This is the first of five planned chapters of a story about Kurt, a young national park worker in Maine who falls for Rob, a co-worker, and then has to deal with his sudden disappearance. Kurt's search for Rob takes him down a convoluted path to self-discovery. Like most of my past stories, this is an in-depth romance story with a plot, a limited number of characters, and more emotions than physical sex. Sex will be a part of it, but it's more implied than explicit. I plan to post subsequent chapters often, so please check back. Your feedback as you follow the story would be greatly appreciated.
No minors were harmed in the writing of this story, but if you are one please go find something else to do. Please do not reproduce this story in any form without the permission of the author. Thanks.
Damian nvtahoeus@yahoo.com
KURT'S TOUGH CHOICE
PROLOGUE
My name is Kurt Harrington, and this is my story – one that started in the mid 1970's, long before AIDS, personal computers, the Internet, cell phones, voice mail, Facebook, and gay marriage changed the way gay men live. If you are of a certain age, perhaps you can relate. The world was different then in many ways, but not so different in others. Our need for friendship, love, and physical intimacy was the same then as it is now.
PART 1
"There he goes again," I mumbled to myself – angry at Rob Hastings for ignoring me again on the busy streets of Bar Harbor, Maine, where we mingled separately among the throngs that always descend upon that oceanside tourist town every summer weekend.
I had just returned for my second summer at nearby Acadia National Park, where I earned some much-needed money for college every year by working on the grounds maintenance crew. It wasn't the most fun work, but it helped me maintain my muscular frame, making me look and feel taller than my 68 inches of height. Tourists in the park often gave me a second look as they passed by – male, female, old, young, it didn't seem to matter. With my short-cropped blond hair, green eyes, and tanned muscular physique, I don't mind saying I turned a few heads.
Rob had been my co-worker and friend – with the potential of more – for two months the previous summer, but we had had to go our separate ways when Rob had suffered a leg injury on the job and had to go home early. We didn't work together every day, but we did enough of the time to slowly develop a nascent friendship. By the second month, we had started to spend more and more time together on nights and weekends, when we were off duty. Both of us shared apartments in Bar Harbor with other park workers, so we would usually meet in bars for a drink or maybe stroll through town together for something to do.
Neither of us was out even to himself, much less to others, in those mid 1970's days, when having at least one foot in the closet was still par for the course among young men sorting out their compelling but often disquieting same-sex attractions. We were no different.
I was certainly attracted to Rob, who carried himself like a prince on his lean 5'10" frame. He was naturally paler than me, and his paleness was emphasized by his coal-black hair and dark eyes. But the difference in our coloring – as well as Rob's handsome face – was something that aroused considerable interest in me, and I sought out opportunities to spend as much time as possible with him as the summer of 1974 unfolded.
We always went our separate ways at the end of the evening, but I was noticing some changes in Rob's demeanor as the weeks progressed. I caught him looking at me more and standing closer to me. There was something in his eyes that conveyed more than his words, and I felt increasingly frustrated that there was no good place we could be alone to explore the possibilities of greater intimacy than we had experienced so far.
One night, near the end of our second month of friendship, we had had our best conversation yet, as each of us really opened up to the other as never before about our past history and feelings about friendship in general. As we sat next to each other in our bar of choice that night, our bare thighs would occasionally touch, sending little shock waves through my body. As we laughed together, we would occasionally touch each other on the shoulder or arm. I craved it more and more since I had never had a friend like that.
We strolled home in the direction of our respective apartments late that night – well past midnight – and spontaneously took advantage of a block with no pedestrian or car traffic on it to duck into an alleyway, where we shared a hug for the first time. It lasted longer than either of us expected, and neither wanted to be the first to break it. I raised my face to my taller friend in hopes that a kiss might be forthcoming. Rob gently stroked the side of my face with the back of his hand, but as he seemed to start leaning down to meet my waiting lips someone yelled out a dark nearby window, "Get a room, guys!" That quickly broke the mood, and we walked back to the street, where we would reluctantly go our separate ways.
Before we did, however, I said, "My roommates are going out of town fishing next weekend, Rob. Would you like to come over for a while and hang out?"
Rob, still smarting from the unwelcome interruption in the alleyway, smiled broadly at the invitation.
"Sounds good, buddy. See you at work tomorrow."
Still a virgin at 19, I tossed and turned in my solitary bed that night, with thoughts of the kiss that never happened firmly etched in my mind. Rob's body had felt so good to me as we hugged, and I had thrilled to the touch of his arms around me. I recalled how my heart had been racing, and how my cock had been stirring to life, especially when Rob touched my face.
The next day I was disappointed to see that Rob and I were not assigned to the same work crew in the park. I harbored hopes of seeing him before the end of the day, but it never happened. As I clocked out at 5, one of the other crewmen came up and said to me, "Did you hear about Rob's accident?"
"No, what accident?" I said, with obvious concern.
"He got his leg caught between a truck that was backing up and a guardrail. I guess it was pretty serious. They took him to the medical clinic in town and called his parents. I hear he won't be back anymore this summer – he's going back home to let it heal."
"God, no!" I replied, with more alarm than I meant to reveal.
I drove home that night in a daze, wondering what to do – not wanting to accept the fact that I might have seen Rob for the last time for a while. I knew he was from a small town in upstate New York, but we had never exchanged addresses or much detail about our parents' homes.
The next day I went to the park office to ask for his home address, but they wouldn't give it to me, citing privacy regulations. They did say, however, that they could forward a letter to him on my behalf and I could include my own contact information for Rob to do with as he pleased.
I spent the next few evenings trying to draft a suitable letter, but it proved difficult for me. I wasn't used to expressing my feelings in letters. What could I – should I – say to this relatively new friend with whom I seemed to be on the threshold of real intimacy? My wastebasket filled up with aborted attempts.
I still hadn't come up with what I thought was an appropriate letter by the following weekend – the weekend that Rob was supposed to have spent with me in the confines of my otherwise empty apartment for the first time. That Friday night, August 9, I flipped on the TV when I got home from work. Ordinarily the images of a U.S. President waving a tight-lipped farewell from the door of a helicopter would have grabbed my attention, but even the grim faces of Richard Nixon and his stoic family vacating the White House in the long aftermath of the Watergate scandal did little to take my mind off my own personal crisis.
What should have been happening instead – Rob arriving at my apartment door – was not. We would have been sharing a hug, a couple of drinks, some dinner, and...well, whatever would have come next in our first private evening together. Devastated, I had to be satisfied that evening with the "what ifs." And those would likely have included waking up the next morning with a very naked Rob Hastings lying beside my own naked body. The fact that it wouldn't be happening that way was more than I could bear to think about, but I couldn't stop myself.
To deal with the pain of my lost opportunity, I drank myself into oblivion and crashed in my bed before 10 p.m., not even taking time to eat a decent meal.
Not accustomed to binge drinking, I woke the next morning with the mother of all hangovers. I hugged the spare pillow that Rob should have slept on and cursed myself for drinking so much the night before. Not bothering to get dressed, I stumbled into the kitchen, where I had planned to surprise Rob with a nice breakfast. Instead I made do with some orange juice, a slice of toast, and of course enough coffee to flush out any insidious hangover. Unfortunately, it didn't happen as quickly as I had hoped.
Since I was already naked and alone, I wandered down the hall to take a shower – one that I had hoped to share with Rob that Saturday morning. I had been looking forward to tenderly washing every inch of the lithe man's incredible body and being washed in return by those long slender fingers that were now somewhere in New York instead of soaping up my body, where they belonged. I had envisioned Rob's hands – or better yet his mouth – bringing me to a shattering climax. But now I couldn't even get a decent erection.
I finally got my hangover down to a dull roar and got myself dressed. I had to get out of the apartment, since all it seemed to contain was images of the two of us snuggling together on the couch or washing dishes together in the nude – if we had even bothered to get out of bed in the first place.
I strolled up and down the streets of Bar Harbor, but all I saw were people having fun together in the warm sunny weather – families with kids and lovers holding hands, and even some young men who looked like they'd like to be holding hands but didn't feel comfortable doing so in that rather conservative environment.
I strolled past the bar where Rob and I had had our long late-night conversation – and the alleyway where we had hugged for the first time, until we were rudely interrupted by some homophobe who couldn't mind his own business. It all turned out to be more torture than hanging out alone in my own apartment, which was usually a den of lively conversation with my now-absent roommates and their friends but was now tomb quiet.
I bought a few groceries to get me through the weekend and went back to the ramshackle two-story walk-up. Sitting at the kitchen table, I quietly ate a sandwich alone and envisioned Rob sitting across the table from me with our feet intertwined and our hands stretching out toward each other. We should have been going back to bed about this time – naked of course – but I had to make do with a solitary nap while clutching that silly pillow and pretending it was Rob.
I went to a movie alone that evening and then turned in early. My head was no longer hurting, but my heart surely was.
I did manage to finish a letter to Rob the next day – a day that seemed twice as long as a normal Sunday. I took it to the park office on Monday morning, and the secretary said she would put it in another envelope and forward it to him. I gave her a 10-cent postage stamp to put on it and thanked her.
I finished out my remaining month working in the park, but whatever joy and satisfaction I had gotten from it in June and July was gone by August, and the biggest reason was Rob's absence from the work crews. What was fun in early summer became drudgery by August, as the number of park visitors reached its summer peak, and all I seemed to be doing was picking up after them and repairing the damages they thoughtlessly caused.
The highlight of my day was checking my mail, but the expected and deeply desired reply from Rob failed to materialize. Chagrined, I didn't attempt a second letter and tried to put Rob out of my mind as I returned to college at the University of New Hampshire for my sophomore year. As the snows of winter came, the memories of Bar Harbor and Rob Hastings faded from my daily musings, and I went back into my self-imposed closet.
I almost didn't go back to Bar Harbor and Acadia the following summer, but at the last minute I decided that I didn't have a better offer. My roommates of the past summer, Jim and Ray, still had a room for me in their crowded apartment and had been pressuring me to return. Besides, there was a chance that Rob would be coming back as well. Perhaps he had never received the letter that the park secretary had promised to forward to him. Or perhaps he was like me in not finding letter writing to be his strong suit. I allowed a glimmer of hope to enter my mind as I made the drive back up the Maine coast in early June.
At first I was too busy getting settled in and re-established in the park work crews to think too much about Rob. But I was disappointed after a few days to realize that he was nowhere to be found among the crews.
On my first Saturday off, I thought I spotted him from a distance in Bar Harbor. The black hair and perfect frame appeared to be the same. Could it be? I started in that direction, but I lost him in the busy weekend crowds before I could catch up with him. Beyond disappointed, I searched diligently the rest of the afternoon for my friend, without success.
The following weekend I spotted him again, walking with some friends, and called out his name from a distance, but he didn't acknowledge me at all. After that, he always seemed to be with one or more other guys. Once he walked with his friends right past me without even looking at me for more than a second. I felt invisible – and seriously betrayed.
Another week went by, and this time I had my best opportunity to corner Rob face to face. He was sitting alone on a bench overlooking the harbor. I almost didn't approach him, but I did – with not a little trepidation.
Coming up behind him, I coolly said, "Didn't you get my letter? I thought I might hear from you."
Startled by the unexpected comment, he turned and gave me a blank stare.
"Excuse me? Do I know you?"
He did manage a slight smile as he looked me over from head to toe, seemingly not repulsed by what he was seeing.
A mixture of anger, bewilderment, and excitement washed over me.
"Do you forget people so easily, Rob? It's Kurt – we worked together last summer at the park. I thought we were friends. Then you hurt your leg and left for the season. I wrote to you, but you didn't answer back."
"Hmm, I think you've got the wrong guy, Kurt. My name isn't Rob – it's Riley. So I have a doppelganger around here somewhere?"
I was stunned. Riley? What the hell was going on?
"You're not Rob Hastings?"
"No, Riley Sullivan," he said, standing and offering his hand. "Would you like to sit down?"
Warily, I walked around to the front of the bench and took a spot a suitable distance from this friend-turned-stranger. Handsome as he was, I could tell from his outgoing manner that this man was not "my" Rob, but the two could certainly have passed for brothers.
"Do you have a twin, Riley? The resemblance is incredible."
Laughing, the dark-haired man said, "Not that I know of. I'm an only child."
"Are you from New York?"
"They tell me I was born there, but I grew up in Vermont."
"What are you doing here?"
"My aunt and uncle have a cabin here in Bar Harbor. They weren't able to come this summer, so they asked me if I'd like to use it. Of course, I jumped at the chance. I'm working part-time in a retail store this summer. What about you?"
"I'm from New Hampshire. This is my second summer working at Acadia. That's where I met Rob last year. We both worked on the maintenance crew. We, uh, sorta became friends after a while, but he had to leave around the first of August after his leg injury. He was from New York, but I don't know what town. The park office forwarded a letter I wrote to him, but I never did hear back. When I saw you around this summer I thought for sure you were Rob."
"Well, this is really interesting. I had no idea there was anyone who looked like me, especially in Bar Harbor. Would you, uh, like to grab a beer somewhere and tell me more about this Rob of yours?"
"Sure. Sounds good. But I wouldn't call him `mine' – we were just friends, getting to know each other, when he had to leave suddenly. I've missed seeing him around here – I thought you were him and wondered why you were acting like you didn't know me. I guess you really didn't."
"So we've seen each other in town lately? Now that I think about it, you do look a little familiar. A handsome face like yours is hard not to notice," Riley said with a disarming smile.
That remark caught me by surprise. This guy was certainly more outgoing than Rob – and certainly more forthcoming with his thoughts. I began to feel intrigued.
"Thanks. Was something said about a beer?"
One beer turned into three before the afternoon was over, as Riley pumped me for information about Rob. I told him what little I knew, and the conversation gradually shifted to other topics. It was soon apparent to me that Riley wanted to know even more about me than about Rob. While I thrived on the attention I was getting, I also felt uneasy in saying too much too soon to this stranger about my own situation. But by 5:30 that evening, Riley had asked – and learned – at least as much about me as Rob had learned in two months the previous summer. While Rob had been circumspect and slow to warm up, Riley exhibited no such reticence.
When Riley's right index finger gently found its way to my knuckles on top of the table and he suggested taking a pizza for the two of us back to his cabin, I got cold feet and begged off – not at all prepared yet to accept the intimacy that such an invitation implied.
"Thanks, man, but I'd better get going. It's my turn to cook for my roommates tonight, and they'll be waiting impatiently for that."
I started to pull out my wallet, but Riley stopped me.
"My treat, Kurt. I've enjoyed the conversation. Here's my address and phone number. If you have some time later tonight, I'll just be there watching TV or something. I could use the company."
"Let's play it by ear. My roomies might have made plans for me that I don't know about. But I'll see you around town soon – okay?"
Disappointment was written all over Riley's face, but he stopped pushing for anything else to happen that night, despite his apparently innate nature not to give up easily.
"Okay, but I tell it like it is and I want you to know that I'd like to see you again soon. Don't lose my contact info – I want you to use it. Otherwise, I'll have to hunt you down," he said with a smile. The way the afternoon had unfolded, I was under no illusions as to my new friend's seriousness about that.
On the way home I mulled over the unexpected outcome of the afternoon – one that I thought I'd be spending alone, as usual lately. While I was secretly flattered by Riley's attentions, I was also uneasy about the idea of seeing him again. Part of me very much wanted to spend the entire evening with him, but there was another large part of me that had been resisting. The latter part won out, even though my claim about needing to cook for my roommates was bogus. Not one to take risks or hurry into things, I simply needed time to sort through my feelings.
Even though I hadn't seen Rob in almost a year, and hadn't received any reply to my letter of last August after his accident in the park, I had stubbornly held onto a hope that sometime, somehow, someway I would see him again and we could pick up where we had left off. The fact that someone who looked almost like Rob wanted to spend time with me now only made it more difficult to shift gears and go in a new direction.
I fixed myself a TV dinner and sat alone and watched a lame movie on TV that I'd already seen twice. I wondered if Riley was doing the same thing, but somehow I couldn't imagine someone that outgoing – and yes that attractive – would likely be doing that on a Saturday night.
I was quite aware of the fact that I hadn't given Riley any contact information and that any future get-together, if not serendipitous like the last one, would have to be at my own initiation. I slept uneasily that night, but not without a little part of me making my stomach jump with delicious anticipation.
(To be continued soon)
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Damian nvtahoeus@yahoo.com