FOR A STARRY NIGHT
By Tommyhawk1@AOL.COM
WWW.TOMMYHAWKSFANTASYWORLD.COM
I saw Brent "Bull" Chadwick in the hallway as I exited algebra class just two weeks before the end of our senior year. He was with some of his football friends, and when he glanced my way, I gave him the signal, outstretched hand over my head, then the hand-signal for seven. He nodded and turned away again. I gave a longing glance at those buttocks of his, wide, horizontally oval lumps jammed into his blue jeans, wide but firm as bowling balls. He moved and his letterman jacket, yellow with green trim, the school colors, dove down to cover his butt again and I shook myself and went on to my physics class. Bull took off with his friends to Bonehead English and that was the last time I saw him that day.
But when I made it out the back door of my house that evening just at seven o'clock, a thick blanket draped over one arm, he was waiting in the alley with his car. An older model faded-blue Chevrolet sedan, it was a rather sedate-looking vehicle, but hell, owning any kind of car is cool when you're in high school. His dad had bought a new car and turned this one over to him and his friends in the auto shop class kept it in top running order.
I tossed the blanket into the back, slid into the passenger seat and he turned his head to me, his blonde hair the color of sand in the dim light of the back alley. His face was solid and a little pugnacious looking, his eyes clear blue. I ran my own hands through my black mop and cleared my throat. "Ready to see what we have for tonight?"
"You bet, buddy." he grinned, and gunned it for our special place.
This wasn't what you're thinking. Bull and I were going out to look at the stars again. It had all started when I found him in the library one Sunday morning, back in a little-used corner. He had out a book on astronomy and was looking over it. I walked over and he didn't notice me, poring over a picture of the North American nebula. I looked closer to see just what he was reading, and my shadow moved on the book and he looked up.
"Oh, hi, Theo." he said to me, closing the book with a slam and shoving it under his jacket lying on the table.
"Hi, Bull." I said. "Reading about the stars?"
He had the baffled look of a man debating with himself, then said, "Yeah. I was. So what?"
"Well, Bull, that's nothing to be ashamed of." I said. "I like reading about the stars too."
"Yeah, but you're..." he ended the sentence there.
"...a brainiac?" I finished for him.
"The guys would think it was weird." he declared.
"Well, I'm not going to tell them." I said positively. I had no friends on the football team, no surprise given the typical jock-versus-geek pecking order any school has.
"You'd better not." he warned me. Silence, and I started to turn away and he said, "Uh, Theo?"
"Yeah, Bull?" I turned back.
"You know about this junk, don't you?"
"Yes." I said.
"I...I was wondering how the Earth got started. I mean, I'd read that stars are just hydrogen and helium, those tiny, really light gases, right?"
"Yes." I said.
"But the book said that the Earth is made up of old stars that died a long time ago. But how can that be if they're just those light gases? And the book doesn't tell me, not that I can understand."
It was hardly the kind of question you expect from a not-too-bright football jock. I sat down and said, "I can explain it, but it'll take some time."
"Okay." he said. "But I got to meet the guys in an hour."
"It won't take that long." I assured him. "Now, let's go back to that picture you have of the North American nebula...."
And that's how our odd, clandestine friendship began. I was surprised to find myself learning from Bull, he had the knack for asking the kind of question you don't think much about when you study a subject. Like his question about the Earth. They sort of announce it in the astronomy books like it's obvious, and then pass on. To answer him, I had to go into just what happens inside a star, how the helium becomes heavier elements that press down into even heavier, until a star is a core of iron and heavier metals at its core, which then explodes out to float around in chunks and even independent particles that are caught up once again in coalescing whirlpools.... It was funny, but telling him about it made it clearer to me!
We started meeting every Sunday morning in the library, that same, out-of-the-way corner. I'd get there and he'd always be waiting for me, and his face would light up when he saw me. It was almost like...well, okay, my crush on him started pretty early on. Not that I had the courage to do anything about it.
We kept it up during our sophomore and junior years, and by then, we had taken to going out and watching the stars at night. I'd pick some astronomical event and tell Bull (that was when we came up with the hand-signs I described) and he'd come pick me up in that old car (his dad had given it to him on his sixteenth birthday and he'd passed his driving test the same day) and we'd go out to a spot outside of town where the lights were all way off the horizon and park on a little hill there and get out and sit on the hood of his car and look up and your entire vision was of the stars. Again I learned the stars by talking to Bull, changing those lines and dots in the astronomy book to actual lights in the sky.
This night, not too long before our graduation, we were there to watch a conjunction of Mars and Jupiter. Mars was a bright red light in the sky, being just before its full phase and at its closet approach to Earth, a mere fifty million miles away, and Jupiter was just above it, also nearly full phase, making a light big enough that, had it been a star, it would have had a name like Arcturus or Canopus. Orion was over in the western half of the sky, nearby, so Sirius and Procyon, Orion's hunting dogs, were also not too far away, with Orion's own Betelgeuse and Rigel were there with the three stars that made up Orion's belt. The moon was just two days past the full moon, and gave the world its ghostly light in the eastern sky. I pointed out Saturn in the line-up as well, though dim and all by itself not far from the recently-set sun. All in all, a most satisfying stellar sight to see.
"I brought some Cokes." Bull said after we'd sat a while. He reached into his jacket and brought out a Coke and handed it to me. I popped the red-and-white can and gulped. "Thanks, Bull."
"I'm going to miss these nights." he said, leaning back on the car's windshield and lying there, his body washed in silver by the moon. "Going to miss having someone I can talk to about stuff like this."
"You'll find lots of people at your college, Bull." I said. "Any university as large as Alabama State has to have an astronomy department. Why don't you take some classes in it?"
"Aw, I can't handle that stuff." he said. "They'd all laugh at me, the jock straining at a telescope or whatever. You got it better, going off to UCLA."
I didn't deny it, but Bull reminded me that we were going to be three thousand miles apart from now on. "I'll call you sometimes." I said.
"Sure." Bull said, like he knew I didn't really mean it. I'd be busy, and money would be tight. High school friends go away and you might meet them at the 10-year reunion and you might not.
"We'll make another time like this before we graduate."
"Maybe." Bull said. "Theo, I just...."
"What is it, Bull?" I asked him. "Come on, you can tell me. I don't tell anybody anything, you know that by now."
"I just want to say, thank you for being my friend."
"Your secret friend." I reminded him. "Thank you for being my secret friend, too."
He grinned at me again. "Yeah." he said.
He turned up his Coke and drained it with audible gulps and tossed the can at the row of bushes to our left. His hand came back down carelessly and landed upside my leg. The back of his hand lay there in contact with my thigh, and the feel of that was a course of electricity through my body.
Bull and I had never touched each other before this time. Oh, casual contacts that life brings on, maybe, but nothing deliberate, not even the friendly arm around the shoulders. We'd had a friendship of the mind, me enlightening his small world and finding my own brighter and cleaner in the process.
It was as natural as it could be, that moment. Our world, the world of high school, was coming to an end, and nothing much that could happen in that world was important any more.
I put down my own hand and took his in mine. We interlaced our fingers and clutched tightly. I looked over at Bull, and he was looking at me.
I had the world's biggest lump in my throat right then, and I choked getting it down. I'd never wanted Bull more than I wanted him right then. His hand was in mine, warm and real, firmly gripping my own.
Bull reached over with his other hand and rested it on my chest. I put my own over it, squeezed and released it, and my hand, done with the task I had assigned it, moved on its own mission, and touched Bull's cheek. Soft, that line of angular jaw, for he hadn't shaved much up until then. The white down his cheeks produced could be whisked away by a shave a few times a year. Smooth, clean skin met my fingertips as they moved across that soft cheek.
My fingers moved next to Bull's lips and he moved, caught my index finger and sucked-kissed it as it went by. His hand on my chest arced up to cross over my breast, cupped it and gave it the barest squeeze, before it traveled down my ribs and side of my stomach to find my leg, and over onto my crotch.
It was all as natural as it could be, as I leaned over Bull to reach down with my face to meet his, to let our lips find each other and taste each other. My hand tightened on the back of Bull's neck and pulled him to me, and suddenly the world became unreal.
I don't know if I can make you see that night, the moonlight painting everything with white softness, the clear night of white stars on blackness, the trees and bushes more blackness around us stroked with white light here and there. The utter silence of the darkness, the only sounds those of our breaths as they quickened, the loudest noise was the roaring in my ears as my blood pounded.
Bull was so much stronger than me, so much bigger than my rather slender frame. Why, then, was it me climbing on top of him, reaching down to take him to me. I only know that my little knee fit between his thick thighs like it belonged there, and that thick prong in his pants was a poker of heat pressing against the side of my abdomen, burning me through the layers of denim and chinos. My hands, my puny, inadequate hands, were stroking that huge body of his, feeling the massive rib-cage sheathed in muscle while our lips tried to force us together, into and around each other all at once.
His hands (hands, such wonderful hands, strong, warm, yet ineffably gentle and tender in their motions) encircled my body easily, for I was lost inside that huge form of his and yet still, he was offering himself to me in all of this.
I had to touch that hair of his, which was short and yet always in disarray, my fingers had to take that task on, to stroke into his tousled mass and touch him there, feel the silken strands as they danced between my fingers to lie in orderly ranks at my gentle urgings, only to reform as I lifted and returned to stroke them again, their soft, thin oil caressing my palm and marking me with his scent.
He broke the kiss at last and sighed, "Oh, God, Theo." His hands came down to clutch my buttocks one in each massive paw, and still, here I was in charge though he held me pinned utterly in his grasp.
"Bull...." I said, turning that single word into an elocution of worship. "Bull...."
"Nobody ever has to know." he sighed to me. "I won't tell them. You won't tell them. And I want to. Please."
Again, his simple words had drawn the situation into crystal clarity. "You're exactly right." I assured him. "Nobody will ever know. Tonight...tonight is ours."
"Yeah." He panted and his lips reached for me again.
The old car creaked beneath us as we kissed, our bodies locked in the old struggle. Before we had sought out each other, now we struggled to free each other of the clothes, of the terrible, confining clothes in that warm late-spring night, while the stars, our benefactors and source of our being, shone benevolently down on us.
Something in me prevented me undressing myself, it was Bull's fingers who fumbled over my shirt while I tugged at his t-shirt beneath that school jacket, fighting it upwards while he bared my chest, my thin, inadequate chest. He got the shirt undone and pushed it off from me, almost angrily shoving at the recalcitrant cloth, to let the gentle winds of spring touch my skin at last. I had his shirt up to his neck now, his chest was now exposed to me and I leaned over to taste that broad expanse of male muscle while his fingers stroked my back, urging me on, then down to fight the battle of my chinos. The clasp there was easily undone, the zipper was a problem but gave way before his intent assault, and his hands reached in and stroked my warmth, gripping the sliminess and cylinder of heat, and it wasn't until his grip was firm, when he pulled on it with a regular stroke, that all these essences resolved themselves into a fact, my cock was in his hand.
I rose up, and while he tucked my underwear under my balls, I tugged those blue jeans of his open by my meager brute force, the thick golden buttons releasing gladly their hold. No jockstrap impeded the grandeur of his majesty from rising up and declaring itself to me.
I gripped that turgid regality in both hands and pulled upwards, and now the moment reduced itself to a commoner standard, and we were two high school seniors lying on the hood of a car, our pricks in each other's grip, and we were yanking each other's puds.
Just like in summer camp so long ago! I chuckled at the ludicrous memory, the realization of how juvenile we were acting in that moment, but it was a warm chuckle and Bull joined me in it easily.
"Mmm, push them together." he suggested. "Put yours right up against mine."
I did and he groaned. "Now yank them both like that. Please!"
I got a good grip on our combined prongs and I pumped them. He groaned, threw his head back and held his eyes and mouth wide open. Looking up at the stars.
I was looking down at him. He was the stuff of stars, I knew that intellectually, but now I knew it in my very soul. Once, beyond doubt, the same molecules in our two bodies had been pressed together in the heart of an old Population II star, to be thrust together out into the cosmos, spending milennia side-by-side, and then coming together into this small world. It was only a short gasp of time ago, a few thousand years at most, that our bodies had separated and the molecules had wound up in these two separate bodies. He was more than my brother. Our very bodies belonged together. He and I were...one!
The thought of our galactic kinship was too much for me, I groaned and my hands became a fury on our entwined pricks, and he felt my ecstasy, he matched me in it, for that was his destiny, to match me forever, and his cock heated up along with mine, degree for degree, a faint whisper of the intense heat in which we had been born, and we had our own nova, as our sperm shot out of our cocks together, at one time, rocketing for the stratosphere, to be captured and pulled down into the warm morass of his body beneath mine!
In the fuzzy world of our orgasm, I was again one with the cosmos, and he was right there with me, our differences an unimportant thing alongside the multitude of our similarities, and I watched as the sperm that spurted from his cock and mine fell together in miniature pearly galaxies on the universe of his broad chest and rippled stomach.
Done, I lowered myself down to combine with him again, as the rocks of the whirlpool had formed the eddies that made the planets, and we were one, the oceans of our sweat mingled and all was right and proper in the universe again.
I don't know how long I lay there atop him, our bodies heaving slower and slower, until they relaxed into comfortable waves once again, then I rose up and looked into his eyes, into the group soul that was myself, my other self, inside of him.
There were no words to say and I didn't say anything. I could have lain like that forever, but he, always a little more practical than me, pushed me up at last. "We'd better get home." he said.
"Okay." I said.
On the way home, he said to me, "Theo?"
"Huh?" I asked.
"Nothing." he said. "I'm going to miss these nights."
"Me, too." I said. "Now more than ever. Maybe I can get transferred to Alabama, or you could come to UCLA."
"Maybe." He said and didn't say any more.
"Well, let's at least get together every night for the rest of the school year, and this summer." I pressed him. "Okay?"
"Whatever you say, Theo." he said, and I felt then the distance growing between us. He was being pulled into a different eddy than mine. I was bound for Mars, he for Venus, and he would whirl along on our independent orbits.
"We'll do it." I insisted, but he was silent. I kissed him when we stopped at my house, secure in the darkness of the shade of the tree in our yard blocking the streetlights, and he kissed me, and I could just see the tears in his eyes. I wanted to say so many things, but while my heart was full, my lips could not form the words. I finally gave a grunt, a shrug, and said, "Talk to you tomorrow, okay?"
"Okay." he said. I got out and he drove off.
I looked for him the next few days, and didn't see him, not with his friends, not in the classes we shared. Finally, I screwed up my courage and approached the clump of football jocks that he always hung with. "Hey, guys!" I said.
"What is it, Peabody?" one of them sneered.
"Where's Bull?"
"Why do you care?" he retorted.
I couldn't confess the truth. I had promised Bull. "Just wondering. Haven't seen him for a while. Is he sick?"
"He's off to Alabama." the guy said. "Got a summer job down there, and summer football practice. They take the game seriously in that state."
"He's already gone. But he didn't graduate yet?"
"He's got enough points for his diploma." the guy said. "He don't need no 4.0 to play football. Now buzz off, freak."
I walked away. Bull had known he was leaving. And he hadn't told me. Now I understood the hesitation on the ride home, and the tears at the end. And I hadn't said anything.
Yet Bull's way was best. We ended our friendship in a wonderful way, without the awkward conversations, the increasing coldness of the times apart pushing between us. Now, his place in my heart is secure, and it is a warm place, indeed, that I often take out and look at, and hold close.
I look at the stars at night still. One day, soon, a mere few billion years, and our sun will be dead, it's hold on Earth weakening until it releases it entirely. Then our bodies will once again dance together across the galaxy, to be born anew.
THE END
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E-mail me at Tommyhawk1@AOL.COM
WWW.TOMMYHAWKSFANTASYWORLD.COM