' like they're supposed to be girls. But, I don't want to be no girl, Rev. I just want to be me and be like a man even though I want to be with you. I know now you can show me what I want to know. Do it. Please? Do it."

Solemn and deep as the darkness that escorts midnight yet as soft and fine on Harlan's ear as velvet to a finger's touch, Clay's deep voice issued consent to his wish, "Come upstairs then, youngblood. Come on up now."

In a dream state the pair, Clay leading, rose from their seats at the table and exited the kitchen. All the house was silent except for the refrigerator's hum which faded behind them each step farther away. The musical tinkle of the glassware on the polished shelves inside the china cabinet in the small darkened dining room chimed a brief tiny chorus as the two of them crossed the middle of the house to ascend into the light at the top of the narrow stairs.

They were halfway up when Clay reached back for Harlan's hand. Once they'd reached the upper landing he led the way and they put the few paces of the upstairs hall's length behind them as they slipped into the quiet, unlit front bedroom.

The closing of the bedroom's door banished the radiance of the cluster of small bright bulbs screwed into the tentacled brass fixture hanging high in the hallway outside the largest of the brick rowhouse's three upper rooms. It's door firmly shut behind the two, the front bedroom was dark again save for silver slivers of light being forced in through the spaces in the closed Venetian blinds as a street lamp vigilantly burned out front. There was no brighter beacon's rays to guide them in the dark that night but without any difficulty, they found each others mouths again.

Without a look downward at the world they'd begun to put behind themselves, the handsome man and the comely youth embraced once more, alone at last, there upstairs in the dark.

So moved by the wonder of the moment that he had to speak his heart, Clay briefly interrupted their feverish kiss. "I swear nobody ... absolutely nobody ... should ever kiss this mouth but me," his baritone shuddered with passionate conviction. "Nobody."

Uttering no verbal reply, Harlan declared his full agreement by hungrily hurrying his mouth back home to Clay's. All his prior ravenous appetite for words with which to express himself and the best of his dreams, had flown from him.

The highly combustible composite of volatile essence which constitutes beginnings for lovers -- the taste of lips, the sense of speciality in a certain touch, the particularly seductive natural scent of someone's skin or hair -- ignited. So fueled, his first rocket ride on the sensations of first real intimacy inebriated Harlan, bestowing upon him a sense of elevation he couldn't in a million years explain. He was close to Clay but far beyond the dense atmosphere of practical thought.

Only someone else who'd already made a like journey could have readily grasped the reasons for virgin Harlan's uncomfortable squirming within the aggravating bind of the heavy winter clothing he wore. The flannel shirt he wore, his woolen sweater, the heavy corduroy pants all felt suddenly itchy and ill-fitting. His heaving belly and groin were rigidly bound by his cotton briefs. Harlan's cock was arrow straight and hard as a rock inside them, aching for freedom. Pushed against Clay's groin with needful insistence, Harlan's sex throbbed out the same intermittent code matching the pulse Harlan had first felt against the inside of his own hard thigh when Clay and he'd stood pressed together downstairs.

Passion prodded them as their trembling hands explored, tested flesh, and spoke in signs.

Harlan snatched a breath of air. An odd sensation made him gasp as it set his legs to trembling. No one's, no other man's fingers had ever trailed the tight divide of his backside. Like a low lying cloud of mist, Clay's fingers came tenderly creeping across the seat of his pants and upward with light-handed stealth, through the narrow valley just above the backs of his jittery thighs.

With equal deftness upon discovery, each new treasure of Harlan's maleness bore Clay's tender discovery, as on route to the climax of this meeting, it fell into the path of his large, hard hands. In the darkness, Clay surveyed the firm rounds of muscle cupped in his hand by touch. Keen as a razor, the combined sensation of awe at the coming to pass of the thing that he'd refused to even let himself dream of for the past three years, plus raw want, slashed at him as his trembling hands traveled on.

The elder delighted in the broken songs of assent to be heard in the younger's ragged breaths. His full lips stopped and started as they made their way along the smooth brown skin on Harlan's neck. The young preacher gently sucked an earlobe into the moist warmth between his lips and flicked the tip of his tongue against it.

The tall lean youth moaned and pushed his crotch harder into the meat of the young preacher's thick thigh.

Overcome and trembling, head to foot, Clay roughly shoved a broad hand underneath Harlan's woolen sweater and jerked the tails of the heavy plaid shirt free from the waist of his pants. That same hand pressed flat against Harlan's heaving belly. It was left to linger only a short while before Clay reversed its downward course and slid it slowly upward and halted. His fingers raised and he let their tips delicately drift to and fro over the breadth of one nipple as if lazily sounding a guitar. His young love's next moan echoed the note struck.

Clay groaned louder in answer. More than just a sympathetic resonance signifying attunement or the mutuality of his desire, it warned of the rise of the fire raging below in his groin. Through the material of his black trousers, for the first time Harlan's quivering hand reached and took hold of the young preacher's hardened dick.

Gently, Clay disengaged Harlan's hand and backed away in the dark, hurriedly feeling for the light switch on the wall. With it's click, a small lamp at bedside came on. "It's time, youngblood. I mean to try my best not to cause you much pain but I can't wait any more," Clay whispered earnestly. "Get on the bed."

Harlan turned his back to Clay. Beside the big unmade bed on the far side of the room, his usually nimble fingers trembled but swift and solemn, nonetheless, he unhooked the catch at the waist of his pants. With awkward decisiveness he pushed them and his briefs past his slim hips and his sex sprang out of confinement, long, hard and angled upward. For a moment the youth stood studying his erection as if examining the meaning of the need in him but then forsook the test. In a hurry to know love's ultimate end, the teenager gave no thought to removing any of his clothing and hastily laid himself, face down and ass bared, across the rumpled field of patchwork covering the bed to wait for his golden man to come.

A zipper's brief shrill wasplike buzz brought Harlan's head up from the quilt. He gazed past his shoulder, beyond the anxiously flexing hills of his ass toward Clay.

Clay stood before the mirror of the large dresser with his back to Harlan as he pushed the tan suspenders attached to his trousers off his powerful shoulders. The wide suspenders fell away from the big man's broad back and the waist of his black dress pants' fell open and draped at the top of his muscular hips. Hastily stepping out of them, he laid them over the back of an old wooden chair. Seemingly in the depths of thought, the big-boned man hesitated for several moments before he caught the waistband of his boxer shorts with his hooked thumbs and shoved them down his hard thighs until they fell, on their own, past his thick-muscled, hairy calves to the floor. The dangling tail of his white shirt accentuated every roll of the muscular honey-gold swells of his ass as he stepped free of his underthings. Clay turned his head to look back where Harlan lay.

Harlan's turgid dick was mashed between his flat belly and the mattress beneath. Incredibly hard, it felt hot as steel from the forge against the smooth skin on his abdomen. It leapt the same as Harlan's heart leapt as he caught first sight of the exposed lower hemispheres of the hairy orbs of Clay's bared rear. Clay's shirt prohibited the full view he lay there eagerly wanting to take in but the young preacher abruptly turned about and Harlan forgot for a moment. The youth's trim frame shuddered, head to foot, when he saw and his sex throbbed, imprisoned beneath himself.

The youth's beautiful eyes, electrically alight, grew more hungry by the second for sight of any bared part of the partially dressed broad-chested man standing across the room from him. Thus, Harlan's gaze plummeted from Clay's broad jaw to the wedge shaped thicket of kinky hair at the top of his long, heavy legs.

Clay's cock rose thick and strong out from the preponderance of hair growing at the base of his belly at an angle, bending upward a little like a saber. Pronouncedly darker in tone than the rest of its owner's honey-colored flesh, the foreskin of the thick and sturdy man-staff had drawn back on its own to display its deep lavender hued tip, flared like a plowshare in readiness for the task at hand.

Clay started for the bed but then abruptly stepped backward to take a round plastic container off the end of the dresser. His conscience spoke again as he surveyed the various items in his wife's collection cosmetics situated around the little jar of Vaseline but he shut his ear to it. Again about to go to Harlan, Clay halted once more to softly ask, "Youngblood ... do you want the light on?"

"...Yeah -- leave it."

Between Clay's legs, the brown, soft and wrinkled purse seemingly heavily laden with an abundance of his seed, bullishly swung side to side as he came straight Harlan's way.

Expectant, Harlan laid his head on the pillow he'd fashioned for himself by gathering up some of the quilt as he heard the sound of Clay's approaching footsteps cease just behind him.

The preacher slowly squatted on the throw rug beside the bed and set the small, lidless jar of lubricant on the bed next to Harlan's prone form. He extended his quivering hands and gently pushed the tail of Harlan's shirt and his sweater higher off the warm, pliant mounds of exposed flesh framed by the eager youth's hastily undone clothing. As though meant for Clay's hands alone, he marveled at how they fit his grasp so well as his big thumbs began to pry them apart. Under his eyes within a thin wreath of shiny coal black hairs, the narrow portal promising rare pleasures lay nestled in the central depths of the spread flesh in his hands. "What a mighty long time ago that was," echoed in Clay's mind as pictorial thoughts of things he'd all too briefly shared with someone else flashed by. Bringing his knees all the way to the floor, the preacher leaned farther forward, shivering with want. Obeisantly lowering his head, the preacher applied a tender kiss to each side of Harlan's warm ass.

Eyes opened by a taste of the fruits of genuine passion, Clay lifted his head to peek at the gates of Paradise once more. A moment later, he straightened a little, pulling a hand away. With the middle finger of his right hand, he dug out a little of the jar's greasy contents as the thumb and forefinger of the left held Harlan's ass divided. Clay generously daubed the thick lubricant onto the small puckered orifice then, immediately afterward, reached down to take his rigid dick in hand and hastily apply the Vaseline to himself.

Clay made no attempt to push his finger into the tight channel beyond Harlan's sphincter. Instead, he maintained a gently pressured rubbing at its outside until Harlan's feverish sighs and whimpers beseeched that the mysteries lying beyond the borders of virginity soon be shown to him.

The springs of the big bed gave and groaned as Clay's weight combined with Harlan's. Supporting himself on his knees and an extended arm, Clay began to insinuate the wide head of his lengthy cock into the narrow gap of Harlan's ass. Submerging so deep into a pleasurable and sudden sense of safety as Clay's body began to press down on him, Harlan didn't realize that the faint, far away moan he'd heard had come from himself.

Clay was eager to mount and at last make a complete connection with the youth lying underneath him. He pushed downward more firmly. Harlan, more determined by the second that the barriers of this ignorance he sought to end be torn down then and there, in turn, pushed his tail back against the slippery lance between his asscheeks as its downward force increased. Ardent for ultimate knowledge of Harlan, the preacher used more pressure which evoked a series of short, all at once doubtful whimpered doubts from Harlan. Clay's hefty manhood, priorly a welcome arrival at Harlan's gate began insisting upon entry. Minute beads of sweat formed a crystal chain along the narrow bridge of the youth's nose as the muscle along the backs of his thighs tightened rock hard.

"Ungh!" A pained grunt wrenched its way out of Harlan's gut. He grimaced and squeezed his eyes shut, as if blindness would diminish the pain. A vein rose his long neck on the tensed muscle there as it arched backward and drew his head from the bed. Harlan loudly ate up air by the lungful and spat out subsequent outward blasts of it through tightly clenched teeth as, unrelenting, Clay proceeded to maneuver his thick dick farther into his backside.

His sex securely wedged within the tight cleft in Harlan's slim ass, the motion of Clay's brawny form set the bed gently rocking as he probed deeper increasingly insistent. Though the youth never once cried out for the bull of a man on his back to stop, he thrashed wildly in the depths of cacophonous fright pain brought. He grabbed at handfuls of the bunched up quilt as though a lifeline might be discovered hidden somewhere in its folds. This occurred the instant the thick bronze bludgeon between the legs of the moaning man laying over him suddenly rammed open the gate.

Harlan's sudden agitation by the pain inside himself, proved his prior stalwart resolve not an easy faith to keep but Clay held him secure. Only a moment before, the teasing dick jabs the young preacher had used to test the give of the tight split in his rear with his dick had fueled the fires of the young virgin's ardor, making him ready to surrender all of himself. Now, the gasping youth felt as though the broad spike of male flesh being driven up his ass would soon split even the very fabric of his being along with his tail.

Clay, lodged halfway inside him, bore down more and if it had not been for his mass hunkering over him, holding him down and holding him to his word, the willowy brown youth lying speared on his sex might well have tried to bolt and run.

But, it was too late for rising or walking away and Harlan knew even if he could he'd only want to come back to try again.

"Stay loose. Keep yourself just as loose as you can," Clay gasped in Harlan's ear as one last thrust brought him all the way inside Harlan's tensed body and held himself still for a while.

Minute by minute, the scorching ache in Harlan's entrails began succumbing by degrees. In it's dying, the burning sensation modified to a feeling of warmth and fullness that led to his allusions of its possible lineage from potential satiation. Harlan, quieted, laid more still and relaxed beneath the husky frame of the man who'd begun to move again on his back ... thrusting deep, nearly withdrawing all the way, and then driving in again.

The voicings of the guide and his charge's shared passion and pain, and the cricket chirp of the bed's springs intermingled and rose and fell moment to moment. The issue of sounds contingent on the love they'd begun to make randomly balanced against the noise outside in the street.

Over and over, sounds of early evening in North Philadelphia swelled and ebbed. Cars slowly passed. A huckster's loud call kept repeating, "I got winter squash. I got yams here -- sweet as honey." The intermittent stop and go clip-clop of the hooves of the peddler's horse as it bore its master wagon house to house played off the steady tap of running feet at play in the cold just before suppertime. The tiny feet of the bundle-up children scurrying up and down the block danced in counterpoint to the staccato of their flutelike laughter while the feet of neighborhood elders shuffled on and off white marble stoops. Drumming out the time for the march toward home and hearth, doors shut and opened all along the narrow street.

Equally as intense upstairs and inside, one most of life's common expressions was heard only by them. It sounded in the urgent breaths of the handsome preacher and the comely youth lying with him. The sing-song their moans began to hang more prominent inside the room than the patchwork curtain of exterior sound.

Harlan and Clay came to hear nothing at all but each other; saw nothing at all except each other. By then wrinkled and dampened by the rain of sweat off their squirming hard bodies, that the remainder of their clothing still had yet to be shed had become a thing inconsequential. All that mattered to either one was that they were lying across the wide bed, at last completely joined.

Underneath the back of the heavy shirt and sweater, Clay's fingers followed the finite etching of every muscle atop Harlan's back and along his sides as he lay over him. As he gyrated his hairy groin pressed flush against the smooth, burning rounds of Harlan's ass, the young preacher grabbed at his young love's wide shoulders as though a famished man about to break a loaf.

Yet, Clay's thoughts were not merely focused on his own taking of pleasure. Snaking a strong arm around Harlan's hard chest, Clay pulled the youth along with himself as he slowly rolled onto his side to spare themselves separation. Quickly, he grabbed for the open jar that still lay just beyond them on the bed and scooped out a bit of its contents with tips of two fingers. Harlan's flaccid dick, instantly leaped alive in the clutch of Clay's palm as oil was gently spread from tip to base.

At first slow and tantalizing, Clay slid his big fist up and down the length of the youth's greased, dark scepter. Glistening in the low lamplight, its throbbing denoted the extreme state of Harlan's desire. Deliberate, gradual increases in the speed of the ministerings of the brawny man's oiled hand caused the novice, who's newly opened ass was spasmodically seizing around his cock, to cry out involuntarily. With all his might Harlan began to rock his slim hips as he awkwardly pumped his dick into the tight clutch of the fisted hand cradling it. Clay became all the more incensed by sensation.

Like a tiny eye the slit in the tip of Harlan's dick began to joyfully weep a thin stream of sticky, clear fluid in preparation of the release that must come. The plunging fist surrounding it reached lightning speed as it traveled from head to root of the stiff, twitching rod it grasped.

"Ooh! I'm gonna jizz soon! I'm gonna --"

"That's only natural for a man, youngblood. Go `head ... let it go ... give it up to me," Clay urged him on with a rumbling groan as his thrusts from behind stepped up in pace. Harlan's athletic form suddenly jerked straight and quivered against the body of the big man spearing him. As Clay felt the burning shaft of the lean youth's swollen cock pulse in his grasp, he jammed himself all the way in as a squeal from Harlan pealed out like a bell tone. Cometlike, the first volley of Harlan's semen jetted across the quilt.

Clay too, suddenly a helpless pawn of the passion he'd long kept his face turned from, hugged Harlan close and lay there doggedly driving his dick into a vein of sweet sensation as he zealously prospected the full depth of the long-legged youth's tight, lean tail. The young preacher's flared nostrils grew as tantalizingly filled up with the heady perfume of Harlan's seed and sweat as his rapidly pistoning fist was with the youth's erect sex. Clay jammed his encircling hand all the way down to Harlan's groin as the youth squealed once more from pure pleasure and his firm belly jerked in response to the second orgasmic pulse that coursed his stiff rod from his tight balls to its throbbing fleshy helmet. Shaded dark as night, the long thick ram looming out from Harlan's flat, smooth belly spurted another thick lob of his sperm into the folds of the quilt, then spat out seed again for a third and fourth time as the no longer virgin teenage boy lay triumphantly moaning out the news that he'd come across the line.

The centrifugal force in the powerful swing of the sublimely delicious agony of first connection caused Clay's brow to knit as he traveled with it, all the while hearing Harlan's pleasured whimpering bejewel his own excitement. "Got a sure `nough good feelin' comin' down on me too youngblood!" Clay groaned, tiny sweat beads blooming wild all across the golden field of his forehead. "Good God, it's comin' down just like rain!"

The grip of the muscles along the narrow channel cut deep below the proud rise of teenage boy's ass tightened then loosened again and again and involuntarily set a sea of heat churning all about the young preacher's hypersensitized cock as the youth continued let go of his load. All in an instant, a bomb blast of sensual fire exploded and rapidly amplified and spread from low in Clay's gut. The taut musculature of the big man's hard, hairy belly seized up and, eyes squeezed shut and groaning like a bear through his clenched even teeth, the young preacher began to spill out his essence inside Harlan's clenched ass.

Learning to sing in an angel voice, Harlan uttered a long moan of amazement as he felt Clay's dick pulsate and spurt jets of sticky seed that made him feel mysteriously warm far up inside. Greedy to grab up every scrap this new moment offered any way he could, with a loud whimper, Harlan impulsively ground his lean brown butt hard into Clay's heaving belly....

As both at last became quiet, the preacher's panting and thrusts ceased along with Harlan's groans for more of him, the repetitions of a car horn's blast sounded off in the distance, somewhere seemingly far, far beyond the mere second-story room where they lay. Secure and sheltered in the novitiate of Clay's strong arms as they continued to surround him from behind, Harlan ate up each passing second of a new contentment with mute relish as the preacher's thick cock, still lodged inside his ass, gradually softened ...

1964 - Part 3

From behind the wheel of his car, Clay warily looked about the periphery of the idling Buick to be sure that passers-by were nowhere near. It was past eleven and the side street under his eye, from where he and Harlan sat, proved empty. Despite any misgivings the somewhat nervous young minister may have had as to the possible suspicions of others should the two of them be seen parked that late at night, joy, shyly kept but too pervasive to remain hidden burnished the dark timbre of his low voice. "Hold up youngblood ... kiss me one time before you go," he said.

Harlan and Clay slid slowly toward the center of the big car's front seat from their respective sides. As if in their slow approach they'd come to find each other all over again, their hearts pounded in their high rising chests like drums. Both the handsome young preacher and his incredibly comely passenger leaned across the little hill Harlan's heaped textbooks had formed between them. Clay reverently framed Harlan's face with his fingertips and guided the willing youth's mouth to his as if a connoisseur about to rest the rim of a glass brim-full of the rarest of wines on his lips. Passionately wishing he could lay the youth down again right there on the seat, the young preacher tested Harlan's lips to learn the weight of their welcome and then mashed his lips against the youth's. He held them in his keeping for a long moment. "Quick now," he said, his breaths deep and ragged after letting go of the taste of love with great hesitance, "better get yourself home."

But, dreamy-eyed, Harlan didn't make ready to leave the car. Instead, he leaned back in the seat once more and his long neck arched as his head tilted backward once Clay let him go. Pensively cherishing Clay's kiss, he traced the tip of his tongue lightly across his bottom lip to savor any lingering taste of the preacher's mouth that might be left there. Then, suddenly overcome with reckless excitement, the beautiful, starry-eyed boy sat straight up on the seat and enthusiastically suggested, "Let's spend the whole day together tomorrow. Yeah, I'd have to be at school for roll-call by eight-thirty but right after that I could cut out man and be back on a bus just like that!" he hypothesized, all exuberance as he snapped his fingers to sketch his speed of travel. "Nobody would -- "

Clay, frowning his strong disapproval, cut him off. "No, that's a thing that ain't about to be." The young preacher's bottom lip all at once set as sternly as carved stone. He gave the steering car's steering wheel a hard knock with his big fist and ordered Harlan to, "Listen," in a firm tone clearly defining that his absolute attention was in demand. "There'll be no such excursion tomorrow or any other day. You're not about to start doin' junk like that -- not on my account anyway."

"It was good -- I swear it to you -- every last bit of what you made me feel tonight I mean, but that ain't all there is to life. Lovin's somethin' we'll just have to tend to as best we can -- when we can -- `cause your makin' somethin' of yourself's a heck of a lot more important." Pausing, the big man looked out his side window seemingly not about to say more.

The sudden irritation that had darkened the tone of the young preacher's already deep brown eyes began lifting as the register of their hue segued to a tender entreatment that Harlan look to logic. Clay sighed, "Enough meddlin' with what most likely should have been left alone already's been done."

This time, Harlan frowned.

Empathetic, the handsome young preacher reached over and gave the impatient youth sitting beside him a gentle squeeze on his nearer thigh. "God only knows, youngblood, how I'd like to just up and do anything I feel like myself. Why right this minute, I'd put this car in gear and you and me would ride off and leave everything else behind us. You wouldn't see me study stop light or stop sign. I'd just jam my foot down on the gas and go. Funny ... always did want to let this ol' Buick show me what she can do," Clay said wistfully.

The brawn of the musing man made itself evident despite the way his heavy winter garb masked his muscular frame as Clay, chuckling mildly, pushed himself deep as he could sink into the car's upholstery and allowed himself a moment's free withdrawal of luxury from a bounteous balance of his unacted upon fantasies.

"It would be just you and me buddy; nobody but us two. We'd head out for someplace where there'd be not a soul who'd be eyin' us and wonderin', or lookin' to have their little say.

"I'm talkin' bout somewhere so far past Philadelphia that we'd never be found. Yeah youngblood, I sure nough would fly away to be some place like that. Problem is," the young preacher said as the wistful look that had lit his handsome face began to fade, "for the likes of us, I can't rightly say I know of any such place. Sounds way too much like Heaven for it to ever be found anywhere here on Earth.

"There's no denyin' how I feel. It's got to be all over my face, plain as day by now," Clay continued, "but I can't let you start dodgin' your responsibility to yourself no more than I can start settin' aside my own. Talkin' love's one thing, doin' it's another. How could encouragin' you to skip class show I care about you?"

"Don't worry, bet your bottom dollar, you'll find me right there at the house waitin' on you when you're done with what you've got to do tomorrow." Suddenly smiling again on seeing his say carried some weight, the young preacher quietly asked, "How is there a way on Earth I could forget you now after what you've given me baby?"

All at once mindful of nothing else but his closeness to Harlan, Clay lent no concern over the further possible need for his reconnaissance of the dark street. He roughly grabbed Harlan by the nape of the neck and snatched another kiss. "Now, get yourself goin'," he softly ordered as he pulled his mouth away....

Euphoric and feeling wild, all due to one night's revelations, Harlan scrambled out of the big black car a block away from his home at around eleven-thirty. The handsome young romantic who'd been made, inside a few brief hours, unbelievably exuberant of spirit and giddy ran homeward unaware of and untouched by the freezing cold that ruled the dark street. The long-legged youth's head was too overflowing with naive and rash contemplations of innumerable tomorrows for him to hear the drumlike rumble of wind in his ears as his running feet chewed up the distance between the corner where the preacher sat waiting in his car to assure himself that he'd made it up the sandstone steps of the brick house on Walnut Street where he lived and was safely inside.

Harlan stopped only for a second to search his jacket pocket for his key before taking the front steps two at a time. Turning about just prior to pushing open his front door, he hoisted an arm and waved exuberantly at the headlights gleaming down the street ....

Inside, hearing the insertion of a key at the front of the house, Harlan's mother came to meet him at the living room side of the vestibule just as the heavy oak front door swung open.

Quietly cautious, Harlan offered her a simple greeting, "Hi Mom," but no explanation for his late arrival. He instinctively made an instant though timid search of Cleotha Creely's inquisitive visage for signs of real trouble.

"Well mister man, I was beginnin' to wonder what time you'd figured you felt about ready to come in. You know you've got school in the mornin'," Cleotha tersely informed him as she crossed her heavy dark arms. Without missing a beat, the stout woman executed one quick pace to the left; the next step of the dance countering her son's evasions and deliberately positioned herself in his path before he could pass. Mother's intuition had already told her he'd try to. She asked, "Now Harlan, just what was so important that it kept you in the street this time of night?"

Harlan hesitated guiltily before molding the frontispiece of the first lie he'd felt it necessary to tell his mother in a long, long while. The jolt he felt inside his chest with each heavy thump of his racing heart added to his unnerving. He was sure his mother would soon begin to notice its leaping even though hidden so deep beneath winter clothes and a jacket. Nonetheless Harlan steeled himself to answer, "There's this science project that's on for school. It's got to be all done right away. So tonight, I really needed to go in town and look through some books and stuff at the main library. That's all."

"Harlan, that couldn't take `til this time of night. And on top of that, Center City Library closes at seven-thirty," Cleotha matter-of-factly informed her son with suspiciously narrowed eyes.

"Uh ... uh ... yeah, I know," Harlan replied, suddenly nervous and not helping himself one bit. Clumsily sided on the defensive, the teenage boy was growing more scared. However, even though he frantically wondered whether or not his face was betraying him, the new young man in love was desperate and somehow all at once rallied. His heart had come to hold greater sway over him than his mother would ever again and just then its mandate called for the preservation of his secret -- by any means.

This reason in its requirement of his rebellion simultaneously oiled the doing of the deed by rendering within Harlan a reaction quite similar to the release of endorphines upon the body's suffering a wound. Quite thoroughly, his justifications for lying brought on a welcome anesthetization of the customarily forthright youth's conscience. So numbed by his need to by all means protect the special thing that had just come into his hands, painful twinges of the youth's conscience were near completely allayed as more falsehoods were about to spill from his lips.

Remorselessly ready, yet not quite so numbed to be more than a bit ashamed of himself, Harlan set to the hasty further weaving of his explanation. He knew if he was slow about it his wary mother would begin to press him hard for more detailed answers as to his whereabouts. "But on the way to the bus I passed by this movie theater on Market Street --" he began to add but was gratefully spared the relation of the rest his invention for a moment more.

"A movie?" his mother sharply inquired. "And on a school night? Harlan Creely where is your mind? Lord have mercy! If your daddy heard tell of you comin' in here near midnight after some movie, why you, me, and Buddy would all have to leave out of here because not a one of us would be able to stay up in here once that man's mouth got to runnin'. Boy if --"

"It's okay Mom -- it's okay! I mean, come on just take a look at the time," Harlan interrupted, quickly drawing Cleotha's still suspicious gaze from his anxious eyes with a nervous jab of his finger toward the large banjo clock hanging on the living room wall. "Daddy's not here to know it and it's really not that late. All I wanted to do was be out for a little while. Gee," he shrugged, "this is about the time I always go up to bed, isn't it?"

"Anyway, there's still a lot more to do." Harlan said, taking a plunge deeper into deception before his mother could get the chance to counter with logic inevitably better than his. "I'll have to go back tomorrow night. It's okay isn't it? I mean, shoot Mom, it's not like I'm a kid anymore. I am nineteen-years-old now; up for college next year. That's way more than old enough to stay out a little late -- at least now and then and --"

Harlan had grown up. He cut himself short, realizing if he said more he'd negate the point and his argument by merely appearing a sulking, whining boy.

Harlan's story was far too vague and loose for someone as intuitively on the money as his mother. Being quite aware of that, on general principle alone Cleotha had already set before herself several very sensible reasons that should have immediately prompted her refusal. There'd been all sorts of reports of teenage boys and young men in West Philly streets looking for trouble and hanging in gangs. But thinking on that, she felt assured only the most dedicated of hoodlums would brave the freezing weather they'd been having lately for the sake of folly. "Praise God, can't be that many fools around," she thought.

Then again something disquieting but hard to define in the back of Cleotha's mind almost did bring about her flat denial of Harlan's request. Yet unable to put her finger on the exact reason, the frowning woman consented with a reluctant nod upon a moment more of thought and abandoned motherly interrogation. "But you be sure you have your mannish self inside this house no later than this time tomorrow night. You hear?"

"Yes, ma'am," Harlan answered not surmising that something in his smile set his mother to wondering again. Impulsively, he saluted her and then gratefully gave her a quick peck on the cheek.

Recurring thoughts of Harlan's miserliness in relating his itinerary that evening kept Cleotha curious. However, knowing her son to usually be as good as his word, she decided to let this one incident pass and leave the rest trust. She thought to herself in an offhanded fashion, "I wonder if that boy's gone and met up with some little girl somewhere," but shook it off. Since she hadn't been aware of him showing any particular interest in any among the gaggle of young girls his age at church she couldn't, that moment, imagine who it might be.

Still thinking Cleotha turned and gazed toward the foyer. "Well Lord, my baby's just about grown," she thought. Melancholy flitted across her eyes as she remembered not that many years before it had seemed that neither of her young sons could wait to rush through that door up front to share every minute detail of a day's yield of deed and accomplishment. Present times seemed to show that the maintenance of a grasp on what was going on with her two sons' time, spent more and more away from her, literally required all the arts of alchemy. She glanced at the little brass perpetual calendar by the lamp on the side table for no reason. "Nineteen sixty-four ... Lord, how fast things can change," she blandly marveled to herself. Then considering boys' transitions to men with slightly sardonic amusement, "How they do change too."

With a grunt the portly woman wheeled about-face and started for her kitchen. "Come on then," she said, looking past her shoulder impatiently. "Get your butt out here in the kitchen and let me fix you somethin' to eat. Probably haven't had a thing tonight except some junk."

Although his belly was already near full, Harlan wisely thought better of begging off this second dinner and obediently trailed after his mother to the rear of the house and into the kitchen ...

Relieved that the road to back Clay had been paved quickly and with relative ease, an hour later Harlan lay groggily ebullient upstairs in his bed. Stomach stuffed with his mother's cooking, he was ecstatic and most deliciously awed by every circumstance that had forged the clandestine happiness he struggled to quietly harbor.

Lying in the dark, Harlan turned his ear on hearing a sudden rustle of bed things nearby. At first he thought his younger brother Buddy might be waking, possibly in need of a trip down the hall to the bath. However, though the nine-year-old stirred in his bed just across the room he did not rise but incoherently mumbled something. The utterance was brief but seemingly of great importance and imparted to an unknown compatriot who must have been traveling at his side while he dreamed. In another moment, the youngest of the Creely household snuggled deeper into the covers, sighed deeply, then became quiet again. The second youngest Creely was lost in a dream equally as deep but he was wide awake.

Harlan lay reliving every moment that had come to pass after his first real kiss just hours before. The youth eagerly harvested every mindful he could grow of every line, ridge and rise of Clay's body. The heat of his cheeks intensified as he lasciviously dredged up his very last recall of the bullishly virile preacher's readied implement of connection just as Clay had stood over him as he lay waiting to have the lance put it to his ass sure and true.

Inside Harlan's head the beautiful panorama of retrospect was wide. Some of sex's mystery dissolved and wildly aroused again by mulling over all the worldly knowledge he'd seen strewn about outside his virginity's exit door, the firm-limbed youth uttered a luxurious sigh. Its own brand of reactionary to fancies of sex, the black shaft of his limp dick began to broaden and grow as he re-eyed every turn of scene in the evening he'd passed with Clay. Blotted out by the span of such an awesome view, any previous consideration on his part of any pain suffered in the accomplishment of rending the seal on naivet fell from his mind.

He reminisced, with feverish delight, at how he'd lain securely locked inside the band of one of Clay's big hard arms as the slippery diligence of the preacher's hand on him, unequivocally proved no touch was like a lover's touch -- not even his own.

The youth continued piecing the total picture of the time they'd shared back together. It reoccurred to Harlan the wide bed in Clay's bedroom had rocked under them as though they'd been rafting a wild river's white water. The springs had groaned near as loud as he and Clay at the culmination of their frenzied melee. Jammed ass to belly they'd been; close as any two men could be as Harlan received the warm spill of the moaning young preacher's healing unction inside himself....

Harlan kept on lying there in his bed, lazily toying with his hardened dick and thinking how wonderful all of it had felt. Strangely content, he required no more erudite a realm of comprehension respecting what they'd experienced than came with his rudimentary visualizations. Simple recaptures of the significant bliss he'd found in giving himself up to Clay to be held, to be opened, proved enough for just then.

Harlan abruptly shifted beneath the covers and felt a slight, curiously ambiguous residual soreness deep in the cleft his backside. Whether this part of the harvest of his surrender was in actuality less a pain than a bittersweet and integral component of afterglow he'd yet to decide. He remembered that Clay's thick, soapy fingers had made him wince, first touch there, as they'd helped each other hurriedly clean up shortly before leaving Germantown. That strange dull ache was the only actual physical reality left of their lovemaking that night and the youth lay dreamily aware of it.

Whatever its interpretation, the odd sensation's presence prompted even more of his recall of the man he'd longed for to assume as fully an upright stand as his dick.

Mind well-fueled with voluptuous recollections, Harlan relit with passion. The heady muskiness of male arousal was leaking from every pore of the smooth, teak brown skin all over his lean, hard body again.

Maddened by the nagging itch in his cock that called for fondling, the youth brashly snatched his tumescent sex from where it lay cached inside his briefs as though believing as great and dominant an urge as sexual need could be reined in merely with the motion of a hand. "Better hurry," Harlan whispered to himself advisedly.

A following and very brief application of his fist, tight and frenzied in motion once he seized hold of himself, brought about a reflex flutter of the muscle in the comely youth's thighs. His splayed long legs jerked as he hooked his heels into his mattress's sides. Lending strange harmony to his hard grunts, Harlan's narrow bed creaked as his fist kept pumping his cock. His sinewy body strained like a young bird meaning to fly away toward some high place that for an instant had appeared unreachable from where he lay. And Harlan did touch upon it.

The lean youth's broad chest lifted high each time he sucked at the air through his clenched teeth. An all consuming sensation that radially spread in its rising from the root of his cock took possession of him. Had his taut belly been a drum it surely would have toned loud; booming out a message of his nearness to coming as his fist at work banged on the bone in his crotch.

In the dark Harlan hastily corralled his feather pillow in the crook of his free arm and turned his face into it just as he uttered a loud involuntary gasp. The beautifully formed halves of his lean ass bunched and clamped together rock hard as his pelvis thrust high. Burning pleasure seething at his cock root and helpless to hide it, Harlan gave up his frenzied groans and cries to his pillow and a fresh, profuse delivery of his sticky essence to his fist.

No time or clarity of mind was afforded him to fling off the bed things or yank the bottom of his tee-shirt past his heaving belly, clear of the spurts of semen that gushed out onto himself with each pulse of his dick. Once the rainstorm of seed going on inside the cotton and wool cocoon of the bed things wrapped all about him had passed Harlan, dazed and sweating, lay still longingly moaning Clay's name into his pillow.

In a while the last of the colored tinsel stars he'd seen falling behind his clenched eyelids as he came had evaporated, the tall youth lay completely quiet in mind and body once more. Noiselessly, he planted his feet on the his room's bare floor and rose.

Standing beside his bed, Harlan quietly stripped in the dark, taking great pains to find all the gluey remnants of solitarily expressed passion that clung to his flat belly and firm brown thighs. As he found sticky patches of his come on his smooth skin he wiped them away with his wadded up tee shirt.

Light from the street was sieved through the curtains at the window as the tall youth stood carefully cleaning himself. In the dark, here and there on his beautiful bared frame the etchings of young man's muscle was highlighted through the loose wrapping of the deep shadows inside his room. Harlan's smooth cheeks suddenly ballooned as he blew out a breath of air and shuddered, head to foot, when he applied the wadded up shirt to his still highly sensitive dickhead to clean his come away .

Buddy, not far away, continued to lay peaceful and quiet. Harlan satisfied himself that his often inquisitive nine-year-old brother had been asleep the whole time and hastily shoved his soiled underthings beneath the mattress. He laid down naked to sleep.

It was nearing one o'clock and morning was coming. He and Clay would meet again that coming afternoon ....

1964 - Part 4

On the other side of the city, the handsome young preacher lay by himself too. A haze of mingled but conflicting odors drifted all round the darkened master bedroom distracting him, already in a confused tangle of thoughts. Scent wafting from his absent wife's perfume atomizer, across the room on the dresser, sang out in disturbing, disharmonious concert with the leavings of the stirring masculine aroma generated from the love he'd made with Harlan.

Agonized by the haunting, the handsome, worried man yet lay awake and aware in the limbo of his want. As well, his cognizance of every line he'd gone lunging across headfirst -- and all in an evening -- grew acute. Knowing himself, the clergyman realized he'd never be allowed the simple ease of merely blocking off the sad side of his thoughts.

Nothing was ever to be the same again. Clay knew it. There existed no quick and convenient fixative for the broken clay of his vows to church and spouse, both not long before dashed to the ground. Then again, undeniably, there was nothing and no one that he knew of who could erase the unchained devotion he then even more gladly bore for Harlan. He didn't want to lose Harlan or anything he had but he knew that couldn't be. From the troubled young clergyman's position at the prow as time gradually became a moving thing for him again those several hours later, he saw clearly a cautionary beacon warning of perilous shallows for those plotting courses while bearing cargo as heavy as falsehood. "Truth or lies?" the young preacher asked himself as he considered how he'd greet the morning.

The coming of morning brought to mind, the preacher anxiously shot a glance at the clock. One a.m. already. But a moment passed and he remembered it would be all right to sleep a little later if he wanted. There'd be a few calls to make and a drain in the bath that it wouldn't hurt to looked at but nothing required early attention. He was sure to have the time to sleep in.

The big honey-colored man turned on his side, simply meaning to lie himself down to sleep but recollections of Harlan would not abandon him. Lying there befuddled and feverish as he was, Clay couldn't let them go. Exiting the car with him when he'd returned late that night, his newborn memories rushed ahead of him, barging into his house like sweet but rambunctious children.

It was clear to him they'd come to stay for, there alone in the dark he discovered himself supplied with ease, perfect visions of Harlan's handsome face. "He is mighty like a warrior, ain't he?" Clay asked an unknown ear with whispered awe. "So much like Africa --," he marveled, thinking back to his brief stay as a missionary on the continent one summer just after his senior year in high school. "Especially the rise of his cheekbones all smooth and brown like teak, that lift to his chin. Somethin' about that nose too ... right blunt and proud with a flare to it -- so much like the noblest in the tribe."

The preacher, meditations deepening, also recalled well the youth's mystifying, light eyes and the thickness of the black lashes rowed along their border lines. He remembered not only the look of them but the feel of them too when they'd swept his cheek as, man to man, he'd helped the inexperienced youth in his arms begin to gain a mastery of touch. Clay's heart set to rumbling in his wide chest. All at once crazily needing something ... anything ... to hold he pulled the bed covers closer, thinking how every wet kiss he'd sucked from Harlan's full lips had borne a taste of salt and sweet. As the two of them had lain close, that mixture of flavors had been as much a tonic for the young preacher's denied condition of the heart as the musky scent of man that Harlan's young, hard body had exuded as the warmth of his skin spiked synchronously with his urgency of his need for Clay's hands to be upon him.

"Mercy ... mercy," rumbled softly in Clay Adderly's throat as a tidal rush of sexual feeling took hold of him and sent an electric charge streaking one-way straight through the heart of the bone rowed down the middle of his broad back. More of the marvel that had transpired was tumbling over and over in his mind. How maddeningly wonderful it had felt to at last have handsome, brown-skinned manhood not only alive and impetuously squirming in his arms but also coming awake to grow long and hard inside his hand. Dogging the trail of that thought came his distinct recollection of the incensing grab the close interiors of Harlan's slim backside had placed on his sex. Feeling bullishly hot from the mere thought of it, the suddenly glassy-eyed young preacher vividly recalled how the strong, virginal squeeze Harlan's ass exerted on his swollen cock had robbed him of manners and compelled him to jam himself all the way home over and over.

All of it -- everything -- had come back to Clay but unlike the visitation of lesser recollections in frustrating times past, this night, he would not for a moment resist their approach.

Clay abruptly threw the sheets and blanket off his naked, roused body and rose from his bed into the dark room's comfortable warmth. He swiftly made his way to the dresser as his sex thickened and stood, boldly wagging to and fro before him. At the dresser, the young preacher hastily reached for the light, switched it on and then retrieved the same jar of Vaseline he'd earlier used to oil Harlan's ass.

While Clay stood eying the little translucent plastic vessel, almost lost in his big hand, he thought more broadly on the secret union that had come to be in his bed that night. Unable to see any blasphemy in the opinion, the handsome young preacher somehow sensed that a profound blessing had been rested upon him through the true specialness of the intimacy he and Harlan had shared.

About to reach for the light, out of the blue, "No," Clay muttered most decisively as, deeply wistful, the preacher determined that to lie down among shadows again would be a real defilement of the memory of his first and possibly only time to love. Feeling so, he left the lamp burning and returned to bed, ready. His cock was throbbing and risen to full stand.

Plumping a couple of pillows and propping up his head with them, Clay's brown eyes sparkled brightly in the light. He lay stretched out on the bed with his legs splayed wide, scrutinizing his slow maneuverings of the hand he employed to dress his thick standing member with petroleum jelly. Lazily, his other hand lay at rest on the broad rolling plain of hard muscle beneath the taut honey-gold skin spanning his hairy chest. Its thumb casually traipsed, boundary to boundary, the breadth of one of the nipples that lay there much resembling a bright copper penny. Much farther down the broad-chested man's body deep his bronze hued erection acquired a gleam all its own in the light after a thorough application of lubricant.

More and more of Clay's rather unwillingly entertained apprehensions over what was to come with morning fell in temporary collapse. They fell asunder as other thoughts erected themselves once he'd set his big, firmly clasped hand traveling up and down the length of the well-oiled root of his manhood.

As that same unrelenting hand's sweep shepherded a loud gaggle of anxious meditations elsewhere, every new smear of pleasure that its movement wrought issued a souvenir of the short time prior within which he and Harlan had at last truly found one another. Each piece of that memory was laid on a stockpile already a hundred dreams high.

A deep moan softly slipped from Clay's parted lips. The lids of his eyes had become heavily weighted down by carnal inebriation. Distant in his mind, Joyce lived nowhere in his remembrance that night as he continued gaze between his fidgety legs, mesmerized by the motion of his hand and the past ....

Without a doubt, Clay Adderly was internally built every bit as much a man of virile inclination and drive as the underlying fleshly prowess his robust and athletic physique hinted at. Be that as it may, should he want to stray, ordainment allowed the young minister none of the excuses other men might employ to set aside their failings. Through holy rite he'd been sworn a soldier and pressed into the service of an army which wielded Bibles, not guns, on the battlefield.

He genuinely strove to prove faithful in all things per the code of that calling even if it meant the denial of his flesh. In sincere accordance with aims as honorable as this, Clay forged an earnest battle. Although full-faced self-confrontations made him uneasily conscious of himself and his hidden longings, the diligent young preacher skirmished honestly against the draw of anything that might cause him to give in to indisputably real urges and stray from the path of conduct that befitted his calling.

Meaning to seek refuge from a life of solitary burning per Good Book recommendation, Clay had even gone so far as to choose marriage. Not so much because he wanted to but at least because he believed he could.

Yet the awful truth was that even if he'd left himself to burn alone it would never have been for a woman.

Through the years since college, until Harlan and that fateful night, Clay had resolutely forced the vigorous exercise of the rituals of belief before himself, like blinders, to screen the outer edges of his easily drawn vision. Most determinedly, he'd endeavored to prohibit the line of his sight from straying off the narrow way he'd been commanded to walk. It was a grave misstep to wander into the mire of longing and set aside the faith for other fulfillment. Quite some time before, while a student at divinity school, Clay had struggled to harden himself to unsuppressible voices.

Just barely twenty during his first days of religious study, if Clay's heart could have been laid open like a book no one perusing its pages would have found dark turns in the story written there. Through his faith, a true kind, there was no epic inscribing of vengeful contemplation there; no unfoldings of desire that inclined him to lay hold of anything not rightfully his own; no vignettes of his delight in the crafting of falsehood.

Yet a man's actions with respect to other matters, especially those of the heart, he found weren't as easy to decide upon. In his private deliberations of one specific grey area of morality Clay's personal opinion challenged the wrong perceived in it and it's unacceptability by those in the church and in the street although he'd been strictly taught the physical expression of homosexuality was sin.

Not only had he been wrestling with the matter of physical expressions of the heart's desire. Even though a minister, for quite some time and of course for his own reasons, Clay had yet to reconcile in his mind the genuine fairness of it. His faith, a method of living which encouraged honesty denied an honest man, no matter how unsatisfied, the freedom to heed basic and simple yearnings of the heart. At any rate, in spite of his feeling on the issue, he conceded to doctrine and to what he longed to trust were wiser, higher minds. Though he could not bridle his thoughts, the young minister kept his silence and forced the yoke of obedience to church upon his shoulders of his own volition. Far more perfunctorily, Clay set a like example as a husband.

Meaning to keep himself centered in the right lane of the straight and narrow way, Clay Adderly forsook temptations for adventure and plodded through acts of sexual congress solely with his wife. Until Harlan, Clay had wholeheartedly managed to follow all that had been ingrained in him as right and good -- and to believe himself content in the doing....

There wasn't a thing at all boyish or masculine about Joyce Adderly's slender, small-breasted body. It was merely that her practical, unaffected demeanor's expression made it appear not imposingly feminine in kind. On their wedding night, it was mostly this saving grace that had enabled Clay, an anxious but reluctant twenty-four-year-old bridegroom who'd never been with a woman before, to tether his mind somewhere else and go about taking on the physical and ritual duties of a husband.

Yet sex had never become an issue in the marriage. Joyce was to all appearance quite contentedly given to wifely concerns as regarded Clay's ministry and their home. Before and since their marriage she'd never communicated a need for -- or for that matter -- an interest in things of sensual substance. Clay had sensed this early on. For reasons that might have made another man reconsider had he felt aware of the same, it had made it easy for the young minister to ask her to marry.

After their wedding, with time, the green preacher and husband grew used to having a female form at his side through his nights and days despite his underlying but unarticulated contrary desires. And with time it came to amaze him how the pretty woman he'd wed for all the wrong reasons had turned out to be his friend. She'd proved it most by being his shoulder to lean on when both his parents lost their lives in a car crash barely a year after they'd married. She went on to prove it even more so by willingly working with him and looking to his interests.

An essentially bright woman, as well as being his sounding board, she also provided him with the best of her counsel which he often took. But never in the four years since their wedding day had it been within Clay to come to Joyce in the night for fulfillment in a romantic sense....

As an aside ... not every female member of Clay's large Philadelphia congregation maintained a fixed focus on Bible study and prayer. In moments of distraction by the warm, somewhat brooding brown eyes set like shining gems in their pastor's handsome face, the minds of many women wandered. Intent female eyes often noted the potent appearance of his large frame and the assured, seductively bullish manner with which he moved about in their midst.

With knowing little laughs, the more vociferous church gossips among these women whispered veiled speculative commentary regarding the good-looking young preacher's sexual talents. They ultimately were led to presume, by what they saw, that the sex life he and his pretty wife shared must have somehow been well above the norm. Speaking but not knowing, they gave no consideration at all to good lovemaking's dependence on the soundness of the desire found on both sides of the bed.

Fact was that for all his virility, the young preacher only slid his muscular body to his wife's side of the bed when the basic, functional urge to jettison seed he'd carried too long would coax his sex alive and no longer allow itself either to be set aside or afford him sleep. Though never intentionally rough with Joyce by manner or method, Clay was clumsy by way of being so practical in purpose. Always mannered, he'd wait in the dark to determine Joyce's disposition to the gentle placement of his hand on her slim thigh. Once aware of a gentle nudge of her elbow, her unspoken issue of consent, he'd modestly undo the fly of his night things, lay on her and fit himself in her quickly then pull away once he'd achieved the aim of the swift, rabbitlike jabs he made between her legs -- an ejaculation.

In her own way, prim Joyce was offhandedly just as utilitarian in sexual matters. She'd feel Clay turn her way in the dark and in anticipation of his intention she'd cooperatively draw up her nightgown's hem and spread herself open with her fingers to facilitate his entry. Then, she'd lie quiet beneath her man's ramming bulk with wifely patience, demanding neither kisses nor fondling as Clay sought to satisfy his need. She never once questioned her husband's stops and starts, as he'd go soft inside her or the several times it would require the jerky motion of his hand on himself to help him finish. Once done, certainly ladylike and efficient in matters of hygiene, she'd immediately flit away to wash herself.

Clay invariably would quietly exit to the bath directly on her return to bed, not so much with the intention to make himself clean. Never fully satisfied in mind or body, he'd search his soul almost as routinely as he'd soaped his groin and pendulous genitals. Standing at the ancient pedestaled sink in the bath, as always Clay was forced to confront his replicate, opposite himself. Perpetually hungering for more than Clay had so far found, the man in the mirror never stopped sending an intent gaze the young preacher's way from inside the mirror beyond the hot running water's rising fog.

Clay was a black man and after all it was Nineteen-sixty-four. Wanting a rightful allowance of equal privilege that duly demonstrated the insignificance of a skin's hue was an imperative sought by everyone of color at the time. But there was the rub. Clay was covetous of something even bigger -- real freedom. He didn't want to be doled out just the liberty to ride buses or run banks, buy houses in the suburbs.

He hankered for freedom that swept a clear path for honesty; freedom tailored so as to allow honest men free choice to live their lives without reprimand or worry from others ignorant of their ways. Yet for all the shine his idealism might have put on this private picture of freedom, despite his formidable size and stature, the man of muscle and bone standing on the mirror's real side had little liking for trouble.

This seemed odd even to himself sometimes, there being no match-up in his force of conviction about the issue despite the confrontation it might mean. He'd taken on other other issues just as unacceptable to some -- race and religion as a start. Yet on the other hand, Clay saw it as understandable. It was better to be a black man that at least some small part of the world would be willing to know than be a man of any color wanted to be known by none at all because of where he was known to sleep.

Accordingly, the young preacher found himself strongly disinclined to relinquish the safety of a potentially easier ride through life on the currents within the straits of conventionality. All things considered, it seemed to him that he and Joyce had a happy enough unspoken arrangement. Neither had yet put qualitative questions or requirements to the other. Maybe that wasn't half bad he'd thought ....

As Clay lay alone as the slow rise and fall of his hand trailed his greasy fingers the impressive length of his rigid dick. Exasperation almost crept in on his enjoyment of this small pleasure. He'd begun to wondering what it would be like to be on his own, to be free to avail himself of touch when he pleased, with whom he pleased. It being his first time to be alone in four years, he realize what a long, long time had passed since the last time he lay alone as he did then, exploring the possibilities of touch in solitude.

Masturbation, such a simple thing, had always been a surreptitiously administered regimen for allaying the recurring fevers of youth that rose in him during adolescence. Through privacy having become even more a rarefied gift once he'd left home and set up lodging within one of the small dorms at college, he'd generally found himself forced to curtail the exercise during his nights and days ....

Anxious to succeed in fulfilling his devout parents' expectations of him from the start after he'd enrolled as a freshman at the Bible college he'd attended in the heart of the mid-west, nineteen-year-old Clay Adderly had immersed himself solely in the study of theology -- per duty, and football -- per allowable pleasure.

During his first three years there, the good-looking and bright student excelled as he worked diligently and without great problem toward a degree with lofty hopes of making both his parents proud by ultimately following in his father William's footsteps. When at last there lay just a year and half ahead of him, confusion fell in beside him and matched his every stride. The home stretch of his race suddenly began to be piled high with obstacles.

Quite a healthy, physically normal young man, none of the accouterments of a male nature had been excluded Clay. Though he'd staunchly tried to apply himself only to study, his young mind proved extremely fertile ground for thoughts of sex and naturally love. In just a little time, Clay began to be robbed of the ease with which he'd previously run the academic gamut. Although he'd gotten on quite well with the other young students attending the all male seminary, he'd constantly experienced an underlying sense of loneliness and the want of a good friend. Someone who could be a confidant -- someone special.

Despite having generally kept his eyes forced front and center in and out of class, attraction and arousal were difficult thing to quash in the gymnasium's locker room after football practice. In the showers varied views on the spectrum of masculinity in its prime were presented daily by his unclothed, unwitting academic associates. Never farther away than the corner of an eye, there was too much male attraction about to be avoided without making himself obvious.

Some of the noisy drove of other young men he so often found himself in the midst of were tall, some short. Some were slender built, then again, others husky, some quite hairy. All were as varyingly attractive and different one from the other in personal makeup as the sizes and weights of their contrastingly dissimilar limbs and sexual parts.

Clay's taste in men, as far as which ones aroused him were concerned, was naturally diverse since he'd never slept with one despite his conscious awareness of where his feelings drew him. He secretly enjoyed all men, long-legged or short, lean and narrow-assed or husky and wide. Sometimes Clay found stirring evoked in himself merely by the set of one man's chin, the posture of another's mouth as he paused for serious thought, the charming manner in which some young man's nose might crinkle when he'd laughed. On occasion, all it took was the heft of a man's hand to peak Clay's curiosity and cause heat to rise inside him and set him wondering about the manner of its touch.

In any case, Clay had all along been content with just being one of the guys. Such revealing sights as found in the locker room could have proved particularly menacing to the sense of security of one who was naturally drawn by them yet never once had his cock rose to betray him during those first three years. But eventually, a door to knowledge was opened to him.

Clay's severance of his ties to his ignorance of men came about very late one night, around two in the morning, just a week or so prior to the third year student's return home for spring break. Occasional snores and murmurings of the other men asleep around him could be heard in the dorm. Attempting to lie as quiet as possible, Clay had been restlessly squirming in a lower bunk. By then, some time had passed since he'd, at first almost absentmindedly, begun to toy with his dick.

He hadn't specifically intended to, but initially finding he rather enjoyed the mildly titillating sensations that the easy, hedonistic play of his hand had evoked he began a private little game beneath the blanket to offset his boredom. He'd wondered if he could keep himself on the knife edge of the pleasure he felt and not come.

Although the warning had been posed as a suggestion and veiled in generalities when put to them by their counselors, the issue of masturbation had been a matter the school's young male alumni had quite quickly and intentionally been led to understand as being a practice not particularly acceptable for those seeking to bear the Word. Yet, that night Clay had thought that, "As long as nobody knows, maybe just this one time...," there'd be no harm in what he was doing, that it would be all right as long as he stuck to his intention to stop before he shot. Having forgotten because he'd abstained so long, the muscular young student marveled at how every motion of his hand supplied stoked the fire low in his belly. But, in time, he'd lain frowning and full of silent self-chastisements when fully ablaze with heat he'd become unable to leave off the game.

A resultant brawl between angels and demons unfolded in the young theologian's head. In a schizoid sortie with guilt, his own lustful thoughts came under assault by the stern haunting dictum of theological mentors. Their imprint on his conscience magnified the viewing screen for his thought while reflecting stilted regard for human exercises, even acts in final analysis seemingly as harmless and simple of sorts as Onan's. The young confused student, suddenly feeling ashamed, attempted a leap to the high road to thus leave his seed and his purity unspent.

When he'd begun to touch himself Clay had believed abandonment of the prolonged self-subjected teasing of his sex along with all thoughts accompanying it would be no problem. Another erroneous thought on his part had been that a final capitulation to sleep also simply meant the withdrawal of his hand from the crux his hard, sweaty thighs. At last, stop Clay did but his loins, stressed and sore, would allow no such simple recourse -- or sleep -- for long. Nagging insidiously, an ache emanated from Clay's sweaty groin and tight, sore nuts and plagued the tense-bodied young student to hastily apply the remedy he knew well. But valiantly, he'd forced his attention and his hand away from its call for a time.

When the insistent itch for release had become absolutely unbearable Clay gave in to his body. He'd snatched a towel off the back of a wooden chair kept close at bedside. Draping it on his arm, before himself, to hide the lift in one loose leg of his pajamas once he'd risen, he stealthily exited the dorm for the showers meaning, wrong or right, to finish what he'd started. But, once again relenting in intention with a sudden burst of zealot's will after he'd gotten there, Clay swiftly stripped off his pajamas and entered one of the double stalls. Resolutely, he turned the shower head's single valve to the cold position with a hard twist of his wrist and thrust himself beneath the spray....

1964 - Part 5

Solemnly whispered, came the wise insight, "If only that was the way to get beyond it," from someone standing directly behind Clay just as the rush of ice cold cascading water had begun pummeling his broad back. Startled and embarrassed, Clay spun around. His hard-on, which had yet to be dampened by the cold rush of water, swung into full view. Mortified yet agile of foot, he found a handhold before nearly slipping on the stall floor's wet white tiles and quickly found his balance though not his composure.

"Easy, Adderly -- easy," Dan Coleman whispered. There was something so obviously unjudgmental in the face of the newly arrived ruddy-cheeked freshman who stood there facing him that Clay instantaneously lost some of his chagrin. Dan, a sandy-haired young Iowan, had moved into the seminary dorm at the beginning of the semester. "There's not a soul here but me and you." Trying to comfort the flustered, good-looking burly young black man before him, the short, easygoing youth smiled understandingly at the nervous look Clay shot his way. "Don't worry," he said, "I'm not the kind to run around with stories."

"I was just --," Clay began.

"Look, I said you don't have to worry about it. There's nothing to explain." The square-shouldered young man's head all at once dropped shyly bringing Clay's attention to the protrusion at the front of the thick towel wrapped around his hips. Then, timid himself in the admission, "You can see that I know exactly how it is," he said.

Yet bravely enough, Dan looked up at Clay again. This time directly into the deep brown eyes of the muscular young black man still standing naked and aroused inside the shower stall. Slowly, Dan undid the towel and let it fall off the ends of his fingers to the floor completely leaving unmasked his own emblem of like need before he entered too.

Dan moved forward; just close enough for cold droplets of the spray deflected by Clay's broad shoulders to begin spattering like the flecks of copper on the pale white rise of his chest. "Come on," he said, solicitous of his fellow student's common sense, when he plunged all the way into the chilly spray. His hard dick, a short pink spike, grazed Clay's thick hairy thigh as gingerly, he reached around Clay's large shivering form and gave the control valve a quick twist in the opposite direction, well past the warm mark. "Go a little easy on yourself. There's enough out there to beat you down that nothing can be done about," he'd continued. "Even though we're to set our minds to rise to the heights of angels, my God man remember, all we are is flesh and bone."

Dan, seemingly speaking as much to himself as to Clay, fell silent as though closely considering the thing he'd just said. But quite abruptly, he took a bold step forward that brought the upraised head of Clay's swollen sex against the heavy frost of pale, wiry hair covering his groin. Clay, just as abruptly, backed away. The chance he'd yearned for had just jumped out at him like a jack-in-the-box and left him too unnerved to avail himself of it.

There was powerful mesmerism in Dan's whispered assurance, "It's okay."

The farm boy from Iowa understood what Clay needed as well as his fear to ask for it.

Momentarily the young black novice theologian conjectured that "it's okay" might well have been the literal translation of the very words the serpent uttered at man's beginning in Eden. Somehow Clay couldn't focus on that or any notion for long. In an instant the sum total of his already scant resistance had given way. He bestowed no more thought to serpents or judgment once Dan's slowly extended hand had gently taken hold of his cockhead.

In turn Clay reciprocated, offering no resistance, when his dormmate's free hand clasped his wrist and drew his hand toward the dripping wet wedge of sand-gold pubic hair in his own crotch. Willingly, he received the glowing pink staff that jutted out stiff at the apex of the freshman's short, sturdy slightly bowed legs as it slipped into the loose circle of his finger. Clay made no comparisons of their dick sizes but marveled at how warmly Dan's cock burned in his grasp.

"Yeah -- like that -- do it just like that," Dan gasped in a broken up whisper. His flint grey eyes closed as Clay's big fist churned about the head of his sex . Standing in the warm rain of spray that fell on them from the nozzle overhead, he let his flushed cheek fall on the warm gold skin of Clay's wide chest. With slow, unison motions, each continued stroking the other's cock.

The requirements of passion rose, demanding more than Clay knew how to ask for. In a short time it was the gleamy-eyed freshman who mused out loud, "Wow, it's kind of big but --" Scrapping the remainder of the comment, he at once let go of Clay's cock and snatched a bar of soap from a chrome holder on the wall. "We'll have to be quick," he whispered urgently. "Here, go ahead but soap me up good first."

Clay hadn't comprehended until Dan had firmly pressed the bar of soap into his palm and turned his back toward him. The Iowan's smaller hand instructively guided Clay's fingers into the warm cleft of his small smooth-skinned and milk white rear. Dan bent deeply at the waist to allow Clay better access for applying the lather.

Clay's closer inspection of the split in Dan's ass, caused his sex to leap for his belly all of its own volition, . For the first time in his life, with absolute fascination, he found himself beholding the wrinkled pout of another man's fundament. In time to come, while laboring to visualize the key for release as he lay over his wife, he'd use repetitions of it's recall to bring him to the boiling point. He'd come to remember, unfailingly, how beautiful he'd thought that sight and how incensing the feel of it had been to him under first scrutiny by his curious fingers.

Nervously poised on tiptoe like a dancer awaiting his cue, Dan somewhat less tall than Clay, had leaned back against the husky youth's bigger body for partial support. His short, thick legs strained and trembled as much as the hand he'd used to reach between his backside and Clay's belly. It trembled as he'd grasped Clay's dick mid-shaft to properly seat the dark, swollen head within the thoroughly soaped divide of his tail. As willing as he'd been eager, the young freshman had set his jaw and clamped his lips tight to stave off the natural reactionary gasp he knew was bound to burst forth from himself when the big man at his back, seeking sanctuary inside him, would begin pushing up into the tight envelopment of his ass.

From the start, the hurtful stretching of the seductive Iowan's pale ass had made itself unmistakable to Clay through Dan's rapid, ragged breaths although he'd fought hard to render his pain voiceless. "I'm sorry," Clay whispered hotly into Dan's ear. His acknowledgment had been sincere but he was overcome with need. "... so sorry," he'd again moaned apologetically to the trembling freshman. "I can't seem to help myself ... just can't stop now."

The warm coil of Clay's big arms tightened viselike about Dan's chest. Then, with a deep grunt he'd hoisted Dan clear of the floor, burning to penetrate him more deeply. Suspended in the air, the freshman's feet no longer made contact with the wet, white tile below and his splayed, muscular legs dangled puppetlike, flailing with urgency when Clay, holding him fast, had suddenly begun faster and deeper upward drives into his ass.

It wouldn't be long before Clay's claim on the comely freshman's pale ass would to end. Not many hurried, deep thrusts into the sweet grip of the tight channel in Dan's backside would be needed to swing open the floodgates inside the man desperately lunging into him. Clay staggered backward, holding Dan's burning body against himself with all his strength as his ass mashed against the cold tile on the wall. Gasping for breath, the ardently ambitious freshman in his arms by then was totally speared on the thick dark column of his sex and awkwardly churning his ivory pale backside to add to his taker's pleasure.

The press of one big hand against Dan's hard midriff kept the sandy-haired youth's pale ass jammed into Clay's groin. Incredulous at the high sensation each spike of his dark, unbending rod into the cream-colored orbs reaped and powerless to hold his peace in awe of it, Clay's mouth fell agape. Just in the nick of time he pressed his lips hard against the side of Dan's neck. He muted the keen howl that expressed the extreme of his sensation as he began free fall from the height his voracious lust for more and more of the clutch of Dan's tail had led him to. Bending Dan's trembling body with his, Clay slammed his thick sex into the sheathing of the freshman's tight ass one last time as an orgiastic sledgehammer blows knocked him nearly to his knees. Hunched and bent over Dan, the smooth contours of Clay's deep gold body resembled a large block of dark polished stone as he urgently embraced the willing young white man impaled on his sex. His powerful frame lurched each instant his distended member throbbed out a new cannon blast of his seed high up Dan's insides.

Fighting to control his gasping, Clay, half-dazed continued to tightly hold onto Dan until his penis finally went soft and was grudgingly expelled from the freshman's tail. Shakily, the large youth slowly lowered Dan to the floor.

The young freshman spun about panting, eyes on fire. His strong chest was rising and falling just as hard Clay's. "Now me ... turn around for me," he whispered urgently.

No questions outstanding in his glistening eyes, Clay mutely obeyed. Dan rested his hands on Clay's waist and he at once acquiesced to their guidance by slowly turning around. Subsequently, the gentle slide of the bar of soap up and down the divide of his heavily muscled buttocks began.

Dan tutored Clay in whispers, "Lean forward and bend your knees some." Then, pressing firmly downward on his tall pupil's broad shoulders from behind, "Yeah that's it ... that's it ...," the eager freshman said, "Squat down some more ...."

It being that throughout his upbringing his religious parent's had been a closemouthed sort as to the subject, Clay knew little of sex of any kind, in any form, other than his own childishly askew assumptions regarding the matter while a boy.

That accrual of his sexual knowledge had been garnered by the same manner of osmosis as most children's -- inadvertently from television and movies, surreptitiously from fragments of adult conversations. Of course, the lion's share was erroneously gathered from just as misinformed young friends, especially other boys, who could only properly school him in all the wrong words for male and female anatomy.

Though somewhat better advised during his teens, the like of such sketchy secondhand detail remained all he'd had to fill in the gaps for himself once the mechanics of the issue became better established. All his acquired data of course referred to the usually known history and workings of sex -- boy meets girl -- more or less.

Yet, the thing which provoked Clay's deepest though most sensibly undeclared interest was the innocent enough inquiry regarding what happened if a boy happened to meet boy. He remembered only one in-depth mention of this issue which had at last given him an inkling that it was indeed possible for men to be together.

During a summer holiday gathering, a couple of his uncle's relived escapades from their army days in a far corner of the Adderly's backyard. Each of the grey-haired brothers stood sipping whiskey from a paper cup as one puffed on a fat cigar, assuming all the while their twelve-year-old nephew and the rest of the young ones at the family picnic to be off at play and out of earshot.

Clay passing on the opposite side of a high fence had heard familiar voices near. Traditional in regard to time and place, the rural south, "grown folks talk" was something strictly forbidden to children's scrutiny. Clay knew this but stopped to listen even though he knew a whipping would be coming if he was caught. Grown-up voices, cautiously lowered in tone, those of Clay's uncles Gilbert and John, were the irresistible lure that had drawn the boy to creep near. Initially at some distance, he'd no clue as to what they were actually talking about.

"Well sir, seems they went and sent the lot of us from where they had us stationed to someplace way out in the pine woods to bivouac for ten days or so. Now, Murphy was our platoon leader. We used to call him Bulldog behind his back," the boy had heard when he'd crept nearer. "Great big ol' burly man too believe you me. I'd have sworn that big bruiser was damn near tough as nails and would have called anybody a liar said he wasn't. Tough, I say. When he spoke there was no doubt about whether you'd be listenin' or not.

"Then first night out, lookin' for a spot to take a leak right quick, I heard a funny sound, like a bear or somethin' gruntin and rootin' round out there in the dark. ... Well sir, that's just how I came up on em. There was both of em in the moonlight, naked as jay birds Gilbert. Murphy was on his back with his big ol' self laid on the ground, legs drawed up and heels just dancin' in the air. This new recruit was hunched over him and buckin' like a horse. Fella had his root all the way up Sarge's rump and was puttin' it to him somethin' crazy out there in the tall grass not ten yards outside the camp ... and then ..."

Gasps accompanied the nasty snickering between them as the elder of the

two brothers, Uncle John, sneeringly continued his narration of a certain young Corporal Dinwitty's and Drill Sergeant Murphy's unfortunate discovery while out on maneuvers. Young Clay, who'd been privy to the tale's relation merely by advantage of his hiding place on the opposite side of a high redwood fence, had been swiftly and thoroughly taught the general low appraisal of such a thing.

Nonetheless, despite the apparently negative view in the telling of it, this seemingly vast body of knowledge which had accidentally been spilled into Clay's awareness through that gap in the fence stoked the boy's privately kept wondering further. As he'd continued to grow, seen and unseen manifestations of normal male libido made him more and more aware of himself and as well, other boys. Wondering still, he'd been full of unanswered questions by the time he'd arrived at college. He'd neither known nor been fully able to imagine the familiarity of the design of the comfort found in another man's arms nor the like of lying abed with a male as though a compatriot, close and ardent ... but he'd begun to learn ...

Using a shower rail as his handhold for support, Clay assumed a hunkered stance as Dan moved in on him from behind.

Eager for his turn at pleasure, the eager young freshman anxiously ground his firm, pale belly against the gold and tremulous rise of Clay's tail.

Clay steadied himself further to accept Dan's weight as he felt him begin to fold his body over his. Unsure of what degree of pain or pleasure was about to come, the athlete's heart inside the virgin theologian was racing full throttle.

Dan lifted himself a little on the balls of his feet. His hurried and fumbling fingers slipped the hot, swollen head of his short fat dick into the rift in broad-backed Clay's rear and brought it in line.

Clay's big body shuddered as he uncontrollably uttered a soft, low whimper at the rhythmical nudges he felt against the small opening in his tail.

Expeditiously, Dan gripped Clay's shoulders tightly and himself trembled when the muscular youth bent before him again shuddered violently as the tight ring of muscle buried in the rise of his ass was first pierced. The freshman sighed ecstatically for want of more of the feeling, stilling himself to bask in the tantalizing warmth that was suddenly all around the tumid head of his manhood. Dan's respite lasted for merely a short chain of elapsing seconds. He quickly abandoned his lingering and proceeded all the way inside Clay with a steady, slow push of his groin.

As far in as he could get in the depths of the bigger man's tail, the young Iowan didn't allow rare pleasures to rest as his alone. He snaked a pale arm under Clay's bent body and reached with spread fingers for his sex. Soft and dangling, Clay's cock swung into Dan's open, searching hand as the two of them began to move together. As warm water continued falling over their stooped forms pumping forms, Dan tantalizingly rolled the head of it tenderly in his soapy fingertips once he'd made the capture. Quickly, it began stiffening in response to his touch. Dan's fingers left off teasing and he seriously set to energetically pumping the thick, elongated mass with his small fist once it was fully erect. Fast falling in synch, his jabs into Clay's backside caught the cadence of his plunging hand.

Despite the high and dizzying elevation to which they and their passion had climbed, the coupled novitiates maintained the commitment to silence and clamped their mouths shut. Knowing the grave danger in discovery, they still endeavored to minimize their disruption of the quiet inside the empty shower room. Except for the reverberated fiery blasts of hastily coursing air in and out of their nostrils, the only noticeable sound to be heard outside in the corridor was that of falling water.

The thick, deep brown rod of firmed manflesh grasped by Dan's pale hand had grown hard as a staff of Mpingo wood. Erratically, it pulsed once or twice as he'd held on tightly. Then came a sudden urgent squeeze on his own sex as its warm surroundings spasmodically began to contract. Working Clay's sex furiously with his hand because he desperately meant them to meet same time, same place, somewhere high in orgasmic nirvana, Dan too hurried toward its gates. His taut belly hooked and connected with hard, fast slaps against Clay's backside. Abruptly, within the rush, his own sex began spouting warm jets of his seed into the well of sensation from which he'd drawn.

An instant later, the rippling sea of musculature on Clay's bent back froze over. Though each and every clenched muscle found a pose all its own beneath the gold veneer of the satiny skin there, each knit and combined with the rest in a broad, detailed relief which surely and succinctly portrayed man during his most profoundly beautiful moment -- the ebullient unfoldings of culmination at an ardent striving's end.

Throb by throb, another copious flow of Clays pearly seed burst forth and dribbled off the end of his pulsing bronze-hued manhood. Every delivery was spun out in short, gleaming crystalline chains that intermittently broke as they'd shone in the light from overhead, immediately lost to sight once they'd landed on the white tile between Clay's parted feet. So camouflaged, his issue ran into the drain with the spray of water that streamed down from the shower head ....

The vision of his classmate instantly dissolved behind the young preacher's eyes. The reality of Harlan's want of him was again upon Clay as he lay there threading his tight fist with his sex. All at once a view of future love and joy seemingly too bright to be obscured by gauzy reminiscence, leapt from behind Clay's reveries of dead and bygone time and appeared clear as day within his eyes again. It usurped his faded visions of the few resulting brief encounters he had with Dan. Flashes of heat -- exquisite heat -- lapped at his belly making him eager for the climb toward Harlan's naked lithe form; suddenly all there was to be seen in the moment's dreamscape. "Youngblood," he suddenly commanded in loud summons in the empty room as urgency rushed overran him and his big body spastically jerked on the bed. "Ooh ... youngblood!" This time he almost screamed for Harlan as he furiously plunged his tightened fist up and down the length of his sex. Each hammer of his fist fell with a thud onto the thick pad of coarse, black hair that dressed the joining of his knotted thighs. The drives of his hand landed hard enough to cause the readied and tightly contracted mass of his scrotum to jiggle with each hit.

The young preacher was ready indeed. A complete occurrence wholly inside a millisecond, Clay's sweaty body bridged the length of the bed in a tremulous, swaying arch of tight muscle as he desperately dug his heels down into the mattress as if further spurring on the uproar of sensations carrying him off. Nearly every part and piece in the span of his straining and primed visible flesh was clearly defined on his frame when he cried out for Harlan one last time. Geyserlike, expulsions of the big man's semen shot high up into the air above him and then plopped down again in sticky drops that wet the hairs on his heaving chest and belly like warm, spattering rain.

The last pennies of physical passion spent, Clay's sweaty ass crashed back down onto the bed as a strange, groggy and bewildered moan seeped out of the handsome preacher's lips. The lids of his slowly closing eyes were the curtain fall on the lonesome man's act of yearning. Eyes fully closed to the bare stage his empty room made, Clay quickly surrendered to the enticements of deep, dreamless sleep and lay for the rest of the night covered only by soft lamplight ....

1964 - Part 6

A few minutes ahead of five that next afternoon as dusk grew, Clay Adderly's front door upended an eternity of waiting for Harlan with a welcoming inward swing. Breath steamy, the youth hurried inside the house from the cold bearing a grin and elation, both of which beamed bright in contrast to the dreary leavings of late day outside. Again face to face but this time no longer shepherd and one of the fold, new lovers instead, the tall, lean teak-skinned youth and the big framed young preacher composed quite a comely pair.

Though such a simple thing, no other gift was as great to either as the other's nearness. Both silently rejoiced, gratified. Neither Harlan nor Clay uttered a single word or even moved as just for them time kindly stretched the next minute or so thin, piece by piece, before stealing by.

The city and its workings, all just outside the thick wooden door at Harlan's back, were all at once vague and distanced in the handsome youth's awareness. Clay's firm, flat-handed shove on the heavy door had cleanly cut off the lean, newly made man before him from Philadelphia's stoic face, the chilly weather and all else in the outside world with a dull thud.

Though he and Clay had been separated not even a day's worth of hours, to the youngest of these two new lovers the expanse of the time so far elapsed between the prior night and then was tantamount to days, maybe even weeks. Thus having come across a seeming abyss, naturally, the tall youth's light eyes were not only full of love whetted keen by time and distance but questions too. He was especially eager for the answer to the greatest among them but didn't quite know how to ask and had to think on it in silence for a moment or two. Finally, no other knowledge essential to him but this, shy, Harlan tested Clay's eyes and stumbled on the words, "Rev, I was kind of wonderin' whether ... I mean ..." Harlan looked away to shyly complete the question. "Did you miss me?" he asked.

Deeply taken by the charm of Harlan's boyish uncertainty, so clearly real and evident, the big-boned, honey-colored man at first playfully feigned surprise but then murmured quite seriously, "Good God, youngblood how could you think for a minute I didn't?" Clay reached out and reassuringly clamped Harlan's shoulder with a big hand. "There's no way for me to tell you even the half of it," he sighed, shaking his head incredulously as though attempting to shake the cobwebs of ignorance for words away. "Why, if I was to sit myself down right now and start doin' the necessary figurin' up of all that's inside me, counted up, the feelin's would come to a sight more than just my missin' you.

"I've been hungerin' for you all through the day, in ways so big and so different, I'd need a month of Sundays to make it all plain. One minute there'd come somethin' like an achin' in my hands that I knew there'd be no healin' for til you were here and I could have another feel of you. Very next thing, my eyes would commence ramblin' about like I was a lost child lookin', if for nothin' else, just the ease in some reminder of the last look I had of you so it wouldn't seem like I was so far from home." The big man's handsome face colored up when he shyly added, "And, well you know -- everything -- about last night keeps comin' cross my mind. Even so, it still comes to more than just a cravin' to be up on you. My need's been deeper than that -- sure nough."

"For all of today I've had as much of a soul deep burnin' to have you near me as I've had for a drink of water or my next breath of air."

Harlan marveled at what he heard and whispered,"Really?".

The oath was unquestionably reavowed inside the solemn attitude of Clay's brown eyes. "Oh yeah ... really," Clay confirmed, nodding earnestly as he slowly drew Harlan all the way to himself in the little vestibule. The well-built preacher nuzzled his returned companion's clean black hair, sucking in the wonderful smell of man and youth on him as he grinned contentedly knowing his new love, his true love was harbored safe and secure inside his arms. "But let me tell you somethin' -- you know, there's more than water and air I feel a need for right now," the velvet rumble of the big man's softly made known in Harlan's ear. "All of a sudden a mighty powerful yearnin' for a taste of sweet brown sugar's come on me too. Can you see your way clear to servin' up a little ... please sir?"

Responding with speed, Harlan pressed his trim build harder into Clay's. "Here, take all you want," the youth accommodatingly murmured as he offered his mouth to Clay.

The grasp of Harlan's gloved hand on the books he carried slackened and, one by one, they slipped then fell away from him as easily as his cares. Each landed dully on the entryway's sisal mat. With equally as little compunction, the youth let loose the reins on the impatient amorousness he'd ridden on through the day and began, despite preliminary shyness, an eager retest of every ridge and hollow of the preacher's solid outer anatomy with his flattened palms. Nonetheless, despite all the force with which his lean, hard belly strained against Clay's, it seemed at that moment, to Harlan, they'd never be close enough....

Two desires, one to quest the high peaks of closeness again, the other to become good friends with the truth were born and risen with Harlan early that morning at seven. Responding to his mother's unwitting felony by way of her relentless call from the bottom of the stairs, he'd reluctantly pried his tan eyes ajar in irritated silence at being robbed of a last twilight vision of Clay. Nonetheless, that's when he'd begun to think of Clay all over again and the roots of love's principles began to bore into his consciousness. Since his chance had obviously come, longings to love well and love deep, grew as rightfully foliate in Harlan's vision as the little informed young lover's aspiration to better acquaint himself with choicer words of love and deeper wisdom in the ways of connection.

To the eye, sparks of this true revival were scant in evidence as, sleepy Harlan trudged to the bath and in a daze stepped beneath the shower's spray. Even if low voltage, the aura of a new frame of mind was surely cloaking him. As his light brown eyes gathered life and light, finally opening all the way in acceptance of the coming day, his intent did not wash away. Inside the chrysalis it had cast around him he'd quite contentedly jostled about during the long bus ride north to school.

As the day had worn on Harlan, too distracted to effect proper studiousness because of his extracurricular memory's frequent preemptions, had wandered class to class through a wishful mire of luxurious ponderings of love, sex and his future. The tally of meaningful scholastic effort times time spent totaled his day at school as a mere sojourn.

As in the aftermath of the rites of passage for many, there was the radiance of a brand new being all about the handsome youth's smiling face that shone too bright to hide. However, the whole wonderful thing beginning to seem almost surreal, he found himself unable not to question whether the night just passed had truly been a real occurrence or just illusion.

Grateful to be alone at lunch to ponder it, Harlan at last permitted the very private bundle of thoughts linked to the prior evening's events to fall wide open inside his head. Yet, each time he'd done so, he found it immediately necessary to slam the cover shut on his meditations by reason of the physically stirring effect of their content on his blood. The reaping of even bits and pieces of memories planted all through the preceding night were more than enough seed for arousal.

Curatively speaking, all the remedies for killing a hard-on that he'd offhandedly gleaned in the locker room proved more comedic relief than reliable prescriptions. Intermittently hard-dicked and embarrassed throughout the day but nonetheless giddily amazed and secretly pleased at the strength with which the mere recall of lying in bed with Clay held sway over him, Harlan found himself unable to suppress boyish giggles at the state he was in.

Despite every trick he'd tried; clamping his bottom lip between his teeth as hard as was safe, holding his breath, even constructing macabre tableaus inside his head, nothing seemed to squelch the rapid flourish of erections that sprang up and bloomed any time -- and anywhere -- he happened to envision the preacher's bare body. This was evidence enough to lead one so young to finally surmise, it had all been more than real and that he wanted another taste of it ...

Shivering with eagerness and ecstatic to at last have and hold each other again, each of the young dreamers made himself warm at the fire of the other's ardor. The two of them stood merely pressed tight for a good while, too much in love to think of or fear discovery and too absorbed in their intimate examinations to be the least bit disturbed by the patter of rushing feet continually passing in the cold outside. Surely it was through luck, not clairvoyance of any kind, that the two new lovers correctly predicted neither harm nor danger would beset their secret celebration of one another that night.

Standing so close, eating the warmth of Clay's body and his hot, dry kisses, in the heat of the moment Harlan's dick thickened and went hard. Just as quickly his mind and will turned quite malleably plastic. So inclined to the follow the lead of his guide, the dreamy-eyed young man hastily coiled his strong arms round the preacher's broad back and unconditionally surrendered, offering himself with an impetuous whisper. "Teach me some more."

The tall youth's teacher, so big, so steady, gladly but shyly began to teasingly suck at his charge's full lower lip, ultimately drawing it betwixt the two of his with a slow, pensive pull. As he took possession of Harlan's mouth, his big hands boldly swooped down to cup, then knead, the firm muscle in the half-spheres of the handsome youth's slim tail end. The doing of that caused the even tighter press of the tall, leggy youth against the big man. Automatic masculine instincts set each to a studied slow chafing of his primed and swollen crotch against the other's.

Lesson by lesson, both started taking serious note of their trailing fingers' every discovery, alerting themselves of little things they did that appeared to please the other as self-schooling progressed. Neither of the pair of handsome young men learning the other's ways in the confines of the cramped classroom that the tiny foyer made could imagine anything more important from where he stood.

The more feverish Harlan's return on the preacher's investment of kisses grew, the more the turned-on youth mashed and ground the hard, aching knot of bound up sex between his legs against the mammoth lump risen at the front of Clay's paint stained khaki pants. His firm butt continued to clench then loosen in Clay's two-handed grasp as arousal spurred him to take initiative.

Harlan swung a long leg sideways, fitting one of the preacher's thick thighs between the two of his as he leaned into his body. The youth, bending his knees slightly and bearing down hard, began short, brisk slides of his aching crotch on the hard muscle atop the big man's thigh with jerky hooks of his gut.

Handsome honey-colored Clay was as much surprised as turned on by Harlan's growing show of ardor. "Mercy now youngblood, looks to me like I'd better get you the rest of the way inside real quick," he whispered huskily. The preacher shot out and hand swiftly pushed open the vestibule's inner door and began to draw the younger man holding onto him to the center of the living room. "Looks like we've got ourselves some powerful big business to tend to," he said in a knowing voice.

"Hold up a second," Clay abruptly instructed as he reached for Harlan who stood there in the middle of the floor, waiting ready and still. His golden man's big hands shoved Harlan's open jacket off his broad shoulders. Pinching the leather jacket's sleeves high at their fronts, Clay deftly drew the jacket straight down the youth's strong arms. Instantly released, it fell to the living room carpet, ignored.

Electric jolts of arousal, on his uncontrollable desire to view all the beauty hidden beneath, compelled the preacher's strong, thick fingers to fly along the vertical row of small buttons at the front of Harlan's heavy shirt. Each was speedily undone and the shirt, once flung open wide to set Harlan free, was as well cast to the floor after being removed.

An upward shove of the preacher's flat palm and spread fingers hiked Harlan's tee shirt high up his wide chest. Clay, with thorough care, guided the pink tip of his tongue across his lips to make them thoroughly wet just before bending to plunge his mouth against the nipple first exposed on the satin span of warm brown skin on Harlan's chest. He voraciously slid his mouth and darting tongue on and off one of the deep bronze hubs of energized nerve ends there to hungrily nourish the ripening lust inside himself by sucking at its tiny nub of a point. As Harlan gasped and squirmed in reaction, his feet commenced a quick-stepped dance of joy purely inspired by Clay's mouthing.

The bull-necked preacher straightened his bent back abruptly and laid claim on Harlan's mouth once more. The rise of their hearts' racing spiraled higher as this new kiss endured. Clay, in love, in heat and ready to do all things to please his love, tore his mouth off Harlan's.

"Goin' down youngblood," he intoned like a man bewitched as his eyes fell to Harlan's crotch. " Bout to get on the case just like a doctor," he uttered, throaty and incensed. Moving his lips yet closer to the youth's unquestionably attentive ear, "Headin' way, way down here," he whispered, gently rubbing the lump, hard as stone, at the junction of Harlan's legs. "Gonna see if somethin' can't be done to cool down all this hot blood in you."

Similar in abstract, thoughts of being dipped in the pool the day Clay had baptized him flashed across the aroused youth's mind the moment the big man seized him by the waist, hard, and bodily hauled him down onto the pale green sea of carpet under their feet. All in a flurry of Clay's big hands and the few following seconds, Harlan lay stretched out straight on the living room floor, pants undone and snatched down just past the middle of his thighs.

Still completely dressed, Clay quickly knelt over leggy young Harlan, straddling his knees. More alive and sex bent than he'd ever imagined possible for himself or any man, the big man slowly reached down for Harlan's cock, man-steel and heated under his touch, and clenched it in his hand. The young preacher contemplatively eyed it with slack-mouthed curiosity as the long, dark erect staff of manhood throbbed, sometimes twitched within his grasp.

The handsome preacher's broad, powerful shoulders shuddered as he slowly bent low, angling the thick black shaft of Harlan's cock toward his lips. It was then that he noticed a droplet, clear and gemlike, appear almost magically before his eyes atop the wide crown of the youth's sex. Clay bent his body the rest of the needed distance.

One lick, just one. That's all it took -- merely one light but tender swipe of his tongue made the little crystal bright jewel his.

Raising his head a second later, the salty, viscous droplet dissolving on his tongue tip, Clay again ponderously gazed at his slowly lifting and descending fist and at the dark, blunt headed man-flesh protruding from it. He passed his tremulous free hand between his legs, giving his own yet unbared and burning sex a squeeze as he made an intent study of the tiny glistening path of moisture marking his tongue's first trace on Harlan's dick.

Stretched out under him and anxious that he do it again, Harlan burrowed his ass deeper into the softness beneath himself and sultrily moaned up at him like a hungry nestling.

Hearing the call, Clay haltingly dropped his head for another taste. This time he let his dragging tongue set about a slower, more venturesome kind of wandering while he stanchioned the swollen flange on the tip of his whimpering young love's sex with the press of his full lips. The more the big man at work, all muscle and gold, sent his tongue traveling the more adept he grew for the task at hand. Again and again, he lapped round the circumference of the youth's throbbing cockhead, occasionally probing then mopping away more of the preorgasmic crystalline outpour from the tiny sensitive slit in the cap of the tower of flesh clasped tightly in his mouth. Incrementally, the stirrings in Harlan's body were deepening.

Though the ardent young preacher's tongue wagged slow and light, there was force enough in its action to prompt the jerky drift of Harlan's tensed ass off the rug. Quite readily, the youth offered up his dick, wanting all he could have of Clay's warm, wet mouth.

Duly noting the favorable responses his actions elicited, Clay set his tongue to whipping the tip end of Harlan's sex faster. His cheeks caved in as he sucked harder on the rigid flesh in his mouth. Rasping in the air above the preacher's rising and falling head, the rough, studish grunts and groans of a young man much delighted by his abandonment of self to pleasure ground out from Harlan's throat.

Eyes glazed and his countenance raw with rut, Harlan lifted his head to gaze down his taut, ridged gut and witness the production of the broadcast of the incredibly voluptuous emanations coming from between his legs. The youth clumsily propped himself up on one elbow to see more, fixing his gaze on the crown of Clay's head which bobbed in place over his crotch. Then all at once, his head thudded on the carpet as his flat midriff seized up, forcing out a small whimper out of him as agitatedly he began digging heels and fingers into the carpet while Clay attempted to fit more of his thick shaft inside his mouth.

A puppet to the tongue that flogged his dick, Harlan groaned out amazement from deep in his gut. "I didn't know there could be so many ways to feel so good ... so good. Ah!" he suddenly cried out as his lean body jerked again in response the next swipe at his tongue-lashed cockhead. "I just didn't know," he reiterated, dazed as he lay there. All his reactionary moans came as pure and sweet to ear as his face was to the eye. His pelvis continued to involuntarily buck as his long lean legs quivered.

Clay's head abruptly shot up and he sucked in a gutful of breath, allowing Harlan's sex to spring out of his mouth and stand and cool in the air. "Lay on your side," he hoarsely panted as he swiftly lay down to settled himself on his own.

A light caress of Harlan's hip guided his turn toward him. The big man sucked his thick middle finger into his mouth and extracted it, glistening wet with saliva, from the loose grasp of his lips. Holding the moistened finger stiff, the preacher hurriedly wedged his hand between Harlan's thighs and twisted his wrist, feeling for the tiny pouting hole not far beyond the youth's drawn up balls while his mouth eagerly reclaimed the his hard sex.

Small serpentine twists and bends of Harlan's agile body propelled him farther into the draw of Clay's suctioning mouth. The envelopment of overwhelming warmth was once more on him. "Mmh ... yeah," he grunted loudly, grabbing for Clay's hard shoulders as the big-handed man's moistened finger abruptly broke through and began slowly slipping up into his tight backside.

At its onset, Clay's finger struck a chord, resonant and incensing in its lascivious sensation. The trigger for that feeling lay in a particular place inside which Harlan had never before realized the existence of. Too young and too much a novice to be well-versed in names and quick descriptions, what he experienced at each flick of the preacher's stiff finger admittedly seemed odd but felt so good to the youth he instinctively and vigorously sought the advantage of double pleasure.

The sinewy youth clamped the top of Clay's head tightly with his fanned out fingers. Then, after each capture of another sweet reward at the end of a forward drive of his rod into the handsome preacher's waiting mouth, with sharp little grunts, the lissomely moving youth determinedly pushed his ass back against the hard fist which held Clay's thick, stiffened finger ready for another plunge up his tail. Its continued wiggling and prodding inside his butt drove him wilder by the thrust.

Further excited as well as enthralled by the urgent expression of power in the rise of Harlan's climbing passion, Clay took a more solid grip of the youth's slim, tensed ass and incrementally magnified the manipulations of his busy finger to stoke the fire higher. The veins in the preacher's thick neck rose and pulsed as the muscle in it set as he steeled himself to accept the heightening frenzy of Harlan's strong, urgent thrusts to his mouth. The rigid shaft of deep-shaded flesh rapidly sliding in then almost out of his mouth seemed to be hardening all the more.

As expected, since in such matters a man usually requires no special expertise other than merely being a man to judge, the preacher could tell from the intensity of his handsome young love's lustful delvings for rarefied pleasure inside his mouth what was soon to come. Securing him for the approaching storm of passion, Clay hugged Harlan's beautiful, hard brown thighs more tightly and stepped up the movement of his tongue.

Harlan was on fire. The youth, beginning to sweat and gasp, no longer could manage calm, mannered movement and, by then, had no wish to travel that far back to the beginning of the love they were making if he could have. Gritting his teeth, the thoroughly turned on young man growled like a young lion as he determinedly pitched his lower belly at Clay's face. Fragments of new feelings swept in on the waves of voluptuous in the rising tide of orgasm.

Clay made no attempt to distance himself from Harlan and his physical need although the eager, jolting delivery of hard manhood into his mouth, once or twice plunged too deep, had nearly caused him to choke. "Some more! I need it like that ... Like that some more! Hurry man! Hurry!," Harlan suddenly wailed. Helplessly and swiftly falling down into sensory chaos, the youth seized Clay's shoulders as he pumped his mouth with a fury.

"Oh -- I can't hold it back!" he yelled, straightaway grabbing the shaft of his throbbing dick then shoving as much as Clay could take into his mouth. "You've got me bustin' man! You ..." Further words escaped Harlan and a loud, stretched-out whoop took their place as the trembling fingers of one strong hand dug deep into Clay's shoulder hard. His lean legs jerked straight and quivered as the insides of his slim ass convulsively snatched at Clay's still jabbing finger.

Clay himself lay shuddering but kept a grasp on one of the youth's straining thighs. Though surely expected, the first spurt of Harlan's semen into his mouth gave the big man a start. Nevertheless, he swallowed each following issue as though being nursed. His relentless tongue caused Harlan to cry out and his hard body to lurch with every movement of it.

After some time, the preacher reluctantly permitted quieted Harlan's soft sex to slip from his lips, then rolled away to sit upright. Keeping silent, meaning not to disturb either the force of the exquisite bewitchment cast upon themselves or their shared sense of a rare peace just come in the room, he gazed at closed-eyed Harlan as he lay smiling contentedly, midriff bare, sex lying limp and long across a leg still wet from his mouth's work.

Slowly preparing to show himself and his own need to Harlan, Clay raised his strong arms and drew the worn, paint splotched sweatshirt he had on over his head. The brawny young preacher's thick black chest hair shone in the light and sheerly veiled the underlying play of rippling muscle as he tossed it aside. In a minute or two, shoes shucked off, socks shed, he rose to his feet and unfastened the belt cinching the waist of his loose work pants and unzipped his fly. Free in their speech, there in the quiet room his eyes' silent orations began to tell his young love more of the things he'd always wanted the chance to tell another man before. Clay left his gaze to rest on Harlan and pushed the pants and his boxer shorts past his hips. His cock sprang up, hard and throbbing.

Immensely enjoying the feel of the thick carpet against his bare ass Harlan stared up at the big, gold skinned man standing over him, turned on and hard. His own sex commenced a speedy revival, swelling as his curious gaze made a lazy journey up the insides of Clay's hairy calves and thighs to the pendulous seed sack wedged at the meeting of his powerful legs.

The comely brown youth paused for a brief look back at the night past as he once more came to look upon the hard, dark jut of meat which had so thoroughly effected his farewell to virginity. His stiffening dick lifted higher off his leg. His eyes rose too for another viewing of the thick planting of glistening, kinky hair covering Clay's flat, rock hard abdomen and wide chest. Harlan felt the feverish itch he'd just assumed allayed start all over again. But, of all he saw, the most arousing sight was the true and real desire for himself that he found in Clay's face.

Clay, once freed of the encumbrance of clothing, squatted at Harlan's feet. His thick sex stayed hard and bobbed and wagged straight out before him as, first, he methodically went about the removal of the boy's shoes and socks. One by one he tossed them into the growing pile of things strewn on the floor. As he rose off his haunches to stand again, holding the slim-legged chinos by their hems he drew them off as Harlan raised his long legs in accommodation.

"Now that I'm up lazy bones, I'll leave it to you to get that tee shirt off," he made plain in an affable tone. The handsome man's brown eyes were warm and alight with want as he looked down at Harlan wriggling free of his undershirt.

Clay bent forward meaning to extend a hand to naked Harlan but halted midway. Their eyes had met and the lovers found themselves silently communing all over again. For both of the pensive pair, breath all at once came slow but of size as they caught a newer more dizzying glimpse of the depth of their feeling, one for the other. Beyond the first time each of them had occasion to learn the greatness of the other's feeling, the sensation that a current look at the same realization lent seemed, by far, wonderfully new and mysterious. And, each was innately sure the other felt the same thing. Positions frozen, they studied it, they weighed it, but knowing no words with which to paint the wonder of it for the other neither attempted to speak of it.

The two young men's sense of the feeling and the moment threading their way through their awareness seemed as though viewing a slow, long awaited silver train's passage from somewhere up high. Once the long moment passed, its gist hanging behind in its wake, Clay reached out the rest of the way for Harlan's uplifted hand. "What -- think I'm just gonna leave you to lay there?" he inquired with an enigmatic grin as he helped him up and then he shook his head to let the contrary be clearly made known. "There's more for you," he added with an assured nod toward the stairs.

Both the handsome young men, naked and hungry for each other, headed toward the staircase.

Following behind as they mounted the stairway, Clay lay a warm, heavy hand on Harlan's bare shoulder. The other swept upward, glancingly caressing a muscular orb of the lean youth's flexing ass as they rose the stairs. Halfway up to bed, Clay abruptly closed the gap of the stair step or two between them. The urgency of his grip on Harlan's shoulders halted their ascent. Resting his brow on the back of the younger man's shoulder, the handsome preacher fervently pressed himself against Harlan causing his dry, throbbing dick to slide into the warmth of the narrow space between the beautiful youth's muscular thighs as he bound him up in his big arms.

Moments later the preacher let his young love go only to reach for him once again at the stair-head. He greedily regathered the youth and the warmth of him close within his strong arms and rushingly whispered down-home metaphor, hot and sweet as fresh-made candied yams, into Harlan's ear as he ground his sex betwixt his belly and the youth's firm backside.

The handsome young preacher told Harlan about every new emotion he felt growing inside minute by minute, told him that at last he believed himself surely in love. Then he released him again, backing down a few of the steps. Perching precariously on his toes on the edge of a step, the preacher squatted and leaned forward to leave a ring of dry kisses on the small of Harlan's back. The youth's soft, thrilled staccato murmurs came falling on Clay's ears like tinkling silver fragments of a song as he quickly grabbed for the banister to hold himself steady. Folding his brawny frame the big man dressed the sides of Harlan's lean, bare behind with more satin kisses ... then his thighs ... and then the backs of his knees.

Springing erect and rushing close again, Clay ebulliently captured the young man in the warmth of his full embrace once more and quickly guided him into the bedroom.

Harlan stopped just inside the master bedroom's entry and took everything in all over again. Gazing at the big bed, "Yeah, this is the place all right," he thought out loud as though reassuring himself of the particulars of where and how he'd been with Clay only a night ago. Honoring the memory, he gripped one of the virile young preacher's wrists and pulled a big hard hand to his lips.

Pressed into the boy's back, Clay lent no comment as to his own memories but swiftly turned Harlan round inside his arms to face him. Careful as always in his way with Harlan, it was near amusing how unsure the big man appeared as he set his mouth on the willing youth's.

Then again, he was doing something he'd always wanted to do for the very first time.

For all the forcefulness his size suggested the amorous young preacher capable of, the premier insinuation of his tongue into Harlan's mouth commenced rather timidly. Gentle as he was large, he tested and probed Harlan's full lips as if very carefully laying open the unfolded petals of a flower; as if their bruising would prove the ruin of the nectar.

However, Clay's confidence quickly received the boost it needed from the jolt of surprise that whipped his ardor to frenzy when the youth, hard muscled and warm in his arms, emulated him. Thus encouraged, a man in love unreservedly uttered his appreciation with a husky grunt as brawny of figure as he. He hugged the tall, slim youth so tightly against himself that had Harlan held lesser faith in there never being danger in anything Clay did to him, the hot-blooded crush of the preacher's powerful arms might have proved frightening.

The two truly radiant male beings lingered long in the doorway touching each other as they pleased, where they pleased, yet speechlessly they voted the separation of their lips too dear for mere lovers' vows, or praise. Naked and honest in every simple way, they contentedly stood together kissing and continuing to learn the feel of each other in complete silence, save for the rush of their breath, until Clay broke the kiss.

"Today everything's meant to be more for you than me youngblood," he pronounced with an earnest but soft emphasis as he reached atop the dresser for the little jar of Vaseline and planted it Harlan's palm. The young preacher tenderly cupped his young love's mystified face with both big hands and gave him one last deep kiss before he, matter-of-fact, walked away to the bed.

"Dag -- he's so damn fine," the youth thought, body on fire, head reeling and growing voluptuously besotted on the knowledge that all of this beautiful bull of a man he was beholding really was his. Tall, naked Harlan angled his slim, well-muscled build against the inside of the doorjamb and drew in and blew out his breath long and deep through flared nostrils as he gave his deepest consideration to the awesome sensory potential waiting for him just a few footsteps away.

Remaining at a distance, with relish the youth made a close study of the swaying expanse of Clay's shoulders, the complex play of the muscle in his broad back and the alternating lifts and falls of the comely preacher's hairy backside's as he easily ambled toward the bed. Lances of sweet heat found a mark low on the randy youth's belly. Each incensing hit him caught him in the groin area as, raptly, he looked on as Clay lay himself facedown, just for him, on the bed. When his dick flash pulsed in reflex reaction to Clay's silent offer, Harlan swung a hand attentively to himself, iron stiff and standing ready. Dry-handed, he stroked the length of his dry cock once and sucked up another deep breath of air as it throbbed and reared higher upon his touch.

Ass up and spread-legged, the youth's golden man lay waiting for him. This sight and its meaning proved so awesome to Harlan that in spite of the raw lust it whipped awake inside him, his advance to the bed was slow and measured as though an approach to a sacred place. His long cock, fully hard, seemingly thickened and swelled more. Masterless through anticipation, it roguishly reared at the lithe young man's tensed belly with every near trancelike step placing him nearer the big man on the bed.

Halting, Harlan eager eyes visually caressed every round and hollow of the muscle mountains -- hairy, gold and orbed -- that composed the handsome preacher's tail. He moved on to the bed seconds later when their lure would no longer let him abide at a distance.

Seating himself on the opposite side of the bed, Harlan drew his feet off the floor and sidled crab-style on the heels of his hands and feet across the mattress to the middle of the bed, next to where Clay lay. Drawing his long legs beneath himself as he sat, he gently reached out and rested a hand on the warm satiny skin in the middle of the preacher's back and let his open palm go sliding off to wherever his whim took it.

After a short stretch time to merely absorb, for memory's sake, the feel of the man's flesh and his bone, the aroused youth bent his lithe body in the direction of the lower end of the bed as both his hands, pilgrim travelers, journeyed farther down the preacher's back toward his hips.

Fingers spread wide as they'd go, Harlan pushed his hands up, over and down the pliant hills of flesh under them and dragged them back again, same fashion, following each forward passage. A last stroke of his hands came to a slow halt at the apex of the mountainous, warm nether region of the brawny preacher's body.

Without hesitation Harlan began dividing the two rounds of Clay's hairy ass with a slow push of his straightened fingers. The more their parting revealed, the closer forward the youth leaned, anxious a better line of sight into the deep valley between. All of it at last laid open to him, the youth's gleaming and mesmerized tan eyes locked on the brown, puckered hole centered between his trembling thumbs. Now and then it would nervously tense, then relax as if apprehensively awaiting his attention.

Without looking away, Harlan reached beside himself for the little jar of lubricant and let it fall into the shallow well at the center of his folded legs. The jar would have fallen on its side again after his one-handed loosening of the cap had there not been the strong support of his raging hard-on to hold it upright.

Harlan folded deep at the waist and analytically rubbed his smooth cheek against the smooth skin and rough hairs on one hill of Clay's ass. He pleasured himself with the feel of it for a while before he once more sat erect and dipped a finger into the jar of Vaseline in his lap. The young novice inexpertly started spreading the greasy contents he'd gathered up and down the divide in Clay's butt.

Clay who'd patiently lain still and quiet the whole time Harlan had pored over his body began to stir, issuing out low grunts each time Harlan's greasy, testing finger slid over the small, tight hole in his tail. The youth wasn't sure just how much Vaseline was enough and to be sure, extra cautiously applied a gob or two more which left the entire crease in the big man's backside slick as ice.

Once more the lean youth bent his body deep to stretch an arm over the end of the bed and set the jar of grease on the floor. Looking about for something with which to wipe off the residual lubricant clinging to his slim fingers but seeing nothing available, boyishly practical, Harlan wiped them clean on the side of a thigh. Just before he stretched out on the bed to lie on his back beside Clay he asked the young preacher, "Can I ... now?"

"Yes," the handsome man awaiting him said. "Right now"

Harlan slowly rolled onto his side and dragged a smooth muscled leg across the luxurious field of hair on the backs of Clay's thighs and calves as he made ready to mount him.

"Ooh -- daggone," the sex flustered youth throatily groaned in the prone preacher's ear. The swollen flange of his dick had just easily plowed the tight divide in the big man's hairy tail as he sprawled his lean body over him. Wriggling his tall frame to settle himself on top of Clay, Harlan reverently rested the offering of a single soft and thankful kiss on the vein he saw pulsing on the side of the preacher's thick, bullish neck.

Clay's body for a good while a mildly rippling sea of muscle for Harlan to drift afloat on, showed its force belied by the big-boned young preacher's state of patient quiet when he forcefully wagged his ass side to side, once or twice, and sandwiched the burning root of the youth's manhood solidly between its halves.

"Dag -- ain't nothin' like a man is there?" Harlan contemplated out loud with true wonder as his lungs let go a sudden gorge of air that had been laden with Clay's scent.

"From where I sit, right now youngblood there can't be." Clays murmured response was muffled by the bed things as Harlan's searching hand began burrowing under him. "Just can't be," he said once more.

The tantalizingly potent masculine scent of Clay's wiry black hair had adhered to the insides of Harlan's flared nostrils as the titillating prickling from the late day growth of stubble on the young preacher's jaw against his cheek added to the thrill of laying over him. Testing and considering every part and piece of the man his grasp or awareness happened upon, the youth chafed the face of his smoother thigh against the rough haired back of the preacher's. Briefly, he clenched Clay's big shoulders and then let his exploring open hands sweep the groaning preacher's hard sides until they dipped into the hollows of his firm hips. Harlan's fingers squeezed the flesh there as slight hoists and drops of his lean ass continued to send his sex shuttling back and forth on test excursions through the snug furrowed track cut betwixt Clay's clamped asscheeks.

Uncannily wise and practical despite his limited experience, the more lithely Harlan moved his long and lean brown frame over the big man whom willingly presented him his ass, the less he troubled himself as to not having yet discovered and tied together the proper words of love he'd been seeking to voice. Instead he let each feverish breath he took speak for him as he simply lay savoring his golden man's body quiet-style. That in itself might be proof of love enough for the moment he thought.

The random nibbles Harlan had so far taken of the varied and tiny pleasures of foreplay inevitably made his appetite great in a short time and he reacted to its force. Ambitiously arching his spine and gyrating his slim, dark ass he maneuvered his probing sex, like a divining rod sans a guiding hand, inside the crack in Clay's ass. First too high, then too low, Harlan's ready cock prodded muscle, sometimes bone. Two tries more and his blind cockhead caught on a spot that pleasingly yielded to it's pressure.

Instinctively marking and the poising himself over the spot, tail end wagging puppylike with anticipation the youth eagerly brought his lean ass high and, assured of his aim, slowly let the weight of his body drive the long, thick shaft of his cock down into the softness he'd searched to find dead-center in the preacher's oiled ass.

Clay's head jerked up but even though his legs trembled violently he held them wide open and kept quiet as Harlan began bearing down more, insistent to know what it was to have his ass.

The young preacher's loud but choked-back outcry didn't come until the drilling of the head of Harlan's sex all at once burst open the tightly pursed ring of muscle which locked away the exquisite treasure to be taken. Rousted from his prior ease, the young preacher's basso croaked groan bore resemblance to successively breaking timbers as all his big frame shuddered when the beginnings of Harlan's abundance began stretched the hole in his ass wide.

Truly amazed and his arousal growing fat from feasting on the thrill of new sensation, "Oh -- it's almost like I'm up inside a furnace," Harlan gasped loudly as the glans of his cock was suddenly grabbed, viselike, in heat. "It's feels just like fire," he repeated with fevered awe as he sank deeper between the mounds of shivering muscle under his belly.

An eruption of more overwhelming warmth sheathed the thick, continually submerging shaft of his sex. About to touch bottom, Harlan gasped and whimpered a mix of great pleasure and great dismay as highly keen edged sensations began to spear his groin as stars burst behind his closed eyes. "Uhn," he grunted as his lean frame stiffened. "No! Aw man -- don't let it happen yet! Dag, Clay what am I gonna do? I think -- oh I'm about to bust off again. I don't --"

"Hold still -- don't move!" Clay called out. Lightning fast, the preacher's big hands flew back and clamped down on Harlan's thighs with a loud slapping sound as he yanked them tight against his own. "That's it," the young preacher's deep voice authoritatively rumbled up to the youth who by then was so close to the brink that his long dick, fully alive, literally pulsed and leapt in his ass like a wild creature just caught in a snare. "That's right -- that's all you've got to do --," he said soothingly as Harlan obeyed, "just lay on me real still -- the feelin'll die down in a little bit."

For several minutes they lay joined anxious but still. Harlan's breath was still coming strong and fast. His dick, fully distended and throbbing, was hooked deep in the sweet squeeze of the handsome preacher's ass end like a spur. "Pull out easy," Clay instructed quietly after a little more time.

Instantly surprised and disheartened at what appeared the apparent loss of a finish for what had begun, Harlan reluctantly began bringing himself up on all fours. He cast his eyes down and looked longingly between their bodies as his cock, greasy and gleaming from all the Vaseline he'd spread inside the tight crack in Clay's hairy tail slipped out into the light again. Balls tight and achy, the youth wanted to ignore Clay's request and make an impetuous plunge right back in.

Abruptly, the bed began to rock. Clay hurriedly set his powerful frame in motion once Harlan was pulled all the way out of his insides. Though puzzled, the youth agilely danced about the bed on his knees to move clear as the preacher bent and drew his long legs up into his chest while turning onto his back.

Harlan still on his knees looked down at Clay somewhat bewildered as the preacher pulled his knees apart bracing each under a big hand at its respective side of his wide chest. His thick cock, lazily at attention, leaned and swayed over the field of coarse hair on his belly as gravity draped the loose, low hanging sack laden with his balls before the little hole in his muscled ass.

When the youth made no immediate move toward him, "Well, what you waitin' on boy?" he chided gently. Suddenly coming to understand Harlan's quandary by the look in his eyes the big man softly explained, "Even if you can't hold out for long youngblood, I want to be sure I get a good eyeful of those eyes and that face while it lasts. Go head now, slip it back in me easy ... real easy," he warned as Harlan directly came scrambling into position over him.

Harlan's wide shoulders shook as his sinewy back arched over Clay. He carefully began tapping the well of heat in the young preacher's tail. His shoulders weighted down the backs of the big man's thighs and pinned them against his chest.

The eager novice, serious to be thorough, endeavored to leave nothing forgotten, not even a kiss. Awkward as it was to get his arms about Clay's shoulders he nonetheless contrived a way to hug Clay as he brought his lips down to his.

First -- one quick kiss. It's electric effect made the youth suck in just as rapid an intake of wind as its power to stir elicited a pulse of his dick, clenched tight by the preacher's upturned ass. The next -- long and deep, the very way he'd seen male peers, equally as primed for sex as he, tongue and lap their way about the mouths of accommodating female partners as they'd dance the slow drag at impromptu parties thrown in dark, smoky living rooms or basements a few phone calls past some brave young host's being left to teenage mischief and an empty house on occasional Saturday nights.

Sometimes analytic, sometimes serendipitous, the youth probed his golden man's mouth soulfully with his tongue just as he'd seen. Growing a lover insatiably more hungry for the big man in the doing, Harlan unsparingly filled Clay's mouth with his exploring tongue as he as well packed more of himself into the young preacher's tight backside.

In time the wild sensations that Clay's probing had priorly unearthed inside him came to Harlan's recall. With the full intention of bestowing all the best of love's service on the man lying under him, Harlan pulled his arms from beneath the preacher's shoulders and moved to action. Swiftly pushing himself upright, the lanky young man backed off three or four inches from Clay's body. A goodly portion of his dick was still seized by the preacher's grasping tail and he set to jerky pendulum swings his lean ass as he squatted, tiptoed. Pleasured in the investigation the youth's muscular body bent and twisted, his ass wagged as he poked his dick about in search of a spot inside the preacher's tight ass similar to the special place found in himself that had so greatly turned up the heat in him.

Harlan, tightfisted, gripped Clay's raised ankles and held them wide apart with strong outstretched arms. Choked up by the rising pleasure he derived inside Clay's clamped ass, "Is it good?" he asked with a shuddering voice the second occasion a quick experimental jab bumped the tip of his dick against the lump just inside the panting preacher's hairy ass. The action extracted low bass tone howls from Clay. "Am I doin' it right?"

The big man, too much ablaze to issue a coherent reply, lay there able only to blurt out incredulous little cries and murmurs at the pleasure he was gaining from the youth's toiling, over him and in him. Eyes closed and beads of sweat sprinkled like crystal fragments on his brow, the handsome gold-skinned man sucked in then blasted out long whooshing draws of air up to ceiling through puckered lips. Gasping, his handsome head lolled side to side as, buffeted by waves of pleasure his muscular form twisted and wiggled as he too investigated new angles for the vestibule of his turned up ass to better receive benefit from the soft hammer taps of the ample knob of the eager younger man's prodding cock.

Gazing down on him, panting and wide-eyed, Harlan in a while set to a vigorous tooling of the big man's tight ass.

Clay's chest urgently heaved high as he lay and let the handsome young man straining between his hoisted legs learn on his own how to work his ass. Wallowing in the sheets, the preacher's big frame was all ajitter as Harlan, back slowly bending, began to cover his body with his once more. The low light played on the youth's fine features as his beautiful face descended slowly. Their lips merely inches apart, Clay abruptly whispered, "No youngblood -- no -- stay right there. I want to see your face ... got to see that face."

"Are you okay?" Harlan panted.

"Oh yeah -- it don't get no better than this," Clay gasped so assured, he needed not a moment to think on his answer. Looking deep into Harlan's eyes he said, "You'd best believe I mean to show you just how good it is," in a voice knotted up by his passion.

In the demonstrating, the big man cast off the role passivity's limiting duties. He grabbed behind himself for the bed's headboard as he assertively kicked out hard, hooking his heels on Harlan's wide shoulders. The young preacher began to maniacally grind and pitch his upended tail at the tip of the boy's hard cock, grunting hard at each stroke Harlan put to him. The brawny sweating preacher's own sex was standing and throbbing at the base of his sweaty belly like a leaning tower between his tensed, raised thighs.

Harlan's golden man cried out strong and loud, then let out an even louder one a second time as ardor spiked in him, renegade like fever. "Oo-wee youngblood, it's gettin' good," Clay suddenly blurted out through tight lips as he arched his back. He relinquished his hold on the headboard to shoot his trembling hands through his lifted legs, grabbing for Harlan's waist. Sweat laced, his brow knit. His astonished dark brown eyes were agape and pleading he be taken the remainder of the way to the heights. "Put it on me -- you've got what to figured out right," the turned-on young preacher beseeched again.

Answering the call of his golden man's need and his own, Harlan punched the insides of the big man's hairy ass with short, fast thrusts of his dick. In a matter of moments the continued driving of his virility proved to be the key that tripped the hidden lock on the floodgates inside the preacher. A copious spill of the preacher's seed came on with a rush.

All the muscle on Clay's hairy belly abruptly bunched in hard ridges cut by shallow furrows. Shakily, he kept his tail raised to the prod inside it, gritted his pearl white teeth and groaned a roar.

Though something far above and beyond the euphoria afforded a man by merely wine or potions, the ultimate phenomenonal feeling of sexual release bowled the young preacher over with a druglike wave. It came a cropper like a heavy swipe to the gut, taking away both the burly man's breath and his hold on lucidity. Clay's groans of pleasure mounted all the more as, near stunned, he was swept farther asunder a center point of logic and reason by the outwardly spiraling current of an eddy of sensation stronger than anything he'd known coming to be like before. Mouth wide open as he and the room around him whirled and his seed poured out, all that was of clarity in the handsome big man's mind was that Harlan was the author of all this pleasure.

Low on the moaning preacher's sucked in gut, its fleshy helmet flared wide, hot and gorged with dammed up blood, Clay's hard dick flicked and right angled itself each time it pulsed out a gob of pearly male essence. These spurts of the moaning preacher's warm semen blasted upward like cannon fire and painted his young and eager taker's tight-muscled heaving chest and belly, and then wet the thick mat of shiny black hairs blanketing his own squirming torso as it dripped down off Harlan's chest as he lay below.

The freshly jetted seed left clinging to Harlan's flat belly in essence was an unguent aphrodisiac spur that heightened the young man's very natural, virile compulsion to exorcise the sweet radiating ache above his balls. Heart racing, Harlan fell on Clay, no longer bridling the thrusts of his cock as he madly sought to come.

Roughly flinging tangled bed things this way and that to better ring the preacher's broad back and shoulders, with a stallion grunt Harlan slammed Clay's knees tight against his chest though it took all his strength to collect the heavier man close in his arms again. Completely given up to frenzied impatience, he rushed on his way to catch a ride aboard the same wind of pleasure Clay rode. The beautiful youth gasped his own pleasure when he drove his swollen root all the way up his golden man's clenched insides.

Counterpoint bass and baritone, the clamor and potent harmonies of the two young men's voices as they made passionate love crammed any void the giant experience might have priorly left remaining inside the room.

They began to speak in the tongue of a pair journeyed far and awesomely near a beautiful destination. All of it was lovers' talk: hasty directives -- where to touch, how hard to squeeze -- to spice the love they made came mumbled hot-breathed; the telling of the joyful execution of prolonged, stop-and-go tricky feats of balance on the cliff edge of orgasm interpreted in the crescendo climb of wired whines and whispers; loud chest-register affirmations that all the right moves were being made as, in the mix, the ingredients in a recipe for intimacy at last began to gel. This was the language with which both frantically communicated as each ground his body against the other's on the big, rocking bed.

The youth and the preacher's entwined bodies, undulous and bent, turned and grappled as if they were men in contest there in the center of the loudly creaking bed. The slippery feel of the sticky wetness on their bellies from the big honey-colored man's pour of sperm added height to the excitement of the moment.

Harlan let out a screech. Masculine nature came down on him like a lightning bolt. Second by second, the roaring of a lion pride swelled louder inside his ears. Then, all at once, his lean, muscular body lurched from the overpowering force that snatched him into Clay's orgasmic slipstream. "Oh man -- mmh -- I can't hold it!" he wailed hoarsely, marveling at the size of the feeling he felt overtaking him as he zoomed down sensation's fast lane. He fucked Clay's ass for all he was worth, hard and deep.

Wanting to be spared nothing, Clay broke the iron circle Harlan's strong arms had formed around him and arched his back, righting himself enough to grab up two handfuls of the youth's lean, trembling tail. Holding on tight, with one stevedore yank and a groan, the young preacher's powerful arms hauled the full of length of the boy's girthy cock up his ass.

"All of it youngblood, give me all the man nature you've go," he coaxed, possessively plying Harlan's hard, bucking ass with his thick fingers.

The squirming youth roared out at the involuntary squeeze of his gut that expelled of first lob of his seed, willing to give Clay all he could supply.

Lying there in the thrall of love's delirium' the young preacher repetitively whispered for, "More," each time another throb of Harlan's cock spat a jolting surge of liquid warmth high inside his squeezing, churning bowel ...

1964 - Part 7

"Why?" Harlan searched through his whisper to Clay an hour later. Snuggled close against Clay as he lightly breathed in, the youth assessed the mingled aromas of his savior's after shave and the musky smell of sex under his arm that scented deodorant could not quite subdue and liked it. Liked it so much ... the stirring of a phantom feeling began to radiate from the core of his soft dick. He'd very much liked to have had the strong, bull-necked preacher roll his way and kiss him again, start making love to him, slow and sweet, all over again but his need to have his question answered felt of great importance just that moment

Brown eyes slowly traveling the faint traces of silver on the patterned paper covering the ceiling, Clay grunted, "Huh?" The query had abruptly rousted him from slightly drowsy meditations inside the bubble of contentment he'd not known the like of before.

"What made you get married?" Harlan asked, this time making his question clear.

The young preacher clamped his lips together as he ran a fingertip along his thin mustache and frowned, deeply thoughtful. Yet, it only took a passing second or so in his weighing and choosing words from which to constitute a clear answer for him to realize he himself wasn't sure why. Then, after honest consideration of the matter, the minister gave the only truthful answer he could supply Harlan. "Because I believed I was doin' what the Lord say do'," Clay Adderly replied blunt and to the point. The response was the echo of his own father's teaching -- as well as his drawl. He'd cited the quote to Harlan with slow care as though he too might after all come to understand.

"But, now that I'm made to think on my reasons again," Clay added as he rested his tender gaze on Harlan's face, "truth's more likely I went and did it cause I'm a coward." Frowning, he looked away.

The handsome man caught the look of real astonishment on the face of the trusting young man beside him from the corner of his eye. "Come here to me," he ordered tenderly as he slightly turned his big body Harlan's way and craned his neck to kiss his lips with a loud smack. Yet the prior light of joy inside the handsome preacher's deep brown eyes nonetheless suddenly set to dimming to just a glimmer above sadness's own low light. "Youngblood, you can't know how much I love it, how much I need to have you show me that you really think I'm somethin'," he said gently, "but remember -- all I am is a man and that's all I'll ever be. From now on, all we have is the truth to hold us together and make us right. So, let me be honest.

"If I can't do it today then back then I sure nough wasn't up to takin' on other people about my wants and their expectations of me back then either -- not as a man and certainly not as the minister I claimed I wanted to be.

"You see, to make it, if a preacher could put together a tool kit for himself -- other than a Bible and a prayer book -- to tote all around with him the way a carpenter or mechanic'll do, then a wife -- a good one I'm sayin' -- would be the best tool in the set. As much as anything he does, to everybody lookin' his simply havin' her at his side sets him an upright man in their eyes.

"I mean to say it gets people thinkin', Well now, here we've got a man that's livin' a life like ours. One that surely knows and understands the way and the ritual of our tribe.' So there you go buddy, a preacher's association with a woman who's of a mind to be a help to a man lookin' to gain that kind of appearance is a badge of approval that signs, seals and delivers him to the leader's seat.

"Most folks don't put much confidence in guidance about buildin' homes and families if the man givin' it ain't done the same. Don't take my word for it. Look around for yourself," the handsome preacher's deep voice boomed in recommendation.

Abruptly covering his eyes with the same hand as though the teaching could be blotted out Clay went on, " Better to marry than to burn,' so the Good Book's sayin'; and so my father said to me soon as he'd seen I'd sprouted a few extra hairs here and there.

"Well sir, believe you me," he chuckled dryly, "burn I did then and burn I do now ... all the time," he openly confessed on a sigh forced out by the weight of his exasperation. "Get to feelin' just like a house on fire sometimes," he added, "but not cause of needin' a woman.

Don't matter no how. I had no chance to follow whim or fancy keepin' with my ideas of divine because it's written in that very same book, Lie not with a man as with a woman' and I positively did not want to disobey."

"I'm the first guy for you too?" Harlan asked, turning belly to belly with the handsome man he was in bed with.

"Uh-uh," Clay answered simple and true, "you're not the first -- although it felt a thousand times better." Smiling, he grunted and lifted himself slightly to snake his other arm around Harlan. "There was a guy, just one; both of us lonely and both of us needin' ... you know. We'd slip off every now and then at college but I knew -- I mean the both of us knew -- it couldn't continue long.

"Can't say ... I might have decided different and stuck with him if I'd had some time to think on it and seen some kind of way without the world havin' to know. Anyway, it wasn't long after he and I gave up on it that Joyce came along."

Clay shrugged his bare, wide shoulders. "There was a little bitty church not too far from the seminary and I met up with her through the -- speakin' for myself -- unwanted help of some very motherly-minded ladies I'd come to be acquainted with there. Knowin' it was gonna look real funny for a young man to be backin' away from a girl that pretty, I ended up quietly goin' along with things, even when the women folk got it in their minds, after a little while, to start coaxin' me and Joyce toward the altar. I don't know how much she knew of it or whether she minded or not. She's never once said a word about it you know.

"But, after we'd spent a little bit of time around each other I realized, strange as it seemed, I kind of liked the girl and got that feelin' she liked me too.

"Lord it's all of so hard to explain. It's just that I didn't see any harm in the notion of callin' myself goin' with her for while." There came a tiny lift at the corners of the young preacher's mouth as he said, "Most we ever did anyway was go to the show or sit on her auntie's front porch, Sundays after suppertime. We never got all hot to be up on each other like some fellas and girls. Never touched her until we were married. Besides I was safe. I had Jesus to hide behind ... til my weddin' day. That suited me just fine.

"Anyway, I stayed around her long enough to start me believin' that, if we did get married, we'd get by because right off I saw she was a woman who wanted a marriage more than she did a husband -- if that makes any sense."

Harlan pressed himself against Clay and hesitantly inquired, "Clay ... could I ask you somethin' else?"

"Of course! Anything you want."

"You ... you won't get mad?"

"No! Why would I get mad?"

"Well ... just what's it like ... doin' it with a woman?"

Making no reply at first, Clay delicately fitted his mouth to his young lover's. "I guess I take back what I said. Of all things, please don't ask me that," the minister gently beseeched the naive youth his arms enfolded after withdrawing his lips a minute later.

"Ain't a thing wrong with the question. You've certainly got every right to know anything and everything you feel you need to about sex," the preacher quickly made plain. "But, seems to me, it would be way better if you put that question to a man who's truly able to love a woman. Ask some guy who's got a woman who gets his eyes to shinin' when she comes round him cause her ways are just like wine to him; ask a man who honestly can't see the sides of a day as bein' completely connected without her. Now a guy like that --" the young preacher said, giving the attentive youth a nod and the thumbs up sign, "he's the one to ask. He's the man who knows best how to tell you what it's like to lay down with a woman."

"How could a man like me, livin' behind a woman and a phony face, give you a right answer?"

"Don't let me be misunderstood, please," Clay hastily continued, seeing clouds of confusion form on Harlan's quite readable face. "I do care for my wife. That woman's been a good friend to me you know. No, she's been better than that -- and surely better than the likes of me deserves.

"Joyce came into my life not askin' for much more than a weddin' ring and a new last name. Nonetheless, right off, she put her shoulder to the wheel with me anyway; a whole lot like a sister lookin' to make a life for herself through her brother's. And ... I can't tell you how deeply I've come to appreciate that or how much it's meant. But, by everything I know to be holy Harlan -- if it's love we're talkin' bout -- love with some kind of root, real and wide; love that's got a heart way down in the middle of it, in all these four years we've had together, I've never once felt anything for her that holds a candle to half of what you've kicked alive inside me all in just a day."

Melancholy, odd in kind to Harlan looking on, momentarily sailed the handsome preacher's liquid brown eyes as he noted, "Hmph ... looks like the truth makes you glad and sad all at the same time.

"Never a night when I laid this bed and put my hand out to touch her did I hope or need to find desire for me in her or wanted it to be high. I do it cause I just have to. After all, I said I'd be the woman's husband before a preacher and a church full of people. So, even though I may not necessarily want to be one I at least try to act like one.

"I do it because I'm a man and my body needs somebody -- another man -- but that can't be. So I keep my eyes closed while I lay on her and I dream deep bout what I can't have to keep myself hard enough to finish.

"At least I've mastered the trick to that one thing. The hard part is tryin' not to feel ashamed. Even as much of a struggle as it is to carry on with somebody that don't bring your nature up, it's worse when you know it's all really seems more like some kind of mean joke made all at her expense."

"I've got me a good wife. She can clean; Lord, she can cook. But there's nothin' in her kiss about to ever make me feel like a dead man risin' the way yours does. Ain't no leapin' in my chest when she calls for me." Lingering long in afterthought, Clay frowned pensively and said "Then again youngblood, lookin at how she and I began, when did I ever want any such thing from Joyce?

"I made myself satisfied with the simple way we've found for gettin' by. She has too -- I believe. Considerin' the all-out catastrophes I've seen since I've been ordained, as a married couple, we've done well enough by each other. It wasn't until just yesterday, my fault not yours, that each of us had been satisfied with what we had to give to the other and willin' to make ourselves content with what there was to be taken.

"There's no way I can presume to speak for my wife but it's plain it certainly wasn't me who married lookin' for thrills. It was somethin' that I did purely cause it was more than clear I was supposed to and, more than clear, the only way to keep folks off my back."

"That's it? That's all it really is?" Harlan asked in bewilderment. He didn't know whether it was jealousy he felt or that he'd been in some way cheated. He believed the man he loved had been lost to him long before he'd ever been found. "You got married and hid your self from even yourself just cause somebody said you had to? Who said it?" the boy punctuated the inquiry shaking his head negatively in disbelief.

"Aw man! Dag," he moaned in adolescent exasperation that was sided by surprise and sorrow, "how could you do that to yourself just for the sake of makin' folks believe you're part of their doofy program? I don't understand, can't imagine somethin' like that. I mean -- it's -- it's your life.

"Girls never make me feel anything," Harlan said, pressing his smooth cheek into the hair on Clay's chest. "I mean I like em, but as friends. With me it's not like the other guys; I've never been interested in provin' how big and bad I can be to em or in dreamin' up lies to get me under their clothes. So -- if I've never as much as wanted to kiss a girl, why would I want to get marry one?"

"Besides, my mother always says it don't matter what you do. You can bend over backward tryin' to keep correct in other people's sight but there'll always be somebody in the bunch who'll get more than a good feelin' off pointin' out every little thing you don't get right. I should know. Hasn't Daddy proved that for me over and over?" The handsome youth's unaimed question rang bitterly sardonic.

"But, swear to God, the youth added, fire in his eyes, "That's one thing I'm never doin' to myself. I'm not about to let my life become a misery just for the sake of keepin' newsy people from worryin' bout what's none of their business in the first place."

In answer, Clay's bare, woolly belly jiggled Harlan's as it shook. Chuckling wisely, the big man pointed out, "Do you really hear yourself? All you're tellin' me is -- Mama said ...'. Well sir, what mama' was talkin' to you bout don't quite apply here."

"Life ain't that easy in general and certainly not in a case like ours.

Soon enough you'll learn it -- me too I'm afraid to say. Before last night, youngblood how often was it that you'd wanted to sit down and talk with somebody you knew -- just one somebody you had the feelin' you could put some kind of real trust in; friend, relation ... anybody?

How many times? A whole lot more than a little I bet.

"Now, I want you to think back and remember all those times you were just about to push the truth off of its perch right there on the tip of your tongue and let it fly, when all of a sudden somethin' inside warned you off the idea or your courage just up and failed on you. Why'd that happen?

"Air's free and talk ... well that's cheap as can be. You could have gone on and sat down with me or anybody a long time ago and spoke right up but you didn't. Tell me -- what it was that made you deny yourself by holding your tongue? Why?"

"Guess cause I didn't think anybody would understand ... cause I was afraid of bein' pushed away." Harlan sheepishly replied.

"Exactly."

"But --"

A quick slice in the air by the handsome preacher's broad hand cleanly lopped the head off Harlan's next argument. "Bein' round a place as big as Thesselonian, or anywhere else, after a certain amount of time nobody would or could come to an understandin' of how what they figure to be a natural man could be livin' without a woman.

"Thinkin' it mighty strange, sure thing, they'd start wonderin', What's goin' on with the man'. Then, allowed a little bit more time to roll it over in their minds, beyond the rise of curiosity, most likely there'd come doubt regardin' my ability as a man in other ways and that's the one thing a preacher can't afford to lose -- his congregation's confidence.

"Why would they doubt me? Simply cause they'd have no way of seein' their lives mirrored in mine -- exactly what I was tryin' to make you see before. No matter whether you've learned it for yourself or from goin' by what mama said, you did say you've got an understandin' of how hard it is to please people. Well if you do, then you can pretty well guess it wouldn't take long before the hounds would be on my track sniffin' around for details.

"A man's need to get close with somebody is just as much common knowledge as it is regular. Why, wouldn't take no time at all fore some folk got to wonderin' where and how mine was bein' seen to if I stayed single. Who's he seein', they'd start askin' --"

Exasperated, Harlan cut him off stubbornly, "Clay, I don't care. It's not like I want somethin' for my pocket. I'm not askin' or expectin' life to make me a rich man, well-known or any kind of stuff like that. I just mean to have this one thing my way -- even if I have to fight. This is for my heart."

Cajolingly styling his tone, Clay once more tried persuading the young and eager beautiful brown warrior caught in his embrace not necessarily to accept but at least consider his point. "Come on now, don't go takin' too hard a line on a thing like this til you're a little piece down the road. It's a whole lot easier in the sayin' it than the doin', believe you me.

"Life gets hard and sometimes bein' perfectly understood and respected can't compare with just simply bein' able to get along day to day. Youngblood, you're smart as a whip I know, but up to now nobody's been callin' on you to be responsible for anything other than makin' sure that what's in your schoolbooks stays in your head.

"Don't go and get me wrong -- It's nowhere in my intentions to try and put a damper on all that fire rushin' round your veins. No way," Clay said quite surely though chuckling apologetically as he comfortingly pressed his lips to Harlan's deeply furrowed brow. "A little fire burnin' on the inside's a good thing to have -- a real good thing. All I'm sayin' is, for the time bein', I don't suspect you've had much call to worry over what the man signin' your paycheck happens to think or to study bout leavin' open the easiest avenues of dealin' with the people in the house next door so that, day to day, things halfway swing in your favor. But wait," the young preacher said, signaling the youth's caution with an arched brow, "give it a little time.

"One day you'll be out there scufflin' with the rest of us -- scatterin' seed here and there and beginnin' to believe you're reapin' account of there bein' a whole lot of things you'll have managed to gather round yourself. All of it will seem like it's too important to let go. Maybe then you'll feel the need for a second look at things.

"It'll probably be the very same day that somethin' precious and special you've really had to bust your behind for and would hate like hell to lose stands in harm's way. Turn the thing another way," Clay sighed thoughtfully, "and maybe it'll be just at that minute you've finally laid your eyes on the golden gate of someplace you've been wantin' to be so bad you'd give most anything, do most anything to get there. You'll break into a run toward it but might come to find that for all that, just as you get up to the threshold your ticket to come cross is restin' in another man's hand -- and that he don't have to give you a thing if he's not of a mind to.

"Either way, you'll learn firsthand just how much can depend on the way someone else sees you -- then test your bravery."

"Mean spirited people get down on you just as bad when they just think they know your business as when they really do. Now, that wouldn't mean all that much except there actually are folks in this world that are darn near dangerous cause they're almost as wise as they think when it comes to makin' close guesses.

"Such folks generally go round with bad in mind anyway, estimatin' circumstances by what they suppose they see or don't regardless of who's business it is. After while in their estimatin', if they judge the company you've been keepin' with another man amounts to peculiar they'll not only stop to take a keener look and talk all the more, they'll shut you out too.

"Wouldn't go so far as to claim everybody will. In my heart I want to believe no matter where you are, who you are, there'll be at least one somebody willin' to be some kind of friend to you, but still you'll find friends precious and few. Even though those willin' to stand by you will mean well but most likely won't understand a thing about what makes you feel alive.

Harlan, who'd listened intently as the story boomed into the ear he'd rested on the preacher's hairy chest raised his head and nonetheless declared, "That won't be me and it sure won't be us." "Not us ... never us ..." the youth insisted as he tightly ringed the young preacher's thick neck with his strong arms, "we can't let it happen that way."

"God only knows how much I hope we won't youngblood," Clay sighed as his cock began to rise against his young love's thigh.

1964 - Part 8

All loose impressionism, early morning painted it's highlight on the contours of sleeping Harlan's teak brown cheek. Curled up on his side the lean youth lay dreaming half-adolescent half grown-up dreams, hearing neither the coos of scavenging pigeons nor the chirps of flitting sparrows outside nor the rattling of the few cars that constituted the sparse traffic passing over the bumpy street before the house. Silver-edged as the spears of sunlight leaking in round the curtains at his window, pieces of the somnolent young romantic's newest dreams had built a stout hard-on for him. Stirred in his sleep by other bodily agitations as well, the slender brown youth's smooth brow bunched momentarily and he reached for the fork of his long legs and briskly scratched his balls. A moment later his lips spooled out the thin strand of a sigh as he floated back toward his dream.

Making ready to plunge deep into the surrounding quiet's sea of spontaneous visions, Harlan's body uncoiled as he slowly turned onto his stomach. He moaned like a pleasurably pestered boy and wagged his firm, lean ass a little as his erection came to be caught in the press between his flat belly and the mattress. For a moment he unconsciously executed slight physical motions he'd learned to use to nurture love but must have soon realized that it was only his bed he lay grinding against. The youth sighed again then became still once more and dreamed on . . . . .

Deacon Frank Creely had quietly left his bed and his wife's side at six on the dot that morning. He shaved and rimmed his mustache, showered, then quickly ate his usual bowl of corn flakes; mulling over his plan of action for the day as the water in the small enameled pot he'd set on the gas range for his instant coffee heated.

By seven the deacon was out of the house and headed down the street toward his parked car, well before even early rising Cleotha would sit up on her side of the bed that weekend morning. Neither Harlan nor the rest of the later risers left at home would rise with the slightest inkling of the head of the house's plans for the day. But, that was never an uncommon thing.

Without doubt that morning, all things seemed to be wonderfully made and precious in value in the bright, tan eyes of the lithe and comely brown youth standing in the tub. Full of his secret love and grinning from ear to ear under the shower's spray as he soaped himself, Harlan trifled with a mad urge to right then and there fling aside the shower curtain and bolt from the house out into the city. All on his own -- balls naked -- he'd run a one-man marathon straight to Clay through any street that led the way to the north of town.

Harlan's handsome face was upturned in the steaming water's steady cascade and his cheeks, impetuously aglow, bore heat warmer than the spray. Though attempting to prod himself toward a more sober attitude by sardonically putting himself down for foolish thoughts, the tall youth couldn't help but treasuredly realize just how much in love he was that morning.

It took Harlan's sudden estimation of the hour to snatch his thoughts from romance. Not much earlier, he'd jumped out of bed and run down the hall into the bath. The clock had read close to nine. Harlan started rushing to finish. As he hurriedly soaped his body he also fervently prayed for every available bit of the coming day to belong to himself and Clay. All of a day had passed since they'd last been together.

By nine o'clock, Deacon Creely was keeping a watchdog eye trained on Willard Jackson, the cleaning contractor who came to his office every weekend along with a helper. As the wiry man sat at his desk he also managed to continue fastidiously tying up loose ends as regarded the paperwork necessary for his staff of three's payroll and the coming week's collection schedule for outstanding moneys.

Ever conscious of the least thing owed him, Frank Creely shrewdly flirted with the intention of a trip to Germantown in the back of his mind.

Cleotha Creely spotted her eldest son poised and ready to slip out through the vestibule up front. "Hold on mister! Oh no you don't," she loudly commanded over the anti-rhythm of clattering of pots and pans from her usual Saturday morning post before the kitchen stove. "You're not about to leave out of this house with nothin' on your stomach other than that glass of orange juice you gulped down."

"But Mom --" Harlan whined, impatient to be on his way.

"But Mom nothin'. Don't take but a minute to make an egg and some toast -- should have done it yourself." Then, his mother abruptly left off the scolding to curiously ask, "By the way, sir, where are you in such a rush to get to this time of morning? Mighty strange I'd say," she said as her brow wrinkled suspiciously. "Usually it takes me all I can do to pry your butt out of bed by ten come Saturday mornin' -- and here it is only quarter after nine."

"Well I have to . . . ." Protest and impatience were stain of the timbre of the scowling youth's voice as he prepared to forge an excuse for a get-away. His mother, hands on hips, was desirous to hear none and squelched its continuance.

"Hush up and get some bread out of the cupboard," Cleotha snapped.

Despite the gnawing insistence inside that he be on his way, with a hard hand, Harlan forced a downshift on the face of his mood. He masked the fidgety manner that was shaping his demeanor with the veneer of a more outward calm. It wasn't particularly cleverness that led him to do so but common sense. Knowing well that an over-amount of agitation on his part would foster inquiry which his likely inept answers would only cause to be intensified, in no way did Harlan want to instigate hard to fool Cleotha's rigorous probing. He was no match for the woman. Silently, he got the bread and sat down at the table to wait for breakfast . . . .

Frank's plan to facilitate the earlier receipt of a large check due him from a longtime client was conclusively decided upon after a brief phone conversation at about nine-forty-five . . . .

Everything that morning appeared to take an eon to come to pass, even the nine-forty five arrival of the PTC's beige and green bus. To Harlan, the bus's agonizingly slow transit of each city block during the long ride to Germantown seemed another large and costly bite out of the eternity that he meant to spend with Clay. The young man in love's torture on the rack of time -- and the bus ride -- came to an end at ten-thirty. By ten-thirty-five a short, brisk run to Clay's door rushed the two into each other's arms again, leaving them with no time to think of time . . . .

Cleotha Creely hastily mashed the round switch on top of the vacuum with her foot. The metal end of its hose inadvertently slipped from her hand and whacked the leg of an armchair as she quickly left off her Saturday cleaning to dash for the phone when it rang at eleven.

She answered her husband's brusque inquiry simply. Harlan was out of the house, she informed him and, as far as she knew, must most likely be downtown at the library. "Yes, yes," she agreed it might have been quite a good experience for him to accompany Frank and meet one of his better clients in Germantown. "Yeah I will," she assured him. She'd tell the boy to call if he got in before Frank had locked up. Married to the man too long not to know he'd be irritated, she heaved a sigh and dutifully sought to soothe the deacon by reminding him, before he could begin grumbling, that there'd be lots more Saturdays for such things.

The handsomely paired lovers lay on the wide bed holding each other. Their bare arms and legs were an intricately entwined tangle of dark and light-hued well-formed masculine musculature. Their clamorous jubilance, just prior as their rushed union had peaked, had turned into a placidly quiet kind.

Both the youth and the minister had shed their things all in the minute it took them to race from the front door to the bedroom upstairs. The minute they were inside Clay, on impulse, had pushed Harlan down onto the bed and dived for the joining of his thighs.

Making up for the day of separation they'd suffered, the young preacher had begun to hungrily suck on the head of Harlan's ready dick. He lashed it wildly with his tongue and sucked at it all the harder as though trying to derive sustenance from the marrow in a bone.

The strong sensations of Clay's frenzied mouthing manufactured carried helplessly squirming Harlan frighteningly high. Frantically, he began to push at the preacher's bobbing head begging, gasping wildly as he broke out in a sweat, "Hold up ... hold up!" Clay of course immediately desisted but plunged his head again downward like a shot the moment still panting Harlan sheepishly grinned after a few seconds respite saying, "Well maybe you could do it just a little bit more -- it did feel kind of good."

Within a few passing minutes, Harlan' hands were full of Clay's head once more. Sudden hoarsely stammered commands that Clay, "Keep on man!" were the precursor of the boyish squeals and grunts that heralded the first burst of his seed on the brawny preacher's delicately fluttering tongue. The youth locked the big man's head tight in the vice his thighs made until the cycle of sublime bodily turbulences that orgasm instigates were complete.

Calm again and grateful as though just having stepped off a bus after a long, wildly careening ride, Harlan luxuriously stretched his long arms and legs and eventually all-the-way exited the sweet dream state where the last pulse of his spasming cock had left him and lazily rolled over on his side. Harlan's hand on Clay's muscular shoulder gently ushered the young preacher upward on the bed. The youth gently planted a kiss on the full, moist lips that had sucked in his sex and his seed. He tasted the remnant of his sperm there and offered Clay a soft, "Thank you."

As he'd sat up, meaning to slide over to allow Clay more room beside him, Harlan noted the small electric clock on the dresser indicated the time as eleven-ten . . . .

Frank locked up his store-front office at one, got in his car and drove off. Six blocks away he lucked-up an a parking space and dropped off a pair of his best black shoes to be reheeled at a repair shop . On foot and ticket in hand, he made one more stop to pick up some fruit from a nearby grocer. He slid behind the wheel of his parked Cadillac again at one-thirty. A turn right at the next corner headed the car north, the direction of his expectant client's home.

The front bedroom had come alive with sound of vigorous lovemaking once more. Clay lay on his back, grunting as each hammerlike fall of Harlan's energetic thrusts lambasted his upturned ass. Miraculously standing erect despite the fast, deep dicking he'd had been taking, the underside of the blunt head of the young preacher's cock was sweetly being chafed by the hard, ridged muscle that faced the flat of Harlan's sweaty belly. The bed rocked and groaned reciprocally. Raptly, Clay lay there looking up, unbelievably turned on by the excitement in Harlan's light eyes.

Babbling a river of praise and endearments so much like a boy in love but moving inside the thick-thighed preacher just like a man, the handsome youth's strong hands clutched Clay's hairy thighs tight against his smooth chest. The youth's work was not in vain because the preacher cried out and thrust his tail higher to offer him more.

Broad shoulders flush on the mattress and shivering as if he lay on ice, the preacher began to speak his joy with vociferous delight. Love-talk between himself and his young taker began to escalate. Their sound somehow breaking through his moans when Harlan reached between their straining bodies and caught hold his dick., in the distance the young preacher had discerned two vague-strengthed chimes of the clock kept downstairs on the breakfront. The sudden, swift incorporation of the drive of Harlan's tight, plunging fist into the mix of their frantic pleasures instantly tapped and burst the reservoir deep inside Clay. Up pulsed a thick steady flow of semen that streamed off the crown of his cock onto his heaving belly . . . .

Frank Creely and Vernon Deerfield, the client the deacon had made the trip to Germantown to see, hadn't had a chat since early that spring. Frank, never of the sort impartial to small talk -- especially if flatteringly focused on him -- readily accepted Mr. Deerfield's hospitality and blandishments when he arrived at two-ten.

His business man's awareness that his host's pains were largely being taken with the intention of encouraging a better future arrangement of coverage for his two cars made no difference to him. He crossed a long, thin leg over the other and leaned back after centering himself on the living room sofa to wait for coffee and gossip . . . .

Neither of the new lovers could get enough from or give enough to the other it seemed. Once he'd zested the preacher's convulsing ass gut with his seed, Harlan dismounted then reciprocally laid down and spread himself open for Clay.

Feeling incredibly loved, Harlan lay on his belly, turned-on and happily secure beneath Clay's weight a second time. Yet the muscle in his back and ass involuntarily tensed and he winced when his golden man lifted off his ass and reached between their bodies to gingerly probe the tight rift in his ass with a finger. His cock rock hard, the young preacher ached to be seized inside Harlan's ass again but out of concern decided not to pursue the effort till later on. Slowly Clay rolled away. "Better hold off on that for a while youngblood," he said. "I don't want you gettin' anymore sore than I've already made you."

"Hey, what did I say about callin' me youngblood? I'm an old-head now," Harlan growled in playful protest. Holding onto the irritated scowl he also adopted, the youth scrambled on top of Clay and pinned the big man's shoulders to the mattress.

"All right! All right -- I'm sorry man ... I'm sorry! I surely do beg your pardon sir! Tellin' the truth, ain't a thing bout you that's boyish," Clay added after he'd forced his hand between their bodies and squeezed Harlan's dick. The rushed and fevered press of Harlan's lips on his denied him further assessment of any situations size.

Harlan slid his warm hand back along one side of their bodies, to find and grip Clay's. He slowly guided the preacher's big warm hand along his thigh and atop one of the firm swells of his smooth, slim backside and pressed it against himself with his own. He felt Clay's gentle but eager fingers, first knead the muscle there and then begin to explore the valley in his ass once more. The sustained kiss muffled Harlan's gasp as Clay's thick middle finger slipped down into the crack in his asscheeks and then inside him.

Probing deeper Clay touched spots that made Harlan feel ready again, that made him feel as if he'd come again. Harlan broke the kiss. "Go ahead -- do it again," was all he said once he'd slid from atop Clay and settled prone beside him on the bed again waiting to let his ass be taken a second time. It was two-thirty-five . . . .

The main purpose of Frank's sojourn, the collection of Mr. Deerfield's check, had been managed and the social side of his extended visit was drawing to a close. The greater part of his concern that afternoon was owned by an aim to have Joe Jenkins, his mechanic, take a look at the well-tended two-year-old maroon Caddy he was more than a little proud of. There'd been a knock in the engine that morning -- he was certain he'd heard one. Yet, always acutely aware of the extra managerial responsibilities his deaconship called for, a few matters of unfinished church business came across Frank's busy mind as he prepared to leave.

At first he was about to shrug off dealing with the matters outstanding at church, being they were only of minor importance. Then again, being a man who was equally as thrifty with his time as he was with his money, the prudent deacon thought it better to not put off until tomorrow that which he could do in the same day.

"Fine just fine. My oldest will be in college this time next year," he replied quite proudly in answer to Mr. Deerfield's query as to how his two fine son's were coming along. Then, giving his client a final dignified nod goodbye, at three on the dot, he entered the large sedan.

The car's engine caught promptly at the turn of his key and the deacon set off to consult with the pastor of his church before a westerly trip home.

Rather sore and spent by three-ten, the two lovers decided on temporarily foregoing the strenuous sport they'd so enthusiastically pursued abed for that on the little television. They lay together still clinging to each other and more than content the way they were, neither Clay nor Harlan felt quite prepared to let the other go. Though all of each young man's body had by then become quite familiar to the other, alternately one's roaming hands still lazily tested and surveyed any part of the other that easily fell into his grasp . . . .

Phoning before calling upon someone at home is a helpful stratagem that aids smoother footing in the introduction of one's product, thus certainly serving salesmen's purposes. Frank, a stubborn but wily insurance man had learned years before that the soured ambience produced by the unwelcome surprise of badly timed a sales call lent nothing in the negotiation of the sale of his wares .

This exercise of protocol had become so ensconced in Frank Creely's ever business like way of going about everything that no falsehood could be found in calling it automatic reflex. Yet, because he was so close to the Adderly's home and also because he was the possessor of a haughtily stanced pride in self-sufficiency which strongly prohibited his requesting even small favors -- like the use of a client's phone -- he decided to stop by for a brief chat setting aside usual preliminaries . . . .

At three-thirty, a brawl was suddenly breaking out among the two teams' players during first-half of the broadcast basketball game on TV upstairs. One of the favored teams major players had just taken a swing at an opponent found guilty of a foul. His fist had connected. Harlan, laughing raucously at the resulting free for all, grabbed Clay's bathrobe and came rushing down from the master bedroom to share the description of the fracas going on.

Although they measured the same size in bed, there was an approximate difference of an inch or two between the heights of the new lovers and surely one in their builds. Thus, the preacher's bulky multicolored bathrobe was too large for leaner Harlan. Open and mantlelike, the heavy terry cloth clung only to Harlan's broad shoulders as the hem of the robe and its undone sash trailed in the beautiful youth's wake while he ran the course from the hall above to the kitchen below.

The hard, smooth muscular rise of his dark broad chest, the ridges on the flat face of his taut belly, and the shadowy hued, pendulous adornments of manhood that swung seductively betwixt his muscular thighs were naked and exposed as he traveled with haste. All of that, a visual feast of masculinity most comely in kind, was abruptly presented to Harlan's father's startled and totally unappreciative eyes as he burst through the kitchen's entry laughing and calling loudly to Clay.

The silent kitchen all at once seemed cluttered with statuary when both father and son froze in the spot where he stood stunned, as did the preacher who'd just appeared in the basement's doorway . . . . .

Bare-chested, the young minister had come downstairs merely to retrieve a couple of cans of soda. But, in afterthought at the bottom of the stairs, he'd turned back to the kitchen. Quickly he gathered together crackers and some leftover odds and ends, then set them on a tray for Harlan and himself to eat while they'd take in the third portion of a televised championship tournament.

Barefoot as well, Clay had scratched his hairy chest now and then as he happily ambled about the kitchen. He was clad only in thin cotton pajama bottoms that loosely masked his flaccid dick and the crease in his full ass which seemed to hold perpetual allure for the youth waiting upstairs in his bed. He'd lazily donned them not long after the respite in the non-stop lovemaking they'd begun the latter part of the morning.

The knock at the kitchen door came just after he'd slammed the refrigerator door shut .

Waiting upstairs and at the front of the house, Harlan, intently viewing the basketball game had missed the sound of that knock. Neither had he heard voices when Clay, taken completely off his guard, greeted Frank Creely apprehensively but of course allowed him in.

Disconcerted, the moment's priorities appeared as a smudged list in Clay's mind. He noticed the partially opened door to the basement as he was about to excuse himself and head up the stairs. A hasty shove of the door to kill the draft jarred the upended broom kept leaning against the adjacent wall just behind. It tumbled with a loud clatter from the top of the narrow stairs.

"Excuse me just a second Deacon Creely," he said, wrongly opting in anxious confusion to lend a few seconds of valuable time to the retrieval of the broom instead of running up to warn Harlan . . . . .

"Harlan, wha ... what on Earth are you doing here?" was the first of Frank Creely's astonished queries. "And what are you doing here with not a stitch on you?" he asked his son and then he shook his head abruptly as though his eyes might be playing tricks. Growing leonine with anger, the deacon's narrowed eyes swept from the kitchen's entryway where his son stood, apparently too incapacitated by surprise to draw the large striped robe about himself, toward Clay framed by the basement's adjacent doorjamb.

The one and one of shrewd and quick calculation summed up to two when the fuller interpretation of the scene fully unfolded during the wily deacon's analysis. Mere seconds later, the tall nattily dressed man's entire frame seemed to visibly shrink as he let loose a long and quavering ungodly sound, low in pitch. It sounded almost as if he'd just caught a hard punch to the gut.

The kitchen door rattled as Frank Creely reeled back against it feeling for support and powerless to add voice to the accusations his lips were forming. Nonetheless, words of some significance did come after a brief and tense interval.

"Harlan Creely, go find your clothes. You're coming out of this man's house -- now." The cold, quiet, even tone Frank acquired for the issuing of the command set his eldest son more on edge than had it been a lion's roar. The elder Creely lowered the aim of the instantaneous revulsion his eyes expressed from his son's as he took serious inventory of the knuckles studding his clenched fists.

Though panic set in as his senses returned, Harlan at last thought to snatch Clay's robe of many colors close about his nakedness. He was also speedily became aware that without doubt he stood snared by evidence factual enough to require no witnesses to aid in the surmising of the truth. But, despite all the confusion and fear that rushed in on him that moment, he did not want to lie -- he only wanted to begin to be understood. And so he tried. "Daddy, let me explain," Harlan pleaded in a hoarse, near whisper.

Much the same as he'd done when he'd been younger and called forth to bear the weight of Frank's displeasure, Harlan futilely made ready to seek out even the least conciliatory road with his implacable father and logic out what he and Clay felt for each other. However as in past efforts during his early youth, when pleading his own case while striving to be acquitted of some childhood crime -- meaning an escape from the dreaded sting of his father's strap -- the success of a like effort had no appearance of likelihood. "Listen to me, Daddy!" Harlan beseeched his father again. "Will you please just listen to me? It's --

"Go find your clothes Harlan Creely," Frank literally snarled, cutting his eldest short before more could be said. His manner did not change an iota nor did his voice become louder by a decibel but the color of the danger lurking within it had intensified tenfold.

Knowing no way to fight, Harlan backed away in numb disbelief at all that had just transpired and climbed the stairs with leaden feet.

Glaring at Clay, Frank's bile and scorn sifted through his clenched teeth. "And as for you -- there is nothin' you can say to me. Do you hear? Nothin' at all."

The deacon set his mind whirling like a potter's wheel, silently attempting to rough out the shape of a plan of action. All the while approximating the width of possible legal avenues and assessing the weight of the probable scandal underlying the matter a mile a minute, he slowly approached Clay. He'd have taken the chance to soothe his ire by lashing out at Clay with his fists had the tall, broad-shouldered man appeared less able to hold his own.

Nevertheless, if not with his hands then some other way, Frank decided.

The man who remembered everything owed him had it in his heart to see to the thorough reduction of the big man before him and said so. "Let me tell you, I don't know how this came about but I've got every intention to find out all about it," Frank threatened, still incongruously outwardly quiet in contrast to the rage seething so inside him it caused his hands to tremble like leaves in the wind. "But even if I don't find out what led up to this, my boy gets off the train right here."

Frank stepped back, taking a head to foot view of the bullishly built young preacher. The deacon incredulously eyed all of Clay's naturally muscular build; the proud lift of his upper chest, the bulging of his arms, the apparent potency. "Good God Almighty, I'd have never thought for a minute a minister, a man like you with a wife would --"

The play of afternoon light through the kitchen window's panes heightened the gold sheen of the skin on Clay's bare shoulders as by then he'd come all the way into the room. Maybe it was sunlight blinding his eyes within as well as without that kept him from seeing some defense to offer for himself, he merely stood in the middle of the room, still and saying nothing. However, despite the mire of confusion which he was in up to knee deep, the young preacher's broad shoulders remained drawn back and his head did not drop.

In love for the first time in his life, the young preacher began to edge his way out of the bewilderment he was in, moving toward judicious thought. Every part of him yearned to execute an about-face and rush up the stairs to Harlan, dressing overhead, to pick through the shambles of the last moments they might ever have together and find something golden ... a last touch ... a kiss. It was solely for Harlan's sake, not his own, that with considerable effort Clay temporarily staved off giving in to the urge. Just at the moment self-restraint became unbearable and he was about set heart over wisdom, Harlan's slow footsteps sounded on the stairs.

The mute deacon, strangely maintaining counter-character to his priorly contemptuous manner, laced both his rage and his words with quiet when Harlan, teary-eyed with frustration, appeared in the doorway fully clothed. "Let's go," was Frank Creely's only solemn command though he used the shove of a hand to roughly usher his son by the shoulder toward the back door.

There were no outcries, there was no pleading from either in their deep grief but how both the new lovers began to mourn. To Clay and Harlan, Frank's stern order knelled the passing of everything newly come into their hands. Their stirred up dreams lay near death.

From inside the house, through the glass panes on the kitchen's door, Clay could see a bright crown of the sun's last light rested on Harlan's bowed head. It set his young love's clean, black close-cropped hair glistening.

From outside, Frank Creely firmly pulled the door closed behind himself with chilling finality. A minute later Clay was knocked to his knees before the toilet bowl by a wave of nausea that had sent him racing up the stairs. As he began to retch the big man also began to cry . . . .

It was near dinner time. The Creely household was warm inside and there was a tacit aura of cheer to be derived from the wafting aroma of a roast in the oven. The living room overflowed with the sounds of gunshots and pounding hooves. Young Buddy Creely was watching a western. He lay on the living room rug, chin rested on his piled up fists, when the vestibule door burst open and the rough, forceful propulsion of Frank Creely's hand sent his elder brother stumbling into the room. Though given quite a start, the boy didn't ask what was going on lest his angry father's attention swing his way. The TV was turned up louder than it should have been.

Rendered mute by a lump in his throat and cheeks blazing with indignation, Harlan started upstairs to his room. "Oh no sir, your little show's not over yet. We've got a good amount of talkin' to do before day comes. Just you turn around and head yourself straight on down to the cellar," Frank growled.

Buddy, cautious and silent, watched them move away. In the kitchen, Cleotha looked up from the asparagus she was trimming in the sink. "You found him? Where'd you two meet up with each other?

Did --"

Ignoring his wife, Frank nodded toward the cellar door and coldly reconveyed his desire, "Downstairs." The solemn procession of two took a sharp turn left and then headed downward.

In the basement, silence offered Harlan respite for but a short for a time. The fuming deacon paced back and forth before the coal furnace saying nothing as he stood watching, waiting.

At last the senior Creely dragged his palm across the thinning grizzled hair on top of his head as he paused his pacing, after a minute or two, to suddenly turn round and confront his son. "Harlan," he began querying with a knifelike edge on his voice , "do you have any idea of what this man was tryin' to lead you into; what people would say, not only about you but me, if word gets out about such a thing? Why it could turn out to be the ruination of everything I've tried to build up." Frank's face turned hard as rock, "and I'm tellin' you right now I'm not about to have no such thing." The fire in his constrained voice rose. "I'll dash your damn brains out first."

Meaning to stem possible future scandal, the deacon's tone shaded slightly conciliatory. He suddenly sought to do business with his son.

Looking Harlan up and down in assessment, he nodded and said, "Well -- you're surely not a boy anymore but way too young for marryin' -- I know it. I mean -- bein' a man with a certain vitality myself," the deacon said pulling himself up a little straighter despite low ceiling in the basement, "it's no secret to me how regular and strong a man's need can come on him. Any natural man's gonna get that wantin' for a woman but there'll be times he can't always have what he wants. Still," Frank said adamantly pointing a finger at Harlan, "there's no substitutin' for it -- it goes against God, not to mention how people look at such things.

"Besides, if you hadn't found it out on your own by now, at least, I'd have thought one of your young buddies would have told you how to go about -- why you know -- doin' somethin' for yourself with your hand if it started to get to you. Even so, if your nature was on you that doggone strong and you just had to be with somebody you should have gone out and found yourself a little girl somewhere.

"I don't understand. It always appeared to me you had some sense in you cause I've never seen you tryin' to get in too close with the girls at church. Just as well, I think, cause there's no need in a man messin' where he eats. But nonetheless, there's plenty girls around that are willin'," Frank added, sounding a little too knowing despite the hue of his exasperation. "Why you didn't go try to find one, I don't know. There's plenty of em right outside the church door that's round-heeled and easy-minded. Believe me, it don't take but a little lookin' to find one and as long as your careful and don't get no diseases or leave no babies in em--"

Frank's cold and indelicate perspective of the expedient handling of the male sex urge instantly ceased. Perplexity once more upstaged his anger and he scratched his head, confused. "Why for the life of me you got so hot in the britches that you'd go to a man for service I can't understand. I'd never condone such filth and you know it. Any way, how'd he persuade you to let him be handlin' your private parts?"

Slightly calmed for the moment, without waiting for a reply, out loud, puzzled Frank mulled over more to himself than Harlan, "As for Adderly, I can't understand him at all. There's nothin' womanish about him. He's a strappin' young stallion of a man, played football in college and got a mighty good-lookin' young woman for a wife. Besides that, I've seen for myself there's more than one woman cuttin' her eyes his way on the sly when church lets out. I tell you, I just don't know.

"Anyway, I've heard tell before of men supposed to be that way but never in my life did I come across one until now," Frank contemptuously proclaimed to Harlan. "They're the kind of men that have unnatural appetites that lead em to like milkin' young boys' wee-wees and such mess. Heard tell they even try to -- wait a minute --" Frank halted, appearing suddenly even more stricken. "Harlan he didn't try to -- ?"

Harlan made no answer until the last stressed fiber of the peace he'd tried to hold snapped from the weight of his silence. "I did anything he wanted me to Daddy -- just like he did for me. I wanted to be with him." His father appeared too stunned to fill the gaping pause that followed. "That's the truth," Harlan finally added, not at first believing it was really himself from whom the declaration burst forth. "I wanted to be with him."

"What?" Frank hissed in disbelief.

A single tear certified Harlan's confession. It slowly rolled down his cheek like a pure crystal bead, leaving a glistening strand in the wake of its passing as the younger Creely straightened himself to state his point more emphatically. This time Harlan met his father's fiery gaze directly. "I wanted to be with him." A moment or so passed before Harlan's next solemn repetition of this serious, very true fact came. It rode forth aboard a louder voice, not with the menace of challenge but instead the unadulterated clarity of straightforwardness. Though he knew no matter how many times he said it there'd be no way to make his father see, literally drunk on the truth he couldn't stop himself from saying,"I wanted to be with him."

The older Creely's spare chest heaved as his fury again took mount at his son's defiance. "Shut your mouth boy! Shut up your mouth I say," Frank screamed with rage. At first he clamped both hands over his ears to block out the sound as before his eyes the lips of very the fruit of his loins continued their seditious recitation. Then, suddenly grabbing a handful of the front of Harlan's shirt, he violently shoved his son away.

The score for this odious scene in the ugly drama was instrumented by shattering glass jars and the nails and screws that spilled out from inside them when they crashed to the floor in descant pitch to the oaths that Frank was growling. This macabre symphony cacophonously played out when Harlan, capable but unwilling to offer physical resistance in spite of his father's manhandling, fell back against a dusty storage unit butted against a bare brick wall.

His son silenced, several moments elapsed before Frank, seething inside like a cauldron, recovered enough for a coherent further examination of the method by which he saw his name being brought to dishonor. "You mean to tell me that you -- Frank Creely's very own flesh and blood -- laid down and let that man put his dick to you like a woman?"

Nothing else left to buttress or reward his eagerness not to believe, Deacon Creely snatched his hands off his son's shirt collar, as though it were soiled and laden with serious contagion. Glass crunched under his feet as he slowly backed away and, dull eyed, saw the complete text of the dread news he'd already sensed written along with the hate on his silent son's face.

"Good God in Heaven -- you did," he gasped incredulously, his forefinger became a trembling scepter of judgement pointed straight at his son. This acknowledgment of his realization accentuated the bitter, scathing disgust within him that had accrued with each revelation. "You actually laid down and spread yourself out for him like some chippie out there on the street," he nearly muttered, more confirming the point to himself than posing a question. He'd said it in a low but intense voice, fearful that the final analysis of his examination might per chance leak out through the basement window for some passing neighbor to hear.

Frank, all at once dumbfounded by fate, fell silent after over and over uttering a madman's whispers to the four walls around him, "He says he wants it, he likes it that way -- "

Seemingly rooted to the spot, the deacon stood facing his son shaking from head to foot. Seconds later, his face twisted into a picture of every ugly thing in the world. And he all at once vehemently roared, "I'm a man who fathered sons -- not no damn girls."

Frank Creely swung hard at his son's face. The result of the sudden connection of his open hand with Harlan's cheek brought about a loud, pistollike report that was heard at the top of the basement stairs.

"Frank what in the world is goin' on down there? Tell me right now what's all this yellin' and carryin' on's about," Cleotha demanded as she hurriedly started down the stairs from her kitchen.

So furious that large beads of sweat were formed on his dark brow, the deacon wheeled around in his wife's direction. "Go back upstairs woman," the enraged deacon thundered.

"I'm not about to go anywhere. I'm the boy's mother and I want to know exactly what he's supposed to have done Frank," Cleotha answered back just as loud.

"Get back up to your kitchen woman," Frank yelled out again, every vein in his neck visible. Then with a laugh as mean and bitter as it was icy, he informed Cleotha, "Exactly what you're the mother of I can't rightly say I know. Worst of all, there's not a thing in this world that can lead me to believe such a piece of trash was ever any part of me. If he is," Frank sneered, "then it would have been better that I'd played with myself and left the makin's of him in a snot rag than in your belly."

"What?" Though thoroughly shocked and confounded by Frank's ranting, Cleotha paid no attention and proceeded, in a rush, the rest of the way down the worn, painted stairs.

Harlan was picking himself up from where he'd tripped and fallen beside the ancient concrete laundry sink. He'd hit his head on the sink and his hand bore a cut from a shard of glass that lay on the floor. Though lined with trouble, his young face was as much ablaze with wrath as from the sting the blow his father had dealt. Forgetting Sunday School advisements to honor his father the tall youth suddenly feeling it time for balancing the score, not just for this but many things, began making slow but determined steps toward his father.

Cleotha forced her way between them but every vein in Frank's neck stood out again as he rabidly shouted past her, "No nigger, no! Don't even let me think you mean to raise your hand to me. I'll break your neck boy! I swear by all that's holy I'll -- "

Harlan's ever gentle eyes had narrowed to vicious slits. "There's not another damn thing you'd better try to do me again except leave me the fuck alone," he hissed, swelled up with rage that surpassed his father's. Both his parents were taken aback. He rushed from behind the barricade of his mother's girth to confront his father face to face. "Do you hear? If you ever as much as lift one finger to me again, I'm the one that's swearin' to God if any neck breakin's gonna be done I'll be the one to do it -- you son of a bitch," he spat.

Frank lunged at Harlan but Cleotha leaned into him with all her strength to push him off-track. "Harlan! What's happenin' here? This is your father your talkin' to boy," she wailed shrilly as she continued struggling to keep the two apart.

"What did you say? Father my eye!" Frank bellowed. "Woman, I'm a natural born man livin' the way any natural man ought to and know it. How could a man have anything like this waste of seed come out of him? Get out of my house," Frank said, all at once swinging a trembling arm toward the stairs. "You're a useless piece of filth! You hear me? An abomination on the face of the Earth!"

"You don't have to worry, I won't be back this way until it's time to put your black hypocrite self in the ground," Harlan snarled as he wheeled about toward the stairs.

Frank's braying sneer trailed after his son as Harlan reached the bottom step, "Go head then. Go on back and play woman with your supposed to be man."

"What's goin on? What in Heaven's name is he talkin' bout?" Cleotha wailed, again begging an unseen authority for an answer. Wracked with sobs, she solitarily found physical support by leaning on the old laundry sink but no comfort for sorrow in the chaos.

Harlan looked back in pain at his sobbing mother bent over the sink only to hear Frank scream for him to get out again. Hesitating no longer, hot tears all at once streamed off his burning cheeks like hard rain as he rushed past Buddy who stood stunned inside the kitchen just at the top of the stairs. "What's wrong?" his little brother whispered frightened but Harlan was gone for good from the house on Walnut Street in an instant. The slam of the vestibule door rattled the banjo clock hanging near it in the living room. It was ten past five ...

Still dazed, Clay lifted the receiver of his telephone when it rang at five-thirty but found that he was unable to form words for either an inquiry or a greeting. No matter. The voice on the other end of the line proceeded despite silence or lack of acknowledgement. Even though distorted with loathing and venomously disdainful condescension, it was thoroughly familiar to the preacher. It was Frank Creely's.

"Well, sir if makin' whores out of other men's sons is what you're lookin' to do in life I guess you've got one to your credit. It's all right, you can have him," the voice said after a long pause, "I'm a full-blooded man. I'm not about to own a faggot son." Those last words were bitten off and spat out like husks on sure fact.

The voice taunted, "If I was you I'd be at my window keepin' watch. I suspect, right about now, he's on his way there lookin' for you to squeeze and hold him like a little girl. Might even be ready to spread his hindparts for you some more too since he says he likes tryin' please you.

The barrier holding back the deacon's wrath broke. "Do whatever the hell you want to with him. Dress him up in ladies clothes, let him paint his face. Just understand he's been told never to cross my doorstep again. Never! I'll try to knock his brains out if I find him here at my house again."

"In one way, it looks to me like you might end up gettin' off easy. Far as my lawyer says, bein' the boy's nineteen, it puts him a good year beyond me and the law bein' able to have the least bit of say in any of this. Even so, bless God, I still have one whole son and it may prove best not to have this stirred up in court. There's never been any such trash as this goin' on in the family and I'm not about to have it known all over town and in church that all of a sudden a he-she's grown on my family tree.

"So, mister, for just this minute, all you have to think about is bein' sure you have your mess out of that church office no later than Monday night -- every last bit of it -- and you've got your new girlfriend all to yourself.

"To save us all more inconveniencin' talk, it's best you go in and preach tomorrow -- if there's any kind of way you can gather up enough nerve to walk into a house of God with your head up. I'm thinkin' all this out on the run but don't worry, I'll make your excuses come Tuesday and handle the arrangements for a visiting pastor next week set up by Thursday."

"Deacon Creely --"

"Reverend Adderly -- nothin'-- don't say nothin'," the deacon hissed warningly into his end of the phone. "Didn't I tell you that before? Listen ... just listen to me and save yourself some trouble! I've got no ear to lend you for denials or excuses nor pleadin' or apologizin'. You've gone and messed up somethin' that's out of me. You'd both better thank your lucky stars that Frank Creely's got greater concerns than a homo son and his boyfriend to think about.

"But don't you forget what I said -- listen well. I've got a feelin' you'd better be packin' up real soon and lookin' around for new huntin' grounds because there's not goin' be much in the way of work for you in Philadelphia. And should it just be you've got your mind on a new game plan, forget about runnin' to somebody else's church offerin' your services -- if that's what you call it. Even though what we both know may not hold much sway with the police, don't think your hankerin' for boys' behinds is going to be allowed to pass by the bishop or any church looking for your recommendation from Greater Thesselonian."

"Remind that thing comin' to your house he's never to come nowhere near me or my house again." That was the last Clay heard of the voice on the other end of the line before the receiver was slammed down.

Later, at a quarter to seven, not long after Clay had exited the shower the doorbell rang ...

1964 - Part 9

Upstairs in the bathroom, his lips set determinedly, silent Harlans broad shoulders quaked now and then as he struggled to remain standing upright underneath the immense weight of his first great heartache. He held his body straight and stiff, fighting with a fury but failing not to yield to tears again while Clay carefully saw to the swelling at his right eye and lower lip. No matter how forcefully Harlan tried to will them away and though hed never once actually sobbed outright, tears and more tears soundlessly dripped from his cheeks with no indication of their remedys soon arrival. Each time the handsome preacher would gently daub a salty stream off his face with the cool wash cloth in his hand, without fail, a new tiny river of scalding tears promptly appeared in its place.

Facing up to how rapidly things were changing, becoming difficult, was a hard enough thing in itself. Hidden truths first turns in the light had proved a far more jarring gathering of momentum for progress than the beautiful youth priorly imagined. Ousted from the nest suddenly and painfully, though his life was without doubt at last his own it had been handed back to him in a fashion he hadnt quite foreseen.

The worst of the days outcome hadnt been the shock of his fathers unexpected discovery or the resulting bomb blast of a showdown in the basement with the deacon at home. Neither had it been the blows and injury hed come to suffer by his fathers hand and hate for the small cut on his hand now cleaned and bandaged, his swollen eye and bloodied bottom lip would all heal in a little time. As if his own grief wasnt enough to bear, it was the devastating, nightmarish manner by which his gallant adoption of outright honesty had caused the pain of those given him to love to become his too. His little brothers fear and confusion, his mothers anguish both were become part of him ... all his ... haunting him, hurting him all at the same time.

Yet strangely enough had the somber-eyed youth not been brim full of the dark ache of bitterness, right then and there, Harlan might have found himself reduced to raucous, side-splitting laughter at the stupidity he all at once saw. Suddenly quite bewildered by himself, Harlan wondered how could he have even briefly believed that he and Clay might be allowed to circumvent the dangers lurking behind every tree and bush in a forest as big as fate. If the tall, lean new man hadnt felt so near to falling to his knees like a felled tree, hed have surely bent over laughing at the idea of their being allowed to be together unbothered or lucky enough to slide by -- even for a little while.

He popped you a real good one on this jaw here, Clay confirmed with a slow emphatic nod in the continuance of his painstaking inspection of Harlans face. That swellin by your eyes kind of bad but theres just one little-bitty cut. Wed best be sure it dont get the chance to fester. Harlan flinched and jerked his head back. Come on, hold still now, Clay cajoled softly. Iodine always carries a bit of a sting with it. The young preacher serving as best he could as doctor for Harlans ills, stepped back a bit to examine his work as he tore the wrapper off another band-aid.

Clay picked up the washcloth hed been using, and, one-handed, rinsed and squeezed it dry. He carefully wiped Harlans bruised face yet another time. His patient, continued to hold himself straight and stalwart without utterance and tried to show himself as much a man as the man he loved, even though quiet tears still kept on falling. But, the need to cry wasnt possessed by Harlan alone.

The big honey-colored man instantly recalled that first kiss hed let the youth taste only four days before and ruefully saw his acquiescence as the root of Harlans pain. Deep inside Clay felt as though any minute he might just break down and cry too.

As the young preacher warned but had himself come to forget the more the steeping brew of his and Harlans passion intensified: though love couldnt be bought it wouldnt come cheap. The sum total of all the prior accruals of achievement the young minister had set stock in would soon rapidly dwindle to nothing; his future in the clergy and his marriage -- once Joyce was confronted with the truth. Even if his wife proved of a mind to forgive and go on, Clay knew he himself could not. At its magnificent best, at last love he wanted had been placed in his hand, his eyes had been opened. Nothing else would ever suffice.

Regardless of all the sorrowing roiling his insides, the young preacher set further thought over it aside. There was no time for indulging in a luxury as big as tears of his own just then. It was going to take all he could do to see Harlan through this first long night . . . .

Harlan silently sat on the beds edge, downcast. Passing minutes had stemmed his teeming tears to occasional drops. Squatting in front of him, Clay gazed reassuringly into his young loves reddened eyes as he began to undress him. The preacher slipped Harlans scuffed brown penny loafers and thick white socks off his feet then, Stand up for me a minute, he gently directed. Rising as well, the big man reached to hurriedly fling back the bedspread and sheet once Harlan was on his feet.

With patience, the big man slowly went on undressing the lean, battle weary youth, first helping him out of the treasured leather jacket he hadnt shed since his arrival, then his sweater and shirt. Upon his thick fingers agile undoing of belt and pants, the downward force of Clays big hands on Harlans wide shoulders sat him down on the bed again.

The young preachers large hands tenderly gripped those strong brown shoulders and guided Harlan to lie back on the bed. Raise that pretty behind up a little, Clay said as he grasped his sad-eyed young loves opened jeans by the waistband and finished the rest of the job. Harlan lay on his back with his long legs dangling off the beds edge, stripped of everything except his briefs.

Doctors orders: the handsome preacher let it be known with a succinct but gentle attitude of voice as he began to gather up Harlans things, you just let yourself lay and try not to worry -- youre here with me now.

The tall, brawny mans eyes momentarily traveled the sinewy, teak-colored body of the youth lying on his bed. His mind was all at once full, contemplating love fine in kind despite all the inevitability of further tragedy ahead. But, the preacher wasnt left to travel a plane of thought that high or sweet for long because realitys continuous resurfacing set in on him like a recurring troublesome ache.

Looking left then right, Clay made an intensely thoughtful retrospect of the room almost as though only becoming acquainted with the design of it -- and all things -- for the first time. Its doubtful well be here long but pay it no mind youngblood, he said quietly after a long minute of looking and thinking, appearing to have just read the sky. No matter where, no matter what, youll be with me. All you have to do is say you know thats what you want.

Harlans arms lifted and stretched out, straining as they reached for the preacher. The young pilgrim began crying outright and his soft sobs continued as Clay settled him beneath the covers. Clay pulled the sash on his robe tighter and then lay down next to him atop the bed.

Theres healin in tears, the young preacher whispered wisely as he drew Harlan close against his brawny frame and kissed his forehead lightly, ... a whole lot of healin.

Harlan was just awaking from a brief sleep.

Oohwee youngblood, the trials of the day have left you kind of ripe in the aroma department, aint they? Clay, laughing, had just lovingly nuzzled his face against Harlans shoulder and gotten a whiff of his underarm. The youths scent, actually not repellent to the young preacher despite his jocular inference, to the contrary surely bore an exhilarating masculine bouquet. Harlans smell was so seductive in fact that it almost looped and caught like a ring in the brawny, bullish mans nose as he was bridled and led by sweet circumstance into physical want of the youth again. The feeling was upon the young preacher so speedily that he was taken by surprise as a sudden rush of arousal caused the prime piece of his virility to swell between his legs. However, remaining clear-eyed with respect to immediate necessities, the young preacher in love deemed a little jovial teasing and something to eat a far better treatment for Harlans ills than sex.

For no particular reason, out of the blue the muscular, honey-colored man issued a warning chuckle just before he pounced on the leggy youth like a cat ravenous to devour a mouse. They began to play.

The big man took to tickling any rib his lean, young friend happened to leave undefended. Harlan retaliated in kind, and in no time the two of them were on the bed making quite a commotion and a mess of the bed things as they rolled about wrestling. Laughing and howling, they became gleeful like small boys -- no sorrows, no wounds remembered.

For two people who felt so much for each other this spontaneous bout of play, inevitably transposing, might well have segued to sex. Despite their pain, whether individual or shared or of the heart or of the body, their two strong bodies began responding to the change in atmosphere, quieting in some ways, stirring in others.

Clay became still and lay sheltering his eyes in the curve of Harlans long neck saying nothing, doing nothing. He simply held the young man he loved with all his heart close as he could. Lying pressed against him, the hard-dicked young preacher finally abandoned silence and growled huskily into his young loves ear, Aint nothin or no one like you in the world, youngblood, I do declare.

Then . . . this is really it, huh? Love? Harlan responded soft-voiced and pleased.

Yep, I believe it is -- rough start and all, Clay answered solemnly.

Wary of the boys swollen lip, Clay kissed him lightly on just one cheek and then made himself let him go. He sat up abruptly. Hey now, dont go changin the subject on me. Get your butt in the shower. The order was issued with a playful slap on one side of Harlans slim ass. Feeling accomplishment on discovering Harlan enough removed from his troubles to muster easy though minor-sized giggles made the big man suddenly unspeakably happy though deep in the midst of his own . . .

Harlan took the fresh towel Clay handed him out of the tiny closet in the upstairs hallway. While you get cleaned up, Ill see what I can rustle up to eat. Feel like eatin dont you? the preacher asked, his brow again interrogatively gathered and risen for a serious pause.

Yeah -- kind of, Harlan sighed as he nodded.

Yeah? Clay smiled wisely. Thats a good sign, my man --, he told him, a sure nough good sign.

Harlan, half-believing, nodded but didnt require him to explain, of what.

Grinning wide, Clay bossily chided, Get on bout your business. Put on the TV when you come out, he said as he headed for the stairs. Maybe theyve got a game on tonight.

The big man ambled around the kitchen checking the refrigerator and cupboards for food to fit the occasion -- a feast to sustain two strong virile lovers. Finding nothing suitable that could be quickly made, instead of endeavoring to cook, the preacher rushed upstairs again to change.

He left the Buick parked and instead sprinted to a small neighborhood restaurant two blocks north of the house. In quick order hed arranged a lesser feast of two steak hoagies, some fries and a few cold bottles of orange soda. Within the hour Harlan and he were once more side by side in the middle of the big bed. Both bare-bodied save for their underwear sat backs leaned back against the wide beds veneered headboard as, laughing, they shared a tray and an old movie being screened on the black and white TV.

Even though Harlan was outwardly of a brightened disposition he was nowhere near moving toward a further unraveling of all that had taken place between himself and the deacon. Once hed finished his hoagie, grateful, he smiled at his golden man and curled up on the bed, contentedly resting his head on Clays warm, hairy thigh.

The TV, on a small table near the corner of the bed, held neithers attention for long. Eventually as his interest in it began to wane, Harlans fingers, seemingly aimless, wandered the preachers bare, hard thigh as black-and-white images that sometimes said things, sometimes sold things continued traversing the screen scene to scene. However, it wasnt by happenstance that Harlan overreached to scratch the back of his head. The tips of his slim fingers began a teasing path across the top of the thin cotton bound bulge the preachers cock and balls formed just behind the crown of his head.

Clay said nothing but sent his own thick fingers tenderly furrowing rows through the field of black, woolly hair on Harlans head as his dick went hard.

Blind travelers journeying beyond his range of sight, Harlans long brown wiggling fingers felt out a path that led up a loose leg of Clays boxer shorts. The lovers touch on his thigh caused the young preachers tumescent dick to hurriedly finish its straightening and lengthening to push its fleshy head along his muscular leg and meet Harlans searching fingers more than halfway.

A little surprised, You really feel like it? Clay inquired. The question was lightly tinged with caution.

Yeah Big Man, Harlan replied, drawing his hand off Clays hard-on.

Big Man? the curious preacher responded.

Youre mine now?

Yeah, the preacher sighed.

Then thats what Im callin you from now on, the youth said as he grinned, then yawned and stretched as he turned belly up to gaze at Clays face. Not so much cause youre big on the outside . . . and in certain places . . . its cause theres so much good stuff about you on the inside.

Well then, move over a little. Ive got good stuff aplenty for you, the handsome man said as he promptly began sliding all his muscular frame down into bed. Once they lay close, Clay quite gently laid his lips on Harlans. That help take some of the hurt away? he asked with a whispered as inspected the swollen corner of the Harlans mouth a long kiss later.

Yeah, the youth replied breathily.

Diligent in his care, the gold-skinned young preacher then put his lips to the bruise beside Harlans puffy eye. As if suddenly and somehow uncannily advised that great healing power lay in kisses, Clay rolled his hard body onto Harlans with the firm intention that his wounded young lion should have a full supply.

The young preacher gathered and cradled Harlans head in his big hands.

Aroused and ready for duty and wasting not a minute in the delivery of the cure his lips held, he fervently began a rushed application of tender kisses all about the lean youths face.

Clays actions continued to grow even more in this intense rendering of his service when he felt steady throbs of Harlans dick, rock hard under his hairy belly. Giving a great groan he scooped the wide-shouldered youth into his big arms and kissed and sucked at the satin smooth brown skin along his neck as he progressively lowered his mouths position on Harlans firm body. Clay wagged his head to and fro and brushed the tiny peak of one of Harlans nipples with his mustache. Zealous in their labors, the preachers full lips tweaked the small dark nipple as he gingerly mopped it with just his tongues tip. This elicited a breezy moan from Harlan. The preacher moaned too as the youths slim fingers lay lazy veering trails through the wiry hair atop his head.

Then, after having lingered on the tiny nut brown nipple for a time, as Clay prepared to move his mouth on to its mate he realized Harlans cock was gone soft under him. Bringing himself up on an elbow, the bed began to jiggle as the brawny man chuckled softly. Harlan had fallen asleep.

Lord knows its been a rough day baby-man; couldnt hold out could you? he muttered just before planting a kiss on peacefully slumbering Harlans flat belly.

The young preachers first intention was merely to roll off and get to sleep himself. Who under Heaven could tell what new burdens and turmoil were arriving with the next mornings sun would start brewing. However, when he raised up on all fours, poised protective and bearlike over the beautiful youths slim sculpted form the longer he took in the sight of him the more he became reluctant to move away. The longing to touch Harlan just one more time again overcame him.

A soft velvet rumble sounded in deep the young preachers throat with the rise of the sweet ache invading his pendulous nut sack. Hanging low and swinging between his thick, hairy thighs they jiggled as Clay slowly let his head and shivering shoulders drop. The gold orbs of his ass sat proud and high as his lowered lips gently pressed into Harlans warm belly, Clay let his lips gently drag across the firm, flat plain of muscle a second time, and then once more.

As sleepy as he too felt, the big man sighted an incentive for staying awake just a while longer. It spurred his cock, thick and long, to lift up toward his gut as he backed a bit farther down the bed. Another lovers kiss came drifting down and this time fell dead-center on Harlans navel. Thoroughly aroused, Clay couldnt resist returning his mouth to the shallow little well in Harlans belly. He probed it with his tongue.

Lifting his head, Clay peered into the shadows that his broad muscular frame cast over Harlan beneath him and painstakingly studied the bare head of the zigzag of dormant sex that lay across the lean youths belly. Caught in a kind of curious rapture, he brought his head down again and with no difficulty, sucked the tip end of the Harlans flaccid sex inside his mouth.

There came no stirring to life as the preachers fingers lightly gripped its limp length near its tip. Not really expecting much reaction from his sleeping bed partner anyway, slowly tonguing the head of it, the big man was content to considered its taste, then the feel of it inside his mouth. When his moist lips let it go a few minutes later to gently nuzzle and lap at the loose, warm brown pouch swollen with Harlans balls the saliva slicked top half of the the sleeping youths long soft dick flopped over his grasping fingers .

The soap sweet and must scent of the young mans sexual parts fueled the preachers passion. Not ready to resist the feeling, the big man divided the sleeping youths legs with the slow but firm urging of a knee and then planted a hand at each of his sides. Nimble and quick, the well-built man established support for the weight of his upper body on his strong arms as he unbent his tall frame.

The big mans thick dick was jammed hard into his gut and dragged along beneath him over fold and clumps in the sheets as he shimmied on his belly until hed backed his way near shoulder deep in the wonderful warmth radiating inside his young loves opened thighs.

The lamplight inside the room played on the dusting of glistening black hair across the preachers honey-hued backside as the travel of his husky form halted halfway off the bed. Clay eagerly fitted Harlans dick to his mouth once more. Taking as much as he could of the soft mass inside his mouth, the big man resumed gently swabbing Harlans cockhead with his tongue while his hands lightly kneaded both sides of the boys ass. In the touching, the young preachers recall of what fucking the long-legged young man was like was instantly prompted. Low on his body, Clay felt his cock buck upward and slap his hard belly.

Harlan sighed in his sleep and stirred slightly as his own cock slowly swelled up inside the preachers mouth. The big man wondered at what Harlan might be dreaming of as he felt it grow.

Quickening with the rise and fall of Clays mouth on it, the broad-shafted man-flesh between Harlans long legs went all the way hard. Harlan murmured as his dick reached full stand but Clay did not know upon whom he called.

The hour was growing late and the street outside becoming a still, dark world all to itself. There was as little sound to be heard in the room removed from the outside hush other than the big beds soft, steady groans and creaks as Clays head bobbed and his wide shoulders weaved rhythmically. Noiselessly, he sucked on the head of the rigid dick captured in his mouth and pumped its lengthy shaft steadily with his hand.

There came sudden but slight tremors in slumbering Harlans fingers after a sizable span of more quiet within the room as Clay continued making love to the youths motionless form with his mouth. Upturned and ready to receive the gift of the moment, Harlans hands and fingers fluttered at his sides like fallen birds on the blanket just as a breathy gush of mumbled blessings escaped his lips. His head lolled on the pillow and he began to speak in the cryptic tongue known only beyond the waking world as his balls tightened in Clays warm cradling palm. Slow exhalations brought forth more of Harlans pleasured whimpers in commentary to the dream he lay dreaming as the tip of the preachers tongue danced around the tiny slit his cockhead.

Inside the preachers mouth a tiny spill of fluid leaked from the little opening in the crown of Harlans cock. So minute it was, Clay would have missed the single droplets birth and passing had it not been for the hint of salt it left on his tongue. Like a magical elixir this infinitesimal outpouring rallied the tired preacher to more vigorous action. He knew what was soon to be.

The unfurling of the sleeping Harlans orgasm came about in as gentle a way as the passing soft, long sighs that slipped from the sleeping youths lips as the first of a peaceful rivers pulsations, a gentle gush of warm semen, instigated a slow creeping flood inside the preachers mouth. Harlans cock throbbed in synch with his heartbeat and was firmly ringed by the big mans fingers when his shoulders shuddered and his pelvis jerked involuntarily. Lean legs quivering like reeds in a brisk wind and with gasps and little jerks the youths comely brown body delivered up more seed past the preachers pursed lips.

When it was done, Clay remained where hed come to kneel for a minute or so longer. Pensive and perfectly still, the young preacher tilted his head back slightly and swallowed the ample spill of the warm sticky fluid inside his mouth and then pulled the youths soft cock free of his lips and deftly lay it down on Harlans easily rising belly with his fingers. The big man rose and climbed into bed with his young love once more.

Lying there while Harlan drifted deeper into sleep, the young preacher pondered the lingering taste in his mouth and the sound of the youths easy breathing in his ear as he thumbed a nipple on his bare chest. His own cock, hard and neglected the whole while hed ardently mouthed and sucked Harlan, was still standing strong and tenting the bed covers.

His feelings, amorous and sexual, were wide awake in disregard of the hour. There was something in the moment that made the young preacher, highly turned on and impetuous, want very much to kiss his sleeping young prince awake to loving surprise. The back of the handsome mans hand slowly brushed up and down his stiff cocks top side as he pictured it.

First, hed rise again and oil his dick and then come back to bed and pull Harlan close. Hed finger and feel between the smooth brown orbs of his ass until he felt the tiny hole hidden down in the firm muscle they were made of soften under his touch. Then, knowing all was ready hed slowly work his cock into the tight recesses of the youths slim tail and set to killing the fire raging around his nuts. He envisioned what it would be like to have Harlan slowly awaken and find himself engulfed by all his passion and all his love as he gently fucked his ass.

A moment more of thought made Clay admit to himself what a sweet dream it was indeed but the imperative was that Harlan rest on.

Abruptly deciding on another course for his stirred up need, the randy young preacher hastily took hold of himself. He lightly put the squeeze on his aching dick as he pensively set his hand to slowly pumping the shaft. Equally as abrupt, he left off and released his cock. How could he settle on his hand when Harlans provided him far finer sensation he wondered. It seemed a real waste to him and so he gazed at Harlan, asleep under his wing. Mornins comin, he thought as he closed his eyes. Therell be time.

1964 - Part 10

Believing the rattling of the storm door at the back of the house indicated Clays return from the local grocers, Harlan gave no particular thought to his state of dress. For the week theyd been together, the handsome pair had known little need for clothes or much else, except themselves. Each of the new lovers so much involved in gorging himself on the feel of the others body and intimacy, theyd both found themselves hard pressed for time to venture farther from the house other than for short trips out for food. Thus it stood the greater part of all the young outcast possessed, pants, shirt, socks, were downstairs tumbling toward a state of clean in the wash. One of the brawny preachers clean undershirts, a bit too large, and his own thin briefs were all Harlan wore.

The storm door rattled again and, smiling, the long-legged youth leapt up from his place on the rug before the television to go and see if Clay was in need of help. It didnt occur to him, until just that moment, how hungry doing it late in the afternoon could make someone.

Single-mindedly, the long-legged youth ran down eager to see what would constitute the makings of that nights dinner.

Oh!, Harlan gasped, shocked as he swung the kitchen door open. Cleotha, his mother, stood facing him from the other side the threshold.

The normal level of warmth in the attitude Cleotha Creelys usually amiable light brown eyes plummeted, degree by degree, to chilling cold as they narrowed to slits. All in one brusque circuitous sweep, the short, stout womans icy gaze raked a trail from her sons astonished face to his bare feet and up again. She bit her lip, then tilted her head to one side and said quite to the point, Your daddy told me, all of a sudden, youve got a real bad problem bout keepin clothes on yourself. I see for myself the man was right.

Um -- Mom . . . come in, Harlan stammered, clumsily moving back from the opened door to let his mother in.

As she stepped forward, Cleotha gave him the same piercing look she always gave her sons when judgement time was due. Darlin dont you worry bout that none. I certainly do mean to be comin in here, she said tersely. Carrying a leather traveling-bag of good size at her side, she came across the doorway. Inside, looking behind herself, Well dont just stand there lookin. Close the door before you let all the heat out to the house.

Once inside, the portly brown-skinned woman made no immediate effort to further address her son. Instead, in a momentary and womanly sort of survey of the Adderlys tidy kitchen, she stood in the middle of the white tile floor eying furnishings, cabinetry, and the printed cotton curtains at the windows. Harlan guardedly watched at a distance.

Without offering estimation or approval of the place, Cleotha Creely subsequently turned about-face to rivet her attention on her son. Her voice was reined in and quiet but of a timbre the same stern shade as a storm cloud. Boy, I dont have a snip of a notion bout what else is in this mans house but I know for sure your clothes must be up in here somewhere . . . and the other thing I know is that youd better go put em on -- right now. You hear me?

All my stuffs in the basement; in the washing machine, Harlan quietly apprised her. I really dont have anything else to wear, he added, trying not to let all his reawakened sadness show.

The fire in his mothers eyes died that moment and the anger on her face abruptly waxed to dismay. She quite knowledgeably sighed, I know. Thats why I brought these things from the house, she said, nodding at the bag set at her feet. Now get on upstairs and find somethin to put on.

Without comment, Harlan complied by hastily turning in retreat. Hed just reached the staircase when Cleotha, more than a little nonplused at his absentmindedness, demanded to know, Where has your mind gone Harlan Creely. Boy, bring your butt back here and get this thing. Frowning and irritated all over again, she snatched up the leather bag and paced, heavy footed, as far as the dining rooms entry once her son retraced his steps.

Oh, was all embarrassed Harlan could find to offer in admitting the silly oversight. Skittishly swinging his own line of sight clear of the cutting edge of his mothers, the nervous youth reached out and gingerly grabbed the brown bag by its handle and took it from her.

Oh, nothin. Cleothas sharp retort followed her son as he rushed for the stairs again. Just get yourself on out of my face and look in that thing for some clothes to put across your narrow behind, she said as she watched him head upstairs again, patting her foot impatiently.

Her sons footsteps fast fading in her as he rose the stairs, the stout, worried mother turned from the doorway and placed her large black handbag on the kitchen table. She removed her gloves but only unbuttoned the heavy woolen coat she wore and did not remove her hat.

Left to think and to wait until Harlan came down again, preoccupied Cleotha Creely slid one of the four wrought iron chairs in the set away from the table and took a seat. She sat there examining her plain wedding band, twenty-three years old; her blank stare greatly devaluing it. However, an instant later, her attention was drawn in another direction as her brow gathered. Behind her, the rasp of a key quickly shoved into the kitchen doors lock interrupted her quiet meditation. Swiftly twisting round in her chair, she faced Clay just as he entered the kitchen with a large, full brown paper bag cradled in each arm.

Clay came to a cautious halt just inside the door once he laid eyes on her and in awkward, telling silence sorted out words but found none appropriate except, Welcome, Sister Creely. Though he said no more than that, an unspoken apology at once expressed itself inside his embarrassed eyes.

Cleothas searching gaze pored over every line and angle of the tall handsome mans face with care. Well now Reverend Adderly, you look a mite surprised. Didnt expect youd be seein me? she asked with a subdued but knife-edged sarcasm as unnerving as the puzzlement her small smile caused the big man.

He knew the storm on the rise inside her angry eyes would soon engulf them all. To stem the flood of instantaneous wonderings over what was to be left him in its wake, Little things first, the young preacher reminded himself, judiciously keeping silent. There was not a thing to do, not a thing to say, just await the confrontation.

Despite the step-up of uneasiness that churned inside his gut, the big man set about seeing to it that the full grocery bags, about to tilt, remained upright at the back of the kitchen counter. Done, Let me get somethin for you, Sister Creely, he offered. A cup of coffee or maybe some --

No sir, not for me, she broke in on the invitation. Im not in need of a thing, thank you. Cleothas voice lost its hardness and she appeared almost wistful when she spoke again. Seems to me the thing Im wantin most is somethin both you and I know Ill never be able to have -- again.

Offering her attention, the large woman straightened in her chair, anticipating the young preacher would take the opening shed allowed him and openly concede at least his comprehension of the problem at hand. She meant to use that same acknowledgement as the vantage point from which to begin to state, in detail, her feelings but received no such quick satisfaction.

Of course, Clay instantly realized where he was being led but thought better of following. He remained mute in spite of the allowance, neither ready yet to abet nor stomach a dig into the past several days occurrences. Instead, he turned on the gas jet beneath the large aluminum kettle at the back of the range.

Save for the rattle of cups and saucers being set down on the kitchen counter as Clay took them from a cabinet above, nothing disturbed troubled silence. The sudden rending of the pall of near complete quiet draped all about the kitchen first came with the start of the monotone hum from the refrigerator and seemed almost cheery. Several minutes later, the kettles louder whistle started a spiral trill of overshadowing harmony. It was reaching its crescendo as Harlan returned, this time completely dressed. His mother studied the manner of his slow entry with deep curiosity.

The sight of Clay standing at the stove made thoroughly unnerved Harlan feel strong inside again. Raising his chin a bit, the handsome, enamored youth greeted the man he thought the most wonderful of all in the world with a half-smiled Hi. Though his expression was controlled, his voice was unabashedly tender.

Hi. Priorly edgy Clays response bore the exact same brave face.

Swinging her gaze from one end of the kitchen to the other, Cleotha carefully scrutinized both her handsome son and the man hed given himself to in ways she did not want to fully consider. However, evidence of feeling of a kind shed herself long lost sight of was so obvious between the two she was not allowed the ease of ignorance. She plainly saw there was no doubt that theirs was an affair involving more than matters of the heart. Worse, for her, the strength of it within her own sons eyes tore her apart inside as she watched him raptly look across the room.

On the other hand, Harlan nowhere near so capable of studying or maintaining dead-on meetings with his mothers eyes for long, very quietly seated himself in the chair directly across the clean white tables top from her.

You havin tea, Harlan? Clay near whispered the inquiry across the room.

Uh . . . Yes, please.

Cleotha dragged her purse off the table and into her lap as Clay made a slow approach, balancing empty cups and saucers for three on his big hands.

Please have a sip of tea, the big man gently implored. Theres even fresh-made pound cake I brought in.

Cleotha heaved a sigh. All right then, she consented shortly and, apparently meaning to show she intended to stay a while, began to draw her heavy arms from her coat sleeves.

Cups filled and some sugar and napkins set out, the young minister also took a seat. Yet, very, very conscious of himself, he uneasily leaned back in his chair and began studying his hands, folded and at rest in front of his cup.

All parties constituting the strangely related threesome sat silent around the table until, taking a deep breath to face duty, Clay began, Sister Creely, I dont know exactly where I should start. I -- Every one of the seemingly simple words the young preacher had quietly hand picked for a clean-lined assemblage of heartfelt thought and sentiment he ardently wanted to make known to Harlans mother suddenly piled up like a log jam in his aching throat.

Pursing her lips, Cleotha sat up even straighter in her chair; the undulating channels across her brow resembled streamers waving in the winds of yet contained rage. Well then, why not let me see if I cant steer you in the right direction, she said, Ive got a pretty good idea about the place to start. Cleotha ominously leaned toward him. Why dont you start by tellin me just how long this mess -- whatever it is youve been up to -- has been goin on between you and my boy.

Harlan protectively blocked Clays response. Wholeheartedly meaning to represent himself as a responsible party in the discussion he speaking up immediately, telling his mother, Its not like we were sneakin around or somethin. Its only just happened -- just a couple days or so before Daddy showed up here.

Harlan, when did I ask you? Be quiet! his mother irritatedly dismissed him as if he were still a small, worrisome child.

Hes tellin the truth, Clay swiftly attested.

Instantly crossing her arms as she feigned shock, Lordy, Lord! Cleotha exclaimed. Man, I wish to God youd been this fast at lettin as much truth be known back when Thesselonian started scoutin round for a man to fill old Pastor Jamisons shoes. An addendum, Specially bout your likin for layin round with little boys, was nastily slapped onto the thought.

Im tellin you, if the trustee board had only had a piece of notion, it sure would have saved us a whole lot of time in the weedin out process and looking straight at her son, maybe me a whole lot of grief now.

Maintaining her steely gaze, Cleotha projected a, surprisingly cynical inquiry linearly across the table to Harlan. Youre tellin me this stuff has only just now started between you and this man? she asked.

Honest, Mom, Harlan answered, nodding his head solemnly.

She suddenly twisted toward Clay again. Well then, knowin how men will go out and rut around, who elses boy have you had your hands on? What made you decide on mine?

Mom! Hes nothin like that and Im no kid. We --

Clays waving hand shot up, demanding Harlan be silent. Its all right youngblood. I thank you but I can speak for myself, he said outright as he looked Cleotha straight in the eye. Theres no way in the world I can prove this to you Sister Creely, I know, but as God is my witness no such thing has ever happened before in my life.

Well then if its somethin youve never done before -- what in the worlds led to you want him now? Cleotha was not buying Clays disclosure.

There are a hundred reasons why. All of em special and most from the very best part of my heart, but Ive got no way to offer understandable explanations about such things to you. I --

Mom --, Harlan valiantly burst out, rashly believing he could settle the thing once and for all. This is somethin Ive wanted to happen . . . all along . . . since the very first day I saw him, the lean, young man said as he directed a worshipful gaze at the handsome preacher that told his enchantment to both those there to see. Turning to his mother again, he reiterated his point. I wanted to be with him. Thats the truth pure and simple.

Parallel and recurrent horrific words and phrases had been passing in and out of her mind. Theyd been haunting every environ of Cleothas imagining every waking hour since three days before when Frank had forced a venomously righteous recitation of his accidental discovery of their son upon her. Despite the sincere and benign intent in her oldest boys delivery of fact, knowledge of Harlans uncoerced consent arrived like fulfillment of a dread but denied prophecy. It rained down dousing her like acid, caustically searing her ears, even her soul.

The impact of her sons revelation had visibly jolted her. Despite her dismay and the tears she was holding back, the portly woman continued sitting there, chin stubbornly up, bottom lip the stiff ledge seating her indignation. She braced herself against the chairs straight back trying to keep a grasp on composure. Stunned, her face turned an unreadable page.

A minute later, seemingly in recovery but obviously refusing to easily believe, she probed her son. You mean to say that youve been out here runnin after men, Harlan?

Harlan answered in a quavering voice, No, Mom -- no. Its not like that either -- I

Dadblame it boy, then what is it like? she demanded with a venomous snarl, meaning to have absolutely no truck with embroidered tales. Tell me, whats it like! she shouted once more.

Remembering Clays telling him that only truth could make what they felt for each other right and keep them together, Harlan breathed deep.

Theres been nobody else Mom but him. Never was . . . never could be . . . not for me, he replied respectfully and thoroughly forthright. For a son just trying his wings in independent flight, the depth of the bottomless well of judgment Harlan saw inside his mothers eyes was a terrifying sight. Nonetheless, the young man in love forced himself, this time, to meet her gaze directly and tell her, Mom -- I love him.

Pure and primary, the utterance was molded by the odd voice belonging to one who exercises faith in awesome dreams. Yet for all its clear beauty and honesty, the declaration failed to entreat his mothers understanding. Harlan could instantly see that in her eyes. Moments later, the youth suddenly grew as angry as he was hurt when his mothers sustained mocking silence amounted to a dismissal of tomfoolery. It is really love, he objected, hot voiced. Why cant it be?

As if the fury shed carried across Clays threshold had somehow been miraculously neutralized during the last second to flash by; as if the prior importance of what was happening between her son and the man beside him at the table was all at once escaping the moment by trivially drifting upward like a puff of smoke, Cleothas head fell back and her hat was jostled askew. The palm of her hand loudly smacked the top of the table and her large body started shaking like jelly as she commenced laughing loud and raucously.

In love? Youre in love? Boy, what in Gods name are you talkin bout? she asked, this time with astonishment of the purest kind still laughing.

When the resurrection of seriousness came after the death of her laughter, What would you know about love other than that junk you and Buddy see on the TV? she asked. Pretty words and huggin and kissin aint what loves about baby. Aint never been. It aint about layin around in bed either, she added swiftly casting a scornful glare from Harlan to Clay.

Love is havin the common sense to go out and find somebody you know you have a real chance make yourself a life with out there in the world -- hard as it is. Love is goin on with livin together anyhow, even when it gets to lookin like the love you had aint the love youve got. Its seein that garbage goes out come trash day and holdin your peace in spite of yourself. Day by day, its months and years of nights passed sittin up with young ones. Its payin bills and sufferin' and still stickin it out -- if for no other reason than just to have a door you can call yours to walk into. Thats love, boy. On top of which, none of its got nothin to do with no man lovin a man mess?

Now I want you to answer me and I want you to answer me right, she ordered, pointing a finger directly at Harlan. Who have you been talkin to? What kind of storybooks have you been lookin at that I aint seen?

If not in charge of, then surely in full possession of her outrage again, Cleotha leaned toward Clay ready to accuse. Is it you puttin this junk in his mind? she asked sharply.

Sister Creely this isnt exactly somethin you can just plant in somebodys mind. Its a natural feelin. Comes just as natural I suspect as your skin tone or how tall you grow. Its in him, its the way he feels -- naturally. Ive felt this way all my life and this one time I didnt tell myself no nor did he. We acted on it naturally. Thats the important thing to understand.

I dont give a hoot if it was one time or a thousand. Why am I supposed to understand? Cleotha heatedly inquired but did not wait for an answer.

Looking up at the young preacher as he rose from the table to distance himself a little from her wrath, Im really supposed to understand a thing thats hurtin me so bad Im not able to explain even half of why I feel like Im bein split apart?" she seethed.

Split apart I say! she shouted slamming her purse on the table. "Today, this mess has got me bearin pain that seems ten times as bad as the pain I had goin on twenty ago years when Id have sworn nothin was bout to be left of me but the two halves of my black behind the day I birthed this boy into the world.

Mom!

Shut up boy, Cleotha growled in warning.

Silent and plagued by his own pain, lead-footed, Clay trudged slowly to the other end of the kitchen. Leaning back against the refrigerator he shoved his hands in his pockets and cast his eyes to the tile floor. Cleotha trembled with rage as she rose from the table and measured step by measured step pursued.

When she faced him, Cleotha looked up at the tall man and simpered, Understand, with mocking, exaggerated effeminacy. My, my, my, mister preacher man! Youve been peddlin the love of Jesus so long that understand pops out of your mouth right easy. Understand, you said? Get the hell out of my face with understand!

Just like that, huh? She snapped her fingers just a fraction of an inch from Clays nose. The whole things supposed to be put together for me all one-two-three quick and simple like store-bought cake? Hmph! Nigger you sure ought to get out of my face.

Harlan began to bolt up out of his chair to protest again but the chill of menace in his mothers glare froze him midstance. Harlan, sit your ass down at that table before I go ahead and do what I stopped your daddy from doin, she snapped and then shot her gaze back to Clay.

Now, let me tell you exactly what I understand, she said slowly and emphatically. I understand that a little more than a week ago I was just another Negro tryin to content myself with whats supposed to be, realistically, a decent lot in life for just another Negro.

And thought I was doin somethin too! Runnin back and forth to that little job of mine feelin kind of good about myself since they gave me my little title; tryin to get my bills paid up and keep food on the table. Yes sir . . . there I was all along, goin bout my business tryin to do for my two boys and that ornery man I got as well as attemptin to do for myself. But, what a natural born fool Ive turned out to be. All my tryins meant nothin. Then again, good Lord only knows, maybe it was me. Maybe I didnt try hard enough.

For all my attempts to teach him right and a good way to live; what is it this boy of mine learned? For all my bendin over backward lately to keep some kind of peace between him and Mr. Know It All Frank; what on Earth happened? Sunday after Sunday, on time every time for twenty years, Ive hauled em to Sunday School at that same church you get your money from so they could learn the Bible and hear the Word. What has that meant?

After all of that, my oldest son -- my first baby -- cant come home because his father wont have him in the house. And why is that? Cause my son, still nowhere a man dont care how grown he might think he is has decided to lay up with another man, Cleothas voice acquired a steam like hiss, and the man hes messin with aint nobody but an out of work preacher . . . with a wife! Ha! Wonder will she understand?

And you know, heres one more thing, Reverend sir. Speakin of all this playin house and layin up mess, a burst of bitter laughter hued identical to the ugly color of the irate mothers festering contempt, cut then relinked her inquiry as to, what in the world ever made you think Id understand why my sons been leavin the stuff thats supposed to be creatin my grandbabies up your butt?

Clays face flushed crimson as Cleotha spit the salvo of hard words and mean sentiment straight at him. No way to avoid being peppered by shrapnel the young preacher grimaced in the fall-out of motherly rage. He squeezed his eyes shut and turned his head away as his pain bloomed but Cleotha wasnt quite finished.

Look any which-way you feel like, Mr. Right Reverend Adderly but hear me. I want you to catch hold of a real good understanding of just how much I hate you today! I hate you down to soul deep for bein the root of the mess thats spoiled my life and that surely will ruin Harlans.

Then, quite abrupt in the changing, the anguished mothers voice softened significantly as she suddenly spoke her deeper thoughts. God knows, even though in my heart I believe what youre doin is vile and damnable, I probably could have lived through finding out the two of youd been laying around, if it was only me who had to know.

Tears welled at the outer corners of Cleothas hopeless, tired eyes. Only her bottom lashes tenuously stayed their spill. Believe you me, Im tellin the truth . . . I believe myself a Christian woman and aint about to lie about such a thing . . . I honestly believe I could have dealt with it. Yeah, it would have hurt me to my heart but if its comin to light meant losin my child, right or wrong, Id have tried my level best to keep his daddy from knowin.

Cleothas momentarily subdued voice renewed its prior impetus once she stepped back inside her rage again. But let me tell you one thing, even though its Frank, this boys own father whos put him out in the street, youre the one whos caused him to be taken from me.

Yes sir, you're hearin' me right. Im holdin nobody responsible but you. When you took my son for your little playmate you took any snippet of a chance for harmony the so-called Creely family had left too! The loud slap of Cleothas purse against the side of Clays face emphasized her confidence respecting that last remark's fact-worthiness. Although the forlorn young preachers eyes were turned askance, hed seen the blow coming. Knowing judgement greater was coming hed neither made the effort to dodge it nor turned to meet her hot eyes once shed landed it.

Mom, please! Harlan nearly screamed in anguish.

How surprising it was . . . the amount of pain a simple kitchen so warm, so friendly in appearance could hold. My Lord! Cleotha wailed adding to the chorus of woe as she raised her large brown arms up toward the vacant plain on the ceiling overhead. My sweet Lord Jesus!

Look at what theyre makin me do! Sobbing, she stumbled back to the table and sank heavily into a chair.

Harlans tan eyes, for a long time clouded by befuddlement, suddenly cleared. Without question, he saw time had come to show himself as a man and no longer the boy spared from full responsibility of his ways. And just like a man, he wanted to be seen as not as one perpetually in need of help but, rather, one who was able to rescue.

Harlans smooth brow wrinkled as he pursed his lips and, silently ponderous, looked back down the road of fear and pain hed already traveled and on seeing how far hed come eked the strength and mind to travel a little farther. All at once disrobed of fear and confusion, the handsome youth rose from the table and stood straight; decided on what he must do.

It was Clay that Harlan first approached. Hed known his mothers heavy-handed clout now and then in his growing up and deftly inspected the hot, red blotch it had left on the tall mans left cheek with tenderly scrutinous fingertips. Assured no grave injury had been suffered, with a voice soft but open as the passion inside his light eyes, Harlan smiled and told his new lover -- his first lover -- Big Man . . . I loved you yesterday . . . I love you today . . . and Im gonna love you tomorrow. I dont want anymore than that.

Knowing full well Cleotha heard his every word and resolute about making of a man of himself, the tall youth solemenly turned from Clay and retraced his steps across the kitchen. At the round white table, he gently let his hands drift down to his weeping mothers quivering shoulders and let their comfort rest there for a time just as shed done so often for him during childhood sorrows. Then, bending over her, he tightly circled her shoulders with his young, strong arms and kissed her plump cheek hard. Mom, I love you too . . . God knows I do.

Gingerly rubbing his cheek, still reddened and smarting from the blow, Clay slowly approached the handsome youth he loved as he knelt to comfort his sobbing mother. He laid his hand on Harlans head and in the lending of the strength within himself seemed to be bestowing a blessing and silently stood over the mother and son at his table. Waiting and praying in his heart for an ebb in the hurt they all were swimming in, it was obvious to the preacher that he himself could be no less brave than the young warrior he taken to be his.

In time, as Cleotha regained her composure he spoke. Sister Creely, as far as nature goes, no matter bout the direction, Im the same as any man but Ive never been one thats doggish and never have had much use for the like either. Since Ive been ordained and married, no matter what I might have felt or who I felt it for, Ive tried my best to follow the rule book down to the letter and do what Ive been shown was right. From all this time of knowin him, I believe Harlans done just about the same, the preacher added nodding in her sons direction. If I know that, Im sure in your heart you know it too.

Maybe I misused the word, when I asked you to understand. Im really askin -- if you can find it anywhere in your heart -- forgive him . . . forgive me . . . us . . . for any pain weve caused you even though nothin can be taken back or made the way it was before.

Mind you, its not my intention to try to make you see any of this as bein right. Its just that I want you to know that whats happened hasnt come out of low-down doggishness but love in its most human form.

I apologize from the bottom of my heart for your sufferin' but look at us. What is it that the two of us have done? Whats gone on between us? Clay asked, quietly surprised that he was able to continue finding words. Why, just about the most wonderful thing in the world, Sister Creely, strange though it may look. Two people came to find what they believe is both their hearts desire and theyve said yes to lovin each other in all ways with faith enough to try and see to its lastin.

Looking up, teary-eyed Cleotha frowned deeply but let the tall sad-eyed young preacher go on to have his say.

Do what you want, do what you will -- no maam, I wont lie to you. Your son and I listened to more than our hearts and I was more than willing to follow when the feeling led us all the way upstairs to bed. Yet, for any joys, any pleasures passed between him and me these last few days, theres come just as big a heartache too cause theres nobody -- and never will be -- to even say, Were happy for you, or celebrate it with us.

Suddenly Clay dropped to his haunches, joining Harlan at the large womans side. Whats comin for us is a whole lot of mean spiritedness and nasty talk once all is known. As we can see, the Deacons been first in line. Regardless, Harlan and I have already talked it out and as much as Ive tried to dissuade this fine, strong young man of yours, he says hes got his mind made up and he believes hes able to deal with it lick by lick.

Course that, like anything else, only time can tell but thats all right by me too. I mean to be right there by his side either way because above anything else hes said, most important, the young man says he loves me. And that Ill never argue about, he said bluntly as he looked into Harlans eyes. No sense in it anyway. Youre not the only one whos lifes ended up bein turned upside down over night, Sister Creely. Look at me. The way things stand, once I lose him everything Ive got is gone.

I know and you, his own mother, has to know here sits a young man with somethin of a head on his shoulders. Hard-headed sometimes I agree, but no ways simple-minded or a liar. Thats exactly the reason why Im about to take him at his words and go head on to see what the ends gonna be, the young preacher vowed earnestly.

Guided by what you know, which I wont doubt as bein considerable, youre worried over whats ahead for him, lookin ahead and thinkin of the danger in his way just like a mother should. In the doin I realize your minds on weighin right and wrong as you see it, and physical things, and peoples opinion but my mind dwells most on things that have happened in the heart. To hear him tell me how he feels about me is like a blessin to my soul, a near bout holy thing. It makes me happy even though I've got nowhere to go and tell it.

Clay slowly reached for the hand Cleotha had rested on the table and laid his own upon it. He felt it, though small, tense iron hard at his touch but let his own hand remain in spite of that and said anyway, I guess among everything else youll have to think me as much a fool as he is because I feel exactly the same about him, always did. I love him. I loved him enough to chance losing my place in the church and my private life as I knew it to have just this little bit of time weve had and even though maybe Ive lost in one way, I love him enough to say Im not sorry.

If youre wonderin why now all this is goin on its because, beside the twelve years difference between us, it was never on my mind to try and lead him into somethin as confused as all this has turned out to be by makin plain things I didnt believe hed a mind for understandin or feelin. Meanin -- I never dreamed Harlan was studyin bout me. I thought it was all just somethin in me, the big man said. Awe, almost boyish, was lighting the preachers face as if a curtain of clouds had just been lifted from before the sun. Believe it or not, its all a matter of circumstance thats caused us to come to know each others mind.

It took some time but the tense air about the three at the table lessened. They left off examinations of their respective positions and, letting common sense guide, began to talk over essentials. Where was Harlan to stay, and then the completion of his last year of high school. Even college was skirted.

Not waiting any longer for Harlans mother to broach the issue of their living together with her own words, Clay spoke of his plan for his and Harlans quick relocation to some small hotel until either an apartment or another house could be secured. Once Harlan graduated, he thought they might return south to the house and property hed held on to since his parents death. Theyd stay there until Harlan was set for college.

Although not pleased but seeing herself left with little choice but to trust Clay would tend to her sons needs as he assured he would, Cleotha softened somewhat.

Cleotha pushed herself away from the table and prepared to go home. As she slipped on her gloves she instructed her son to, Go up again and take a look in the little zip-up compartment inside that bag Ive brought for you. Took me a little doin but I managed to move a little kitchen money and some of my own around unbeknownst to your eagle-eyed daddy. Theres near bout three-hundred.

Dont you let him him go hog wild with it either, she directed Clay with a stern look. Ill do all I can but hes gonna have to be careful, we aint rich folk. Even so, she added, you be sure you keep close in touch with me. Rich or poor, aint no way a child of mines goin round needin -- Frank Creely or no.

Sister Creely, whatevers mine is his. Anything he needs I --

Lord, its mystery to me which one of yous the bigger boy, Cleotha said with a heavy sigh. An eyebrow arched as she looked up into the tall young preachers face. Still forgettin bout somebody aint you, Rev? she reminded him. Your settlin up aint nowheres near done yet by a longshot. Youve got a wife on the way home youll soon have to reckon with.

Clays own deep sigh confirmed that that point had just become clear again.

Cleotha turned away from him and hesitantly stepped toward the kitchen door. Harlan silently crossed the kitchen and was at her side just as she reached the kitchen door. For just a sudden moment a boy inside again, unsure of himself and stiffly awkward he swiftly wrapped his arms around his mother. He hugged her with all his might. Thank you, Mom he whispered. Maybe you dont understand but thank you.

The stout woman broke into tears again. Aw Mom, no . . . please dont, her son softly petitioned. You dont have to worry bout nothin, its gonna be all right. Trust what I say.

I cant see how, sobbed the plump woman. Aint no way in the world I can see how . . .

Harlan, always remember that no matter what, youre of me and as long as theres strength in me I mean to be there for you. Hand on the doors brass knob, Cleotha halted for a long last look at her son and the preacher standing side by side. She still saw the love shed no way of making sense of and shook her head, her countenance pinched in the limbo betwixt pity and anger rising all over again. Nonetheless she withheld further criticisms as well as addendum to her prior thoughts. Pulling her coat about herself, Mind my child well, was all the stout woman said as she looked back at the young preacher. Hear me now . . . Mind my child well.

Harlan and Clay watched Cleotha slowly descend the back steps and head for her car as their future walked in.

So ends an odd fairytale . . . by Harry Schultz