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.
The words are not mine but the voice is. "Because I love you Logan. Because I love you and it's killing me. Because I love you and know how b-b... how bad I'll hurt you. Because I love you. Because I don't know what l-l-l-ove MEANS!" I find that, for the first time since I was a child, I am curled into a foetal ball, crying at the loss of something that, in truth, I never had. Like a candleflame in a gale, the world snuffs in an instant and I am... gone.
***** Lake Desolation 8: To Have Loved and Lost
By Bear Pup
M/M; kissing, masturbation - Friday
I don't wake so much as fail to stay asleep. I've had this happen a number of times before, perhaps ten in my life, waking without context or any real analytical sense. I float, pure sensation. There is warmth behind me and a stripe of warmth across my chest; soft cloth all around me. I smell wood smoke, light musk, pork. I hear nothing, well, perhaps the slightest breath.
I don't want to open my eyes, suddenly, and the reason becomes plain. Parts of me know that the only reason I've come to semi-awareness like this was tragedy. Something happened. Something terrible. Something that my subconscious has decided that my waking mind cannot deal with, cannot survive.
I sigh deeply. Is it Joseph? No, the memory of that grief is clear and real. Oh, God, please don't let it be Maria. No, that memory, and a week of waking in this way are part of my past. I finally tire of this cat-and-mouse game and fight toward true wakefulness, my deeper self struggling fiercely to prevent it. In an act of stubborn will, I wrench open my eyes.
I am in the cabin. The air is chill but not cold, and I am snuggled in deep. It is dark, and I can tell from long experience that dawn is perhaps an hour off. My breath catches as the warmth at my back and my memory of Maria's death bring the echo-horror of the previous night crashing across me. I begin to cry, and the arm tightens.
A muzzy, young, male voice soothes, "Shh, now. Shh. It's okay. Go back to sleep. You're fine. Everything is fine." I recognise the tone and cadence... and the voice. I'd used the same soothing innumerable times on Joseph and Maria when they were ill or hurt and woke troubled or in pain. It was a voice of caring that was so oft-repeated that the person did not have to fully waken to say the words, to temper the pain. And the voice was Logan's.
I still my crying, desperate that he not wake before my subconscious yields all of the details. I fight for them, then lay stunned as they come. The timeless perfection of that kiss, the pain in his eyes and in my heart when I pulled away. The utter and ultimate defeat in the set of his shoulders as he ate, 'if that's what you want, Jake.' My draining admission that I was damaged and beyond redemption. Logan's failure to comfort me. My stumbling, stupid, smug, self-obsessed, superior pseudo-apology for the true horror I have put him through. He explosion of outraged grief and need and self-loathing.
But mostly what I said next. Words that scare me so deeply that my subconscious knows I might never recover from saying them. No, never recover from admitting they're true. I love Logan. Not like Joseph. Not like a father or a friend or even a lover. I love him as I have loved only Maria in all my years. My utter and complete betrayal of the woman with whom I spent nearly my entire life. I near tears again, fighting for every breath.
"Jacob Benjamin Schweitzer." Maria's voice, tight with concern and love and opprobrium. I look up and she's standing there, lit brightly in the otherwise dark room. "Don't you DARE. Don't you even try to put this as some sort of loyalty-to-the-dead-wife thing, Jake. You don't even stoop to that in your trashiest romances!" Even if it were real, that would have struck me speechless.
"Yes! I said it. You write ROMANCE, Jacob, and you do it damned well. Jake, you know everything about love except what it is. You can describe every shade from tawdry to total, from selfish to selfless. And you still don't have a damned clue.
"You have a chance, Jake, to be happy. That boy, yes that BOY, is desperate, Jake, and needs you damned near as much as you need him. I will not let you give up on the idea of love, Jake, damned well won't let you get away with blaming me for your choice to refuse it. But I want to make this very clear, Jacob: If you give up on this boy, if you give up on yourself, if you give up on love, I will be your Dybbuk and haunt you to the end of days. Now, hush up and get some rest. This will be a busy day, my dear."
I wake when I feel Logan stir behind me. I sense when he wakes enough to realise his arm has crept around me sometime during the night. He goes to pull it back, obviously afraid that I will wake and take offense. I grab his arm, my voice shaky and small, "No, Logan, leave it there, please? Just for a little while?"
He sighs deeply, with a catch that might be a swallowed sob. He tightens his grip and pulls me to him. But I can feel it. He knows that this is just the next hill on the roller-coaster. That I will give him some validation, some caring, some connexion just so that I can strip it away. He cannot understand it, cannot bear it, and cannot turn away from it either. He pulls me to him, not as a saviour or a helper or a lover, but as deadly and debilitating drug that he knows he can never refuse.
This is a kind of love I know well. It was the love that led to the death my Joseph. With every pill he took, he knew he was killing himself. He wept in torment at his weakness and sin, two things he did not have. My Joseph died of a disease, and not the Q Fever that set him on his course of pain and painkillers. Not even the disease of addiction, a disease with few cures and innumerable victims.
The disease that finally killed Joseph was the inability to accept his own demons, to live with and fight his addiction, to go through the knowledge that he, in his poor, young tormented mind, saw as his failure, his flaw, his shame. His inability to "Just Say No" as that horrific, viscous, sanctimonious bitch had put it, as his school had taught it, as society facetiously threw it at him in ad after ad on every channel.
Maria was right. What I have done to this child is worse than abuse. It is as bad as that vile man in A Clockwork Orange. I'm not talking about throwing Logan into the snow to die. That was humane compared to what I've really been doing. I give him the one thing he most-desperately needs then snatch it away. Not once, but over and over and over. And I am so self-absorbed, so conceited, it never even occurs to me to think about what I'm doing.
But now comes the hard questions. Can I give him what he needs? Is it in me to love again? Is it in me to love someone so utterly alien and not least of all, so MALE?
"You're forgetting something, dear." Maria's dream voice whispers. I shudder, not from cold but from almost-unspeakable fear. Is it in me to accept his love in return, or, worse, his rejection?
I turn in Logan's arms to face him, face his deep, sad, chocolate eyes. "Logan, you have no reason to trust me. You have no reasons to even listen to what I'm going to say. What I said last night, Logan, was the truest thing I ever said. What I've done to you is unforgiveable. Let me try, though, please? I love you Logan, and I won't deny it again."
"Oh, Jake," he reaches his hand up and strokes along my jaw, making me shiver. "Why do this, Jake? Why torture yourself like this? When the snow leaves, so will I. You need better, Jake. I... I love your too, Jake, and I know you won't accept that, accept me. I'm not stupid in everything Jake, just the important stuff." He leans forward to lightly kiss my nose. "Wake up, think about things, recognise that I am the last thing that you need."
"NO! Logan, please no!"
His finger is now on my lips, "Shh, now. Shh. It's okay." He rolls away and is out of bed and in the bathroom before I can take another breath. I shake myself and go about the morning rituals of stoking the fire, making tea and starting that fucking oatmeal, plus Cream of Wheat for Logan.
The sky this morning is awash with scuttling grey clouds, cold and brisk. I watch it blow the barren trees about. We won't have much snow today, just flurries, but it will blow.
Logan and I swap, with me heading to the bathroom. I come out and noticed that Logan has a soft smile. For the first time since he dropped into my life, he seems... content, confident, at peace with some decision. I feel a tiny ray of hope form.
"Jake, I'm going to break the ice off the clothes and bring them in. Is that okay?" I smile tentatively and nod, beginning to clear the breakfast. Something -- some unknown thing not unlike the invisible plume of heat the day I found Logan -- moves me to the front window. He must be on the other part of the porch. I move that way and frown, then realise why. My second coat is hung neatly on the banister.
I grab my heavy coat and Wellies and am out the door in moments. Logan is nowhere in sight, but I see no obvious tracks. That leaves two directions, the ploughed stretch to the woodshed or the one to the barn/garage. I run, well, shamble quickly, toward the further. A cough sounds behind me. Logan, in shirtsleeves, is standing in the lee of the house. I snatch up the coat as I run to him.
His voice is shaking a bit from the cold, but this is not the uncommon and deadly snap we've just endured. I try to wrestle him into the warm garment and he holds me at bay and finally shouts me down. "Why, Jake?"
I grab him in my longer reach and pull him to me hard enough to hear his ribs crackle. "Please, Logan, get in the house. NOW!"
"Why, Jake?"
I'm now in a full, spittle-flying rage. "B-b-b-because I SAID SO!"
"Why, Jake?"
"STOP SAYING THAT! Get in the goddamned cabin, Logan. Move!"
"Not until you tell me why you want me to do that. And why I should."
It's like he's hit me with a one-two punch, leaving me stunned and cross-eyed. That's the question, isn't it? For whom am I doing this? Me of course. It is all about me. It always has been, even with Maria. I set that volcanic surge of disgust and self-loathing aside for later. I stare deep into those milk-chocolate eyes.
"Because I want... I need you to... to... Because I th-think you... Because I need..." I sputter to a stop. I am a wordsmith at a loss for words. I take a deep breath of the icy air and feel it cool my madness. "Because I think you might be my last chance, Logan, and I want to love you more than I've wanted anything. And there is not one single fucking reason on Earth that you should care, or should let me." He returns my stare as if x-raying my soul. "Please, Logan? Please?"
He has the saddest and most-resigned look I've ever seen as he reaches up and strokes my cheek with his ice-cold and trembling hand. "Oh, Jake." He moves past me and into the cabin as I follow, securing the doors behind us. I throw off my coat and launch myself into the frail and shivering young man. I rub his arms even as I gather him into mine, trying to warm everything at once. I pull him to the heath and stand with its heat behind him and mine in front until I feel him relax and warm.
I pull him to the couch, holding his back against my chest as I continue to rub his still-icy hands. "Have you heard of St Vitus's Dance?" I felt him smile and settle.
"No, Jake, tell me."
"It's 1518 in Strasbourg... um, it's--"
"I know where that is."
"This woman, named Frau Troffea, began to dance wildly in the streets. Within four days, 33 people were dancing, ensnared in the same uncontrollable dance. Within a month, there were at least 400, many literally dancing until they died of a heart attack, stroke or exhaustion. And then it stopped. Gone."
"Why?"
"No one knows. It had happened before, once spreading from city to city until thousands were dancing. That was sometime in the 1300s, I forget when, dozens of cities with hundreds locked in a compulsive, unstoppable dance across what we think of as Germany and other nearby countries. St Vitus was a Catholic Martyr, the patron saint of dancers, so they prayed to him for intercession. Maybe it worked; who knows? But, each time, eventually, that dance would claim some number of its victims and then simply vanish for years, decades, centuries."
"No, Jake, why tell me this story?"
"What? Don't you find it interesting?"
He sighs, "Yes, but I've read more of your work that I wanted to admit. You never introduce something irrelevant unless it's critically important, 'Mr Stettler McKay'."
I laugh. "Okay, you got me. Those people were so afflicted by some unknown, possibly unknowable, force, that they were compelled to dance to the death. Some died still locked in the mania, others survived and had no understanding, often no memory, of the event.
"This last week, Logan... this has been our St Vitus's Dance. Each of us was locked in some inescapable dance for reasons known, not known or even unknowable. What I'm asking, Logan, what I -- and I don't use this word much -- what I'm begging, Logan, is that we let go of the dance as its survivors, not its victims. That the last week didn't happen," I smile at a phrase borrowed from another author, "or at least didn't happen much."
Logan turns and his eyes are glimmering pools of brown, shimmering and rippling with tears unshed. "I want that, Jake. I want that so much. But..."
"But what, Logan?"
"Wh-what if... if you start to dance again?" The tears now flow and I reach forward and wipe them away.
"Then run away and save yourself, Logan. Don't let the dance take your life too. That was another of the lessons of St Vitus's Dance. Those who moved to try and help were often captured in it as well, and lost. If I, if that... Logan, save yourself and live a happier life, 'Mr Larry Mallory'."
He turns fully and pulls me into a kiss of tenderness, of forgiveness, and more importantly, of beginning. We stay like that, not talking, not making love, not even kissing any more. Just holding one another for perhaps an hour. We both jump as if electrocuted when a loud, purring rumble erupts from the kitchen. I look to the porch and the light is on.
"We have power." For the next hour, we slowly turn on each breaker, making sure to turn off anything that isn't needed but had been switched on when the power died. We've just finished when a ding! erupts from my laptop.
I move there and find that the internet is back as well. I scan quickly and find the messages from Pigtails warning (uselessly) that the power was out (yes, dear, we figured that out, honey) then rejoicing in its return. She adds a postscript. A link to a newspaper article. It is a different, more detailed picture of Logan. Oddly, it looks even less like him that the blurry security photo did. The headline reads, 'Search Continues', then below, 'Suspect Identified in Robbery, Attempted Murder Case'. I yell, "LOGAN! Get over here!"
He is white as the snow at my startling shout. "No. Look, Logan, look! ATTEMPTED, Logan, attempted!" Logan's knees collapse and I hear something new. He is praying as he cries into my lap. The prayers switch constantly between English and Spanish. Instead of trying to pull him up, even though he weighs less than a housefly, I slip off the chair and cradle him as he cries out his relief.
I find that I'm crying in relief as well. How could I go from dispassionate concern to need and devotion so quickly? No one falls in love with a man that fast! I wouldn't ever have tried to write such a thing...
Would I? I think back and realise that the problem is not the 'so quickly' part but the 'with a man' part. In fact, half the princesses, milkmaids and spinsters in my novels fall madly in love at a smile or wave of a hand by the knight, cowherd or troubadour. Ghost-Maria's words echo, 'You know everything about love except what it is.'
I rock Logan slowly. With a suddenness that shocks me to the core, he pulls me into a desperate, shuddering kiss. He pulls back and I am again drowning in the pools of chocolate that are his eyes, "Thank you, Jake. Thank you thank you thank you."
"But I didn't do anything, Logan."
"You did. You kept me alive long enough to find out that I'm not a k-k-k..."
"You never were, son. Even if the woman had died, Logan, you would not be a killer. The Logan I'm holding never did and never would have knowingly killed. Son, you fucked up terribly and it could have been so much worse, but it wasn't through malice or even greed. You were trapped by the madness of the drug, Logan."
"But I knew, Jake. I knew what I was doing." He's still shaking, but I can see that he desperately wants what I am saying to be true.
"Yes, you did. But think back, son. Did you feel like the driver or the passenger?" His eyes widen. "Yes, you're guilty of the crimes your body committed. But for me, Logan, f-f-for us you're not a passenger any more. And I'll fight hard to make sure you never are again.
I shift. I love this kid, but I'm also a mature (don't you dare say 'old') man with 66 years of wear and tear on my joints. Logan see me wince and jumps up. With a strength that belies his frail frame, he pulls me up and gets me into the chair. "Are you okay, Jake?"
"More than I've been since Maria passed, Logan. Maybe... maybe more than I've been in 30 years." I stand, listening to the popcorn noises in my knees, and pull him into another hug. "Let's have some lunch, son, and catch our breath.
"Do you like Caprese? It's mozzarella, tomato and basil?" An ice shard lances my heart as I realise that, in the entire week, this is the first time I ever bothered to ask Logan if he liked something.
He blushes and looks down. "I'll like anything to give me, Jake. Anything."
I smile, "Except mustard?"
He looks up and gives me a long, shy smile, "Even mustard, Jake."
I build what I call 'instant Caprese' in a large bowl. Cherry tomatoes, bite-size mozzarella di bufala straight from the brine and a handful of basil leaves from the package, drizzle with olive oil, salt and pepper and toss to combine. I tip half into each of two bowls, handing one to Logan along with a fork. We eat quietly, looking at each other often. Finished, Logan washes as I clear.
"Logan, um, can we sit for a while? On the couch? Together?" He smiles gently and pulls me to the sofa. We sit as we had earlier, Logan's back to my chest, but this time with him snuggling into my arms. "I was sincere when I said it last night, and I sincere this morning. But Logan, I think I'm beginning to understand what I actually meant. I love you, Logan."
He doesn't turn, but simple says, "Do you?"
I pull his head around to face me, "More than you can imagine." I kiss him this time, not the gentle, caring kiss or even the hard, needful kiss, but a kiss of passion. I turn his body into mine and pull him tight. He responds, moving into me. I pull back and look in his eyes. "Are you, um, are you okay with th-this, Logan?"
"To quote a very wise man, 'more than you can imagine.' Kiss me again, Jake, please?"
I do, this time allowing my hands to roam under his sweatshirt and across his smooth skin. Feeling his muscles move beneath me. When his hands reach beneath my own shirt, I gasp into the kiss. I'd forgotten what it felt like to be touched in this way, by a lover. It has been many, many years since Maria and I were into cuddling.
With Maria, sex had never been boring but, after forty years of marriage, it was predictable. We'd learned each other's bodies so long ago, and so well, that foreplay was a very active thing. This tentative touch, this wondering if I was pleasing or tickling or just annoying a lover had not happened since I was not much older than the man I held in my arms.
I feel his erection against me, a sensation I've never felt before. I move my hands from his back to his chest and begin to thrum his nipples, feeling them harden and making him moan. That sound, coming from his mouth into mine, allows something inside me to finally give way. I pull him tightly, roughly into me and intensify the kiss. My hands know where they need to be, and for the first time in my life, I am stroking another man for his pleasure.
Even at 15, fooling with Martin at Camp Sin, I stroked him more for my own pleasure (and, to be honest, to get him to return the favour). Now, though, I have one and only one goal, to make Logan moan like that again.
As soon as my hand touches him, Logan throws his head back, breaking our kiss, moaning loudly. When my other begins to caress his balls, he dives back into the kiss with a new desperation. My fist works up and down the silky girth, loving every forbidden touch. Across 51 years, I still know that Logan's manhood is drastically different than Martin's. For one thing, he's certainly a lot larger. His foreskin is much meatier and long. He's also hotter to the touch, as if his cock and balls had a fever the rest of his body escaped.
He's now humping into my fist and I step up the caress of his balls and let s few fingers go lower to rub his taint. His voice go into a high whimper and pulls back. "No. No, Jake, stop! I'm gonna, I'm gonna. Stop, Jake! Too soon too much too not yet not YEEEAAAAHHHH!" He erupts like a volcano, spewing over my hand and forearm, flooding his sweatpants with thrust after thrust into my fist. He is screaming and whining and clutching me so tightly I have to smile. When he finally collapses, he asks, breathless. "Why... did you... make me... cum so... quick? Why not.... make it... last?"
"You're young, Logan, you'll recharge in no time. And we have hours. Actually, Logan... we have years." I pull his heaving body back into my arms and nuzzle into his neck as he pants. I smile as I take in his musk and the scent of his spent load as it soaks through the material of his pants. I find that I am happier in this moment that I've been in decades.
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Active storelines, all at www.nifty.org/nifty/gay... Canvas Hell: 22 chapters .../camping/canvas-hell/ Beaux Thibodaux: 14 chapters .../adult-youth/beaux-thibodaux/ The Heathens: 15 chapters .../historical/the-heathens/ Off the Magic Carpet: 9 chapters .../military/off-the-magic-carpet/ Lake Desolation: 8 chapters .../rural/lake-desolation/ Dear John Letter: 2 chapter .../military/dear-john-letter/ Brother Bear: 3 chapter .../incest/brother-bear Shark Reef: 1 Chapter .../adult-friends/shark-reef