All the characters and events in this story are fictitious. Any resemblance to real people, either living or dead, is entirely unintentional.
The story is copyrighted and may not be reproduced in any way without the express permission of the author who can be contacted at:
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PJ
D'n'M Part 7
From Chapter 2:
When Milo emerged, clean, dressed and hungry, though still looking barely alive, she was able to set out a mug of strong coffee and a plate of cheesy scrambled eggs and toast. Slowly, silently Milo worked his way through the food that had been put in front of him. Still nothing was said, until, eventually,
"How's D? Is he okay? Has he told you?"
Chapter 3:
Gerry was not one of those people whose day begins with an instant transition from deep, restful sleep to total, get-up-and-go wakefulness. For him the process was more like a diver, gradually rising to the surface of the water and slowly adjusting to the change of light and atmosphere. That, at least, was his `normal', but not this morning. This morning, as soon as the first hint of consciousness seeped into his mostly-still-asleep-mind he sensed that something was different. After a few seconds of his brain trying to identify the source of the strangeness he narrowed it down to the unfamiliar warmth and pressure he could feel running up and down the length of his back. Suddenly he was fully awake and very aware that the only possible reason he could think of for such sensations was the presence, in his bed, of another body, a body that was very close up and personal. And the only other body he knew of who might be, at that particular moment in time, the source of those sensations, belonged to Nico.
His first instinct was to turn around so that he could reassure himself that the boy was okay and that he hadn't, somehow, become ill in the night or experienced a dreadful nightmare, prompting him to seek out the comfort and safety of his grandpa's bed. But before that instinct could kick in, Gerry realised that what he wanted, more than anything, was to lie completely still and enjoy this very surprising and completely unexpected turn of events.
Ever since he had first met his grandson, at the airport, all those weeks ago, Gerry had made a point of making physical contact with the boy at every possible opportunity -- a hand on his shoulder, a tap on the butt, a ruffle of his hair. Of course, in Gerry's mind, there wasn't, nor could there be, anything inappropriate, certainly not sexual, about these touches, they were just the normal, casual connections between a boy and his loving grandpa, exactly the sort of non-threatening, non-controlling contact that Nico had never before experienced but which Gerry hoped would help the boy feel accepted and loved by his new family. Begin the healing process' was how he'd explained it to himself. He had also hoped that there would come a time when Nico would feel comfortable enough to be the instigator of the contact but, until now, that hadn't looked likely to ever happen. True, he'd never actually shrugged off the reassuring hand or the friendly tap, but this was the first time that Nico had initiated physical contact between them. As far as Gerry was concerned, this was huge, and he wanted to make it last as long as possible before the boy woke up and things probably returned to the normality of don't speak, don't touch'.
He didn't know how long he lay there, or even whether he slept again. What he was sure of was that he loved the sensation of the warmth radiating from his grandson's body and would happily have stayed exactly where he was so he could soak it up forever. It was like being wrapped in a magical spell. Spells, though, can't last forever, and for a man of Gerry's age, the increasingly urgent need to pee was a guaranteed spell-breaker. Carefully he began to slip out from under the bedcovers, but it turned out to be not carefully enough as he hadn't even got himself into a sitting position before he heard a completely unexpected but totally thrilling sound behind him.
"M ... mornin' grandpa."
That was it, just two hesitant words, but possibly the sweetest, most amazing, most tear-inducing words he'd ever heard. He'd almost got to the point of thinking he'd never get to hear the sound of Nico's voice but now, here he was, with a completely unexpected decision to make. Should he respond to the greeting like the big deal that it certainly was or would it be better to play it totally cool and carry on as if the fact of the boy actually speaking to him was completely normal? He desperately didn't want to make the wrong choice and scare Nico back into silent mode. It was while he was mentally dithering over the options that his bladder made up his mind for him, reminding him of the reason why he was half way out of bed in the first place.
"And good morning to you, son," he said, cheerfully, as if this was their standard first-thing-in-the-morning greeting. "Now believe me, I'd love to stay here and chat but I gotta pee. I'll be back in a couple of minutes." He hoped his voice sounded 100% normal as he made his way across to the bathroom forcing himself not to look behind, desperately hoping that he'd made the right choice. Two minutes later he found that he had, walking back into the room to see Nico still in bed, but now sitting up with an anxious look on his face and repeatedly twisting the bottom hem of his T-shirt between his fingers. Gerry couldn't even imagine what was going through the boy's mind or what had happened to bring about such a sudden change in his behaviour. Hopefully he'd find out.
"What ... what was she like, when she was a kid?" Just like that, no preamble, no tentative toe into the shallow end of the conversational pool, but a dive straight into the unknown and, potentially dangerous, deep end. If nothing else, the boy had balls. But the sudden and completely unexpected question gave Gerry no time to think, much less the opportunity to savour the unfamiliar sound of Nico's voice.
"Your mum, you mean? Kate?"
Nico nodded, his hands still busy with the T.
What a question. And how the hell to answer it?
"Well, that's not an easy question to answer. To me she was just, well, Kate. My little girl. Mostly happy, sometimes sad; mostly good, sometimes bad." He saw Nico's face suddenly darken with an accusatory expression.
"No, not BAD bad, I don't mean that. No, just normal, little girl sort of bad. More like naughty sometimes. Cheeky, really. And mischievous. She used to know exactly how to wind up your Uncle Milo." Gerry smiled at the distant memory. "But mostly she was a sweet, normal, lovely little daddy's special girl. And happy, she mostly seemed happy."
The sudden puzzled look on Nico's face was unmissable. Gerry guessed that his version of Kate's childhood probably didn't square with whatever sorry story she'd repeatedly drummed into him over the years.
"But then everything changed."
"Why?" The question was short but with an aggressive edge. Gerry guessed that a great deal depended on how he answered.
"That's a bit of a long story, and not an easy one to tell," he replied. He knew that he needed to buy himself some time; to get his thoughts together; to find words that wouldn't alienate the boy and force him back to how he'd been ever since getting off that plane.
"So, I tell you what. Why don't we both do the whole `shit and shower' thing and meet up down in the kitchen for breakfast in, say, twenty minutes? That sound good to you?"
Nico didn't respond straight away and, for a horrible moment, Gerry thought he'd blown his chance. The seconds dragged by until there was a nod and, if Gerry wasn't mistaken, even a half smile as Nico swung his legs out of bed and stood up.
Having completed his morning routine in record time, Gerry was on his way down the hallway and walking past the family bathroom when he noticed that the door was halfway open. He glanced inside. What he saw took his breath away. Nico had obviously just stepped out of the shower and was standing in the middle of the floor drying his hair. He was turned towards the open door, his head completely covered by a towel but with the whole of the front of his body in full view.
Gerry knew that he should walk away; knew that, by not moving, he was knowingly invading the boy's privacy; knew that he was taking advantage of his vulnerability; knew that he was behaving little better than those bastards who had used and abused him throughout his childhood; knew, too, that many would see this as the worst kind of violation -- he was the boy's grandpa, after all. Yes, he knew all that but he was completely unable to move or look away. His grandson was beautiful, no, more than beautiful, he was stunning.
Gerry had known, right from that first video-call sighting of him, that Nico was a handsome lad with many of Kate's features but with an additional masculine, boy-turning-into-man, definition. Now, with his head and face covered, Gerry's eyes were drawn towards the boy's maturing body. The first things he noticed were the feet which, true of so many adolescent boys, were disproportionately long and strong, as if they'd grown too fast and were waiting for the rest of the body to catch up. The feet anchored two long, lithe legs, both with firm calf and thigh muscles and neither with more than a thin haze of soft near-blond hair below the knee. As his eyes travelled to the top of the legs Gerry knew he should look away or skip past the boy's private parts but, of course, he didn't. He was curious to see how his grandson was measuring up in that department, not in any sexual way but more out of a sense of familial interest. Nico didn't disappoint. His dick was developing nicely for a fourteen-year-old - neatly cut, maybe three inches long in its softened state, an inch or so wide and with a loosely-hung and still hairless sack of just-out-of-a-warm-shower balls. Above was a small tangle of well-established hair, slightly darker in colour than the hair on his head which was still obscured by the towel. The tummy was flat with just the first hint of embryonic abs but with a very well-defined V-line on either side. Two round, dark pink nipples sat on two emerging pecs, with the whole, splendid torso supporting the broadening shoulders. Gerry knew the boy to be a keen soccer player but, with a body like that, he could easily carry on the family tradition in the swimming pool.
With Nico's arms bent upwards as he continued to rub his hair, Gerry could make out a few pale and wispy hairs in the hollow of each armpit. He knew it was an old and well-worn cliché, but if Nico had been around in sixteenth century Florence, the real life model for Michaelangelo's statue of David wouldn't have stood a chance. Gerry couldn't have been more proud and he suddenly felt a near-overwhelming sense of sadness that he'd missed out on the first fourteen years of his grandson's life.
Oh Kate,' he thought, Did we really hurt you so very badly? So badly that you needed to punish us so much?' His sadness was instantly swamped by the guilt of knowing just exactly what he had done to make his daughter want to be so cruel, a feeling that he instinctively knew he'd carry for the rest of his life, however long or short that might be.
Suddenly it looked as though Nico had decided that his hair was dry enough. He began to lower his arms. Gerry realised that he was in danger of being caught spying on his grandson's naked body. It didn't take a genius to work out that, if Nico were to have any idea of what had been happening for the last few minutes, well, the likely consequences of that discovery didn't bear thinking about. Quickly and silently Gerry continued on his way to the kitchen.
Half an hour later, with the debris from a substantial breakfast littering the kitchen table between them, Gerry resumed his story.
"The truth is, Nico, the truth is that it was mostly my fault, mine and Kate's mum's." This was going to be hard, he knew that. Like picking the scab off a nearly-healed wound. So much time had passed; so much water had flowed under the bridge. "You see Grace, that's your mum's mum, she could never accept that I wasn't the high-flying and ambitious businessman she thought she'd married. She'd imagined country houses, penthouse apartments and luxury cruises. She expected to be dressed head to toe by top class designers and to take her swanky friends to lunch at fancy, 5-star restaurants." Just talking about it made the sweat break out on Gerry's back and his heart rate to increase significantly. He leaned back in his chair, trying not to stare so intently at Nico as to make him feel uncomfortable. But he knew he had to carry on, to keep on explaining why the bottom had fallen out of Kate's world and why she'd reacted in the way she had.
"Over the years Grace became more and more resentful. She resented the children she claimed never to have wanted, she resented me, but most of all she resented the unglamorous life-style I'd `tricked' her into."
"It looks to me as if you've done okay," commented Nico, looking around the room and thinking about all the money that had been spent on him since he'd arrived in the country. "This is like, like the best of the best compared to ..." He stopped, unwilling to give anything away about his old life back in Buenos Aires. He still had no idea that Gerry knew more than enough about the sort of childhood Nico had endured, knew because of Kate's letter.
"Yeah, that's what I think too, but it was never good enough for Grace. She became, well, I suppose you'd say she became bitter and angry and more and more vindictive. Everything I did was wrong so I started to spend as much time as I could away from home. You know, site visits, client conferences, set-up meetings, any excuse not to have to spend time at home with her. That's when her drinking started. And the affairs. And, I suppose, that's when Kate stopped being daddy's special girl. At least, in her eyes. And the worst thing was, I knew things were falling apart, that me being away so much was making a bad situation worse, but I still did nothing about it."
Something, he didn't know what exactly, made Gerry determined to be as honest, but as even-handed as possible. He wasn't going to lay all the blame for what happened at Grace's door. He knew they'd both been responsible for the shit hitting the fan in such a disastrous way. As he paused to take a breath before continuing he became aware that Nico was sitting completely still, focussing 100% on the story, soaking up his every word like a sponge. He took a mouthful of tepid coffee and continued.
"Me being away so much meant that your mum and Uncle Milo were thrown right into the spotlight, Milo particularly. I don't know why she took out her negative feelings on him so much. Maybe it was because he was a boy, or because he spent so much time with D and his family. Whatever, he was constantly getting it in the neck, nothing he did was ever good enough. But at the same time as she was pushing Milo away, she was paying more and more attention to your mum. And Kate really lapped it up. Of course she did. To her, it looked like her daddy didn't love her any more. So she and her mum, they were always cosying up together, having girlie chats, keeping secrets. I found out later that a lot of the talk was about how rubbish men were -- me and Milo in particular - and over time she drove a wedge between Kate and Milo which, with me being away so much, I knew nothing about. Looking back on it now, it's hard not to think that Grace was deliberately poisoning Kate's mind in order to get back at me. It didn't seem to matter to her how much damage she did in order to get her revenge. Even if it meant her own children getting caught in the cross-fire."
It wasn't easy bringing back all these events from the past, things that Gerry had believed to be dead, buried and mostly forgotten about. He'd moved on with his life, he knew he had, but he also knew that it was important for him to be as honest as possible with Nico, not just because he deserved it, or because that was the fairest way of moving forward, but also because he was desperate to earn the boy's trust and knew that honesty, as long as it wasn't too brutal or critical of his mum, was the best, maybe the only, way of achieving that.
Nico was still obviously transfixed, fascinated to hear his grandpa's version of the events he'd heard so often before, increasingly aware that he had some serious thinking to do about his mum's past and its knock-on effect on the first fourteen years of his own life.
"So what happened?" he asked. "Why did everything turn to shit?"
Trust a kid to go straight for the trigger,' thought Gerry. No messing about. Get all the crap out in the open.'
"Well, I suppose two things happened round about the same time. One was that Kate hit her teenage rebellious phase. Nothing particularly serious -- staying out late, getting in with a not-so-good crowd, smoking some weed. All pretty standard stuff, really. But it started to get out of hand when she hooked up with a guy who was definitely bad news. The drugs, in particular, got worse and he really got his claws into her. She became distant and angry and completely impossible to get through to. Even Grace couldn't handle her." His eyes were becoming damp as the memories of that time came arrow-straight back to him.
"You said there were two things. What was the other one?"
"What? Oh, yeah. Well, it was then that Milo was really struggling to make sense of his sexuality, you know, to understand his feelings for other boys. He'd known for a long time that he'd got feelings for Dan but this all happened a while before they actually got together. But he had a cousin, Zephan, my sister's boy, who'd worked out that M was gay but still very much not out. So he decided to make the most of the situation, one time when we went to visit and the two boys had to share a bedroom, and then later when Zeph was staying with us for a few days."
"What did this Zephan guy do, beat him up for being el maricon?"
"El maricon?" This was a word Gerry had never heard before.
"A faggot."
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