Please see original story (www.nifty.org/nifty/gay/rural/lake-desolation/) for warnings and copyright. Highlights: All fiction. All rights reserved. Includes sex between adult men. Go away if any of that is against your local rules. Practice safer sex than my characters. Write if you like, but flamers end up in the nasty bits of future stories. Donate to Nifty TODAY at donate.nifty.org/donate.html to keep the cum coming.
He cocks his head to the side and looks at me, then shakes his head in denial. "No, Mr Stettler McKay. It's not that you started loving me. If it was that, your love for Maria would have done this. It's more. It's not me loving you, Jake, but you letting yourself love someone else," his voice is a prayer, quiet, fervent, needful, "letting yourself... love... me?"
Lake Desolation 11: Ravaged Versus Raped
By Bear Pup
I stare, blankly, completely at a loss. I never let people love me? I never really let myself 'love' others to the point that it was a mutual thing? Maria's words from the morning hit me like a truck. Logan sees it too. Both of them.
Logan's voice is now worried and clearly upset. "I'm sorry, Jake. I, I shouldn't have said that. Please don't--" I silence him with a finger to those beautiful lips and stare deep into his chocolate-pool eyes.
"Don't be sorry. I..." How do I say this? He'll think I'm insane, won't he? "I, I spoke to Maria last night. Well, actually, Maria still never really lets me get a word in edgewise; she spoke and I listened. She told me, told me... She said that I... don't let anyone love me and she'd waited forty years for me to see it." The last words come as a rush. I look back and forth between his eyes, waiting for the disbelief. It never comes. "That doesn't, uh, surprise you?''
"No. You've told me that Maria was the other half of you. Why shouldn't she keep trying to help you?"
I hug him to me and kiss his hair over and over. "She also, she made me, made me promise that I would let you love me." I was crying now.
"Did you?" I nod, miserably. "She shouldn't have done that." His voice is low and serious. I look at him, obviously bemused. "No one should make you promise to do something that you might not be able to do. It's cruel."
I sob out, "She said I had to TRY!" and the tears flow for a minute. Logan doesn't move. For the first time ever, it is Logan with my chin in his hand, forcing me to look at him.
"Then I'm glad, Jake. She and I just want to same thing. For you to be happy, for you to be loved, for you to be... complete." It is his turn to pull me to his own, broad chest and let me sob for a minute.
"Uh, Jake? You're getting the pages wet."
I laugh, roughly, and wipe my eyes and nose on my sleeve (something Maria spent over 40 years trying and failing to prevent me from doing). He's right. The way I'd ended up, some of my tears were soaking into his markups.
I pull back and start to read his edits. For a young druggie, it's pretty good. I read further and find myself having mental debates over why my original wording was better and... losing every argument. I look up about halfway through. Logan's sitting, fidgeting like he's in the principal's office.
"This is, uh--"
"I know, I'm sorry. I thought I'd try at least. Maybe I can, you know, help in some other way?" He's blushing and embarrassed to have even tried.
"You done?" He nodded. "Good. Cuz you're wrong. This is easily as good as the hacks at the [___] House. No, that's not fair. This is nearly as good as the woman I worked with for decades. There are technical things, like schools of thought on punctuation (I use Cambridge, you are closer to Oxford or Harvard), and there are stylistic things that I actually like to use even though they're flat-out wrong. But, Logan, this is... uncanny. Let's see how this goes for a while, okay?"
Logan is beaming like I just told him he'd won the lottery. He hugs me wildly and swings himself down to print what I'd written in the meantime. His fingers flow over the keyboard, doing in seconds what it took me minutes to perform in printing the earlier pages. He's out of the seat before I even have time to protest. I'm a bit shocked to find that I'd kept that pace; another 40 double-spaced pages started to whir.
One thing that Maria had forced me to do long ago was set a timer when I wrote. At night, I could write as long as I wanted. But during the day, I had to break every three hours (the limit of the spring-wound timers extant at the time). With the laptop, that changed. If Word is open, a little dohickie in the background dings and interrupts the screen at noon, six and ten. The noon bell rings and my screen briefly goes black. I've trained myself (more or less) not to curse when that happens.
I pull away and Logan stands, pushing me back into the chair. "You keep writing, Jake. I'll wake you when the lunch is ready." I smile. Maria always called getting me out of a writing trance as 'waking me up'. I'm back into the travails of poor, benighted Ginny in moments. Some part of me hears banging and then smells searing meat, both not really ignored, but subsumed into the story in a strange and magical way. Suddenly, there is a wide, thin-fingered hand between me and the monitor and I scowl up at the interloper. Logan is there smiling.
I reach for the plate he holds and he waggles a scolding finer at me, forcing me to switch seats. Smart, cuz I'd be writing again in seconds. He takes the seat I'd held and starts to read. The plate holds a sandwich, a thin piece of pounded pork seared to a wondrous crisp and about as thick as five ham slices. Lettuce, tomato, pickles and... I have to smile, mustard adorn it. Beside it is a quick salad with feta and olives, about as close to Greek as you can get with the ingredients that I kept on hand. Tasty, too.
"So what are you thinking of calling it, Jake?"
He's absorbed in his reading. I think for a minute. I often start with a title and write from there, but usually start thinking about a name a few chapters in as the characters begin to resolve.
Viscount Westgarth really only had one strong option after a life of piracy, to be granted land in the New World from which he could harass the French. Ginny gets there in time to charm and win over the great chief Tejonihokarawa (who, at the end of the book, will end up meeting Queen Anne as one of the Four Mohawk Chiefs). The French villain Loup Noir (the Black Wolf), bastard son of Marquis de Vaudreuil, the Governor-General of New France, has already killed the now-useless Viscount in a duel and has his dark and lustful eyes on his victim's wife, our heroine, for eventual next-to-last-chapter ravishment. Instead, she's set her cap on the hunky but oblivious Richard Farrier, the rough and tumble fur trader.
"I haven't decided. Something about the Wolf, I suppose."
"Hunt of the Black Wolf', you think? I assume that Richard will eventually hunt his rival down? That way the title is about both Loup Noir hunting Ginny and also Richard hunting him?"
I think for a minute and smile. I love ambiguous meanings and wordplay in my titles. "Logan, you have just named a novel." He smiles broadly and blushes again. Fuck the novel. I pull him from the chair and kiss him deeply. We stand like that for a minute, me bending forward to capture his mouth. Just as suddenly, Logan is kissing me, pulling me into him. It's a subtle thing, this reversal, but powerful.
I feel him growl into my mouth as he pushes me backwards. I feel the edge of the bed behind my knees just as he tumbles me, squawking, back into it. "It's my turn, Jake. Lay back and enjoy." I squawk again as Logan literally crawls into my shirt and begins to lick and tease my chest. My hands are all over him and I hear him chuckle, "No, no, no!" He peels both long-sleeved tee and sweatshirt up, forcing my arm above me but stops before taking them all the way off. I feel his hands moving and look up. He's twisting the bulk of the shirts in a way that basically cuffs me gently. Can I get loose? Sure. But do I want to?
That question is answered quickly as he returns to the kiss and begins to stroke my sides and belly with those long, thin fingers, playing my nerves like a slide guitar. He works his face sideways and refuses to let me recapture his lips. I gasp when he begins to lick my neck and below my ear, and I whine piteously and grip the headboard to avoid bringing my hands down to his head as he probes and teases my earlobe.
He kisses me again on his way to the other side, then leaves me whimpering when he moves lower. He licks in a slow spiral around my hairy pec, creeping near and nearer to my areole. My nipples are already distended in anticipation. Logan sharpens his tongue to a single, hard point as he gets to swirling across and around the goosebumps at the edges. I start to moan, but when he dives in full-mouth and begins to suckle, I let out a loud, gut-deep groan of pleasure... And that is just the one nipple.
He repeats the performance on the right side, twirling in slowly and deliciously, but he leaves a hand to strokes and pinch and tease the left. I am biting my lip hard as I feel my balls churning and dick leaking pre-cum in a steady trickle. My breathing is coming in short, hard gasps as I try to wrap myself around the sensations. Now both hands are at my nipples and Logan begins to lick downward along my wiry treasure trail. I literally hold my breath when he gets to the waistband of my sweatpants and let out and involuntary cry when, instead of going further, licks his way up to my lips and draws me into another powerful kiss.
I am panting, desperate with need when he pulls back and looks deep in my eyes. "Don't you have something to write, Mr Stettler McKay?" I am in flat-out shock as he rolls my shirts back down over me, taking great care to brush, nudge, caress and pinch my nipples in the process, teasing me to distraction then rubbing cloth above them vigorously once they're covered.
"Y-Y-Y-You! You... you..."
"Yes, me. I don't have anything to proofread if you don't write, now do I?" I lunge for the evil little brat but he scurries away laughing. "Let's say this. You write really, really well and I'll make your evening very special."
WRITE? Like THIS? Is he insane? I am in the reddish-black area between rage, lust and sulk as I sit in myself front of the fucking laptop and started to peck at the fucking keyboard and find out what the fucking fuckers in my fucking story do next. Logan's teasing was more than simply effective, it was maddening! A wicked smile spreads across my face. Perhaps Richard is not as oblivious as he seems.
My fingers fly. I rarely look at the screen since, even after all these decades, I don't actually touch-type. I hunt and peck very, very quickly. About once a page, I look up and give the text a perfunctory "red squiggle" review to see if Word has seriously objected to any of my typos, then it's heads-down again for another few minutes. Logan is constantly there, bringing me juice or kissing my ear or running a fingertip across a nipple. I find he does it whenever I slow down, which makes me really, really mad so I type even faster.
It turns out that Richard is a complete fucking tease and Ginny can't see it. She is frantically trying to get the hunky, rough man to notice her, completely oblivious to the fact that he's taking every opportunity to make sure she 'accidentally' sees him sans shirt, or working strenuously, or laughing heartily or otherwise being the perfect stud of a man, constantly raising her frustration level to a fever pitch. Even though she doesn't see what's happening, Loup Noir does, sending him into a jealous rage. He prepares to DING!
"Wuh?"
"I think your computer just told you it's time for dinner. I kept it simple since I'm not sure what you like." He slides a plate into place just out of reach. The aroma slaps me hard. When I'm writing, little outside of that (except those fucking kisses and nipple rubs) penetrate my cocoon. What I smell is simply amazing. It's a grinder roll filled with meat, veggies and cheese, but like nothing I've seen. "Think of it as a South of the Border Philly."
I take a bite and moan. It's deeply-fajita-seasoned strips of steak with onions and peppers in a crisp-crust roll, dripping with melted jack cheese and stacked with lettuce, sour cream and pico de gallo. It lacks spice because I don't keep jalapenos and cilantro on hand, but he's made do with parsley, turning it into a sort of chimichurri-pico. It's amazing.
I hear the printer whir and see Logan has started printing out my pages, and I hear him whisper, "Holy crap," just as I finish the monster sandwich. I move over to see what he's talking about. I look down and scowl. 2 500 words for a whole afternoon's work. Pitiful. Then I gasp. I missed a slim digit: 21 500 words. Over a quarter of a novel in a night and a day? Holy crap is right. I shake my head to clear it. I pull the first set of edits from this morning and start at the top of the manuscript, correcting and adding flourishes and touches to support later events.
I find that Logan's edits are as thorough as any a proofer would do for me. There are a few places where Logan has circled a word or phrase and simply put (?), and I find it takes me some time to figure out what I'd meant there as well. Often, it's one of my signature typos that drops a bomb in the meaning. Putting 'not' for 'now' in the sentence, "I am now/not going to kiss you!" is a rather stark difference, especially for a ro-- historical novel. As I get further into the text, there are side-notes I hadn't seen, and small scratches or hashes in one margin or the other.
"Logan, what are these?" He leans over.
"Oh. Sorry. Ignore those. They're marker-dots."
"Uh, care to elaborate?"
"I learned it from Mom. It's for consistency, so I can go back quickly and find out whether someone's hair suddenly changed colour or such. Really, It's just habit. It doesn't mean anything."
I think for a long time and start to flip through, finding identical marks on various pages, tracking a character through the story. Why have I never heard of this before? More to the point, why has he? "Logan, what did your mom do for a living?"
"She did methodology audits for human drug trials. Making sure they didn't cheat and drop problem patients just so they could avoid side-effect statements. Stuff like that. She used marks like those to track backwards, saying that switching patients out was a way they could hide what they were doing. Why are you looking at me like that?"
I am staring, slack jawed, and suddenly blush furiously. I mumble and try to go back to the pages by Logan snatches them away. "Why, Jake?"
I am kicking myself so hard I'm gonna leave psychic bruises, "I don't want to say because I, because I'm an idiot and you'll be offended, and with good reasons. Can we leave it there? Please?"
"No." That's not a, 'No, I don't think so'. It's a, 'Fuck no and don't even think of asking again'.
I'm in the purple range of blushing now but I know I have to tell him the truth. "That's just, um, well, n-n-not what I thought you'd say?"
"And what did you think I'd say?"
I bury my face in my hands so I don't have to look at him. "The day I cut your hair? Before Pigtails came? You were helping me clean?" Where the fuck are the question marks coming from? I would NEVER let one of my characters get away with that! "You did such a good job? I, well, I thought, you know, maybe, uh? Maybe you helped your mom do maid work." I mumble to the end and wait for the explosion. I get it, but not as expected.
Logan explodes in gales of laughter, clutching his stomach and whooping, tears streaming. I watch aghast. "You are SO fucking white!" Every couple of words is interrupted by either a giggle or a laugh, "Since I'm Latino, my mom is a MAID?!?" I am now blushing in as much fury as embarrassment. "Ohmagod, ohmagod, ohmagod. That is HYSTERICAL!" He finally winds down.
"Well, Logan, I, uh, I'm sorry. That was stupid."
"No, Jake, it was just so perfectly white."
"Part of it, Logan, part of it -- and I know this makes it worse not better -- was the drugs."
He sobers instantly, staring at me. I know I've completely blown it. "The drugs were ME. Not my mother." He glares at my abashed and horrified face then relents, "But I can see where that jumped from. Maybe a different kind of profiling, not just racists, but just as wrong. It's okay Jake. It really is. The drugs... the drugs were a big deal for my mom. She g-g-got me treatment. It didn't work. Almost cost her the job. I was too... weak." His voice trails to nothing and I am there instantly, hugging him, or trying.
"Jake, stop. Just stop." He lets me pull him over to couch at least and I sit beside him. "I have to face what I did. Mom knew. She always knew. I... I..." He's crying now and finally lets me hold him. "There was a kid in the neighbourhood. Miller. " He gives me a moderate-to-sever glare, "A white kid. He was a bully and dealer. I was small and he knew my mom made good money. He. He." Logan swallows convulsively, over and over. "He had two of his goons hold me down and he shot me up with m-morphine."
I gasp in horror. Who could do something like that? What kind of monsters have crept into our world? I remember then that he said he was 16. Someone did this to a CHILD. I start to weep as well.
"He, they did it for four straight days. Kept me high more or less. I was flying! I was too ashamed to tell Mom; she was out on an audit and I, I, I couldn't face it over the phone. She came back and d-decided I was ill and kept me home. I went into withdrawal -- seven fucking fixes and I was already hooked -- and I told her everything. She pulled me from school and put me in treatment.
"I came back clean but Miller was always around, smirking. I hit a bad patch from what I'd missed at school, and the fucker was right there. Bastard said he was sorry and said he'd give me a fix for free. The fucker already had the syringe loaded and just handed it to me. Mom tried everything, but I was always using again within weeks of coming home sober. And then she d-d-d-d-died and I-I-I-I... I am so fucking useless, Jake! I am so weak and so stupid!"
I don't know why, but that pisses me off. I slap his wet cheek and his head pops up, appalled. "You're not weak, not useless and damned sure not stupid. Except for saying that you are! Look at me! Logan, look at me! That Miller kid, he raped you son. It's no different. You couldn't stop him. People don't get raped because they're weak or they 'deserve it'! They get raped by predators who have no soul. He did something worse than rape, Logan. He raped you in a way that made your body betray you and kept you coming back for more. Addiction k-k-killed my... killed my... killed my son, Logan. I will never, ever, ever let it kill you. Do you hear me, Logan?"
He nods, rubbing his cheek where my slap had landed. "You know, you hit really hard."
I pull him tight to me. "I didn't hit you, Logan, I slapped your face. There's a difference. And you have no idea, Logan, just how hard I can hit. But I will never, ever hit YOU. I expect both of us will be slapped a few times, we've already been! But I will destroy anyone who comes for you, Logan. They can come with a warrant or a gun or a syringe, it doesn't matter, you will never, ever be taken from me. I... I need. I need your love too much, Logan, and need so, so much to love you back." Neither of us try to stop the tears then.
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Active storelines, all at www.nifty.org/nifty/gay... Canvas Hell: 25 chapters .../camping/canvas-hell/ Beaux Thibodaux: 17 chapters .../adult-youth/beaux-thibodaux/ The Heathens: 18 chapters .../historical/the-heathens/ Off the Magic Carpet: 12 chapters .../military/off-the-magic-carpet/ Lake Desolation: 11 chapters .../rural/lake-desolation/ Dear John Letter: 3 chapter .../military/dear-john-letter/ Shark Reef: 4 chapters .../adult-youth/shark-reef/ Culberhouse Rules: 2 chapters .../incest/culberhouse-rules/
Special collaboration with Brad Borris: In God's Love (4 installments) .../incest/in-gods-love/