The following narrative involves sexually-explicit erotic events between men. If you shouldn't be reading this, don't.
This is a work of fiction. No similarity between the characters here and any real person is intended or should be inferred. Lake Polk is a fictional town, though it may be like many real communities.
In the world of this story, the characters don't always use condoms. In the real world, you should care enough about yourself and others to always practice safe sex.
The author retains all rights. No reproductions or links to other sites are allowed without the author's consent
I want to recommend a really different sort of story. Vancepackard's "PUD," in the Beginnings section, is like nothing else I've encountered on Nifty. For one thing, here's an author with a pyrotechnic command of the language. Besides, how many stories on Nifty are funny? This one is hilarious. Give it a look!
Thanks, as always, to Tommy W., Patrick, Ash, Evan, and Mickey. Special thanks to Tom J.
Timmead88@yahoo.com Chapter 5
DOUG:
Stan and I didn't sit together in church after that. We arrived separately, even if we had spent the night together, which was most of the time. Sometimes I went to the 8:00 service and he went to the 10:30.
We tried to be very careful not to be seen together too often, though we spent most nights either at my place or his.
Sometimes we took long drives after dark in his Thunderbird. I got my hair cut short, in what Larry Wolfe, my barber, called a "Princeton," as short as a crew-cut, but parted and brushed to the side. That way, I didn't have to worry about wearing a cap while we drove. Stan's hair was already short, so thick and curly the wind didn't leave it messed up. Those nighttime drives were wonderful. The air was still very warm, the sky was full of stars, and I was as relaxed and happy as I had ever been.
On the evenings when Stan wasn't committed to something because of his work, he'd often change into more casual clothes, come by and pick me up, and we'd go out of town for dinner. Went to Parkerville, Sebring, Celebration, sometimes as far as Waltersburg or Tampa. Or, sometimes we cooked together at his place or mine. He was a much more sophisticated cook than I was, more innovative, more imaginative. We had wonderful meals and lots of wine. We talked and we talked. Then, always, we made love. I don't mean we had sex. We made love. Nothing in my life had ever been that good. This thing I had with Stan was what I had been waiting and longing for as long as I could remember.
He told me often that he felt the same way. He mentioned one evening that he had called his son Mark and told him that we were now "together." Mark said to tell me he was happy to have a second dad and that he hoped, probably with his girlfriend, Lori, to come and spend at least a part of the holidays with us.
Stan and I wanted to go away somewhere together, but he was so new on the job that he couldn't get away unless there was a holiday when the city offices would be closed. We talked about where we would go. There was a gay resort in St. Petersburg, at the southern end of the peninsula, that I had always known about but never visited. Stan said he HAD been there and that he had always wanted to see Key West, so we resolved that we'd drive down there the first chance we got. I hadn't been to the Keys in a very long time and never with a lover.
One evening several weeks after they had become a couple, Stan and Doug fixed dinner together at Doug's place. They had made a stir-fry, both working on the chopping required for that dish. Doug had a large wok, wooden paddles for stirring, soy, five-spice powder, and all the necessaries for fixing something that, it turned out, both of them loved.
For dessert they had crisp gala apples, stilton cheese, and more of the port they had had the night they first made love at Doug's house.
When the wok was washed and the rest of the dishes were in the dishwasher, they took their coffee and settled in Doug's family room. Both were in shorts, tees, and bare feet.
Stan stuck his foot into Doug's crotch, moved it around a little, and said, "Doug, do you feel like telling me what in hell it was that happened at Cranmer?"
Doug grabbed Stan's foot and squeezed it. He looked pensive for a moment or two and said, "Yeah, Stan. It's time I told you about that mess."
Doug was sitting on the end of the sofa. Stan was sitting in an easy chair at right angles to the sofa. Doug looked at his new lover and asked, "Do you want anything first? This could take a while."
"No, babe. I'm fine. Please tell me about it, and take as long as you want."
Doug took a sip of his coffee, set the mug back down, and began.
"I've never had a really long-term relationship with anybody. Maybe you should take that as a warning." He looked at Stan, who smiled back but didn't say anything.
"When I went to Cranmer to teach, I had had a few brief affairs with guys throughout my undergraduate and grad school days. I was in the army for two years after I graduated from Denison in 1965. For reasons which only the higher-ups understood, I spent the whole two years in Fort Riley, Kansas. I stayed in Manhattan, where Riley is located, and took an MA in English at Kansas State after I was discharged. I had a friend there, a fuckbuddy, I guess. We both knew it was nothing serious, but we had a lot of fun, or as much fun as our grad work allowed."
Stan smiled and nodded.
When I finished at KSU, I was accepted for Ph.D. work at Case Western Reserve in Cleveland. After my first year there, I got a job teaching at Baldwin-Wallace which, as I suspect you know, is just outside of Cleveland."
Again Stan smiled and nodded, but didn't say anything to interrupt Doug's narrative.
"I had `affairs' with a grad student in physics at Case Western, and a couple of students at B-W. All very discreet, mind you, and nothing that went on for very long. Well, when I got my degree, I was lucky to be hired at Cranmer. They had just promoted Jack Breit, the English chair, to the deanship. Luke Bains, who was their American lit. guy, became department chair, and they wanted someone to take over the twentieth-century American courses."
Doug glanced at Stan, saw him sitting there with his intense blue eyes looking intently back, and shivered. "Are you sure you want to hear all this?"
"Doug, I want to know ALL about you. If this is going to get painful, it can wait. But I'm here for the night anyway, and I can wait to do all the things I have in mind to your person." He licked his lips.
Doug shivered again. "Well, if you do that again, I'm going to do some things to YOUR person, studly. Now, do you want to hear this, or shall we just go to bed?"
Stan laughed. "I'm sorry. Truly. Tell me about Cranmer now. We can make love later."
Doug excused himself to go to the john, and Stan wondered if Doug was really trying to put off what he was about to tell.
When he got back, Doug resumed his place on the sofa and continued his story. But he was looking out the sliding door onto his screen porch rather than at Stan as he talked.
"Cranmer was a really nice place to teach. I liked the faculty and the students. Except for those godawful winters, it was almost ideal for me."
"I went to law school in Ann Arbor, babe, so you don't have to tell me about the winters."
"Oh, yeah, that's right. Well, I enjoyed my teaching. The administration was supportive when you wanted to publish, but they didn't push it too hard because they really did stress that teaching was primary for faculty members. I taught there from 1973 until 1997. I had made full professor, and everything looked good."
"Until . . . ?"
"Well, first I have to say that there was a guy, a faculty member, in the drama department, Larry. He and I got on well, went to concerts or plays or art exhibits occasionally. And we fucked a lot. But after about a year, Larry decided he wanted to work in the `theatuh,' not teaching, and he went to New York. I got a letter or two from him after that, but we lost touch. And so it went. A series of guys, some great sex, but nothing serious. And all done with discretion."
He looked at Stan.
"Well, Dougie, that's a familiar story so far. Something must have gone wrong. What was it?"
"In the fall of '96 I met Rick. Richard Modarelli, to be precise. Actually, I had seen Rick around the department pretty often because he was an English major. But he hadn't taken a class with me until then. From the first day of class, I thought he was cruising me."
"OK, Doug, stop. You've got to tell me what this Rick looked like."
Doug smiled. "He was really cute. About your height, or a little shorter, 5'6" maybe. He was very Italian. Black curly hair, black eyes. He was built a little like you, too. Solid. Muscular. He played soccer, and he had the legs to prove it."
"Sounds hot."
"Veritably."
"Well, Doug, now you must give me the salient data."
"What?"
"His cock, man, his cock!"
Doug laughed. Then it occurred to him that Stan was deliberately trying to make him relax a little. "Six inches or so, studly, about the length of yours. But even fatter. Not quite a beer can, but getting there."
"Mmmm," Stan said. "So tell me more about Rick with the Dick."
"As I said, he did everything but come on to me. He watched and listened attentively in class. He often asked questions, always looking me right in the eye and smiling. He would stop by the desk after class. But he always seemed to have some legitimate reason for doing that."
"Sounds like a suck-up."
"No, he wasn't like that. First of all, he was one of the best majors we had. I often heard colleagues in the department raving about what a bright kid Rick was and what a wonderful career he probably had ahead of him, how brilliant his papers were, that sort of thing. And he did excellent work in my Faulkner class. So he never had any need to `suck up' in that sense."
"Then he took to dropping by my office late in the afternoon after most of my colleagues had left for the day. He liked to talk about things he'd read, music he liked, things like that. We discovered that we had a lot of enthusiasms in common. One day he told me that he had tickets for a Detroit Symphony concert on the coming weekend and asked if I"d like to go with him."
"Did you?"
"Yeah, why not?"
"And . . . ?"
"I don't remember much about that particular concert. But when we got back to Cranmer, he wanted to come in with me."
Stan grinned and waggled an eyebrow.
"Yeah, well that's what happened. He spent the night. And a lot of other nights. We were always careful that no one saw him coming or leaving. After the holidays, when he didn't have soccer practice or games to worry about, we spent a couple of weekends together in Detroit."
"So how was the sex?"
Doug scratched his head. "Fantastic! I mean there wasn't anything we didn't do. I have no idea why, but it seemed like he couldn't get enough of me. And I know I felt that way about him. This hot little Italian fireplug stud kept me hard, at my age, all the time we were together and a lot of the time when we weren't."
"But something must have happened, right?"
"Oh, yeah! In the spring term I had a bunch of jocks in one of my general elective lit. courses. You know, the kind who needed humanities credit of some sort and had no interest at all in what we were doing?"
Stan nodded.
"Well, one day as the class was leaving, one of the bozos stopped at my desk, leaned close to me, and said, `Hey, prof, I hear you like fudge.' He smirked at me and kept on going. I was dumbfounded. Didn't know what to do, so I didn't do anything. I was afraid I knew what he meant but didn't want to allow myself to believe that."
"Damn, Dougie." Stan reached over and took Doug's right hand in his left and just held it.
"A day or two later, another of that crew did the same thing, except what he said was, `Have a fondness for cream sauce with your fudge, do you Dr. Curtis?'"
Doug looked acutely distressed. Stan squeezed his hand again.
"And it just kept getting worse. I frequently heard people in the halls referring to me as Brownie" Curtis. Obviously word was out that Rick liked to be rimmed and I loved to rim his muscular butt. Suggestive things were written on the blackboard in my classroom. Walking across campus one day that spring a colleague of mine in the business department nodded, smiled, and called me Brownie" as if he had no idea what that suggested. My name even appeared once in the student newspaper as `Dr. Douglas "Brownie" Curtis'!"
"Damn, baby. That must have been excruciating for you."
"That wasn't the end of it. One day I got an email from a Yahoo address. Attached to it were pictures of a guy who looked something like me. In one he was rimming this ass. You couldn't see whose, but it looked like a young guy with black hair. In another, he was sucking the same fellow. The email said, `Brownie, here's a souvenir for you.'"
Stan wasn't smiling now. His face showed his concern for his friend. Then the blue eyes began to blaze with anger.
"That really sucks. Do you think Rick the Prick was responsible?"
"Do you know, to this day, I'm not sure? He managed to avoid me completely after that. I called his room in the fraternity house, but he would never answer. I left messages, and he never responded. To be charitable, I suppose he let something slip to one of his fraternity brothers. In my worst moments, though, I suspected that he had been put up to the whole thing by his fraternity. Does that sound paranoid or what?"
"It's OK, Doug. You're allowed a little paranoia after all that. What happened next?"
"Well, my departmental colleagues all heard about it and figured out what had been going on. Most of them were pretty supportive. I think they had all been assuming I was gay. After all, when a man hits his fifties and has never been married, it doesn't matter whether he effeminate or not, a lot of people just take it for granted that he's gay."
Stan nodded.
"That spring, my parents were both killed. I was left financially independent. Both Luke Bains, my department chair and friend, and Jack Breit, also a friend and the dean, urged me just to ignore what had happened. They both said they knew I was gay and that that didn't matter to them personally or to the college. They pointed out that Rick was over 21, so there was no legal problem. Jack suggested, very tactfully, that I have my affairs off campus, or at least not with students.
"But I was so humiliated I couldn't look at anybody. I just knew all my colleagues and the entire student body had me pegged as an ass-munching old queer. So I figured that I'd get the hell out. And I did. I resigned as of the end of the spring semester, 1997. I must say, my departmental colleagues gave me a wonderful send-off. We had a real blast in the Bains' rec room, and I think we all were pretty well bombed out of our minds when we staggered home. In fact, I'm not sure how I got home. I think either Luke or Jack must have taken me home and put me to bed."
"But neither of them crawled in with you?" Stan said, grinning.
Doug chuckled. "They are both happily married."
"So?"
"Well, at times I've had my doubts about Luke, but if he's of our persuasion or bi, he's much more cautious than I am."
"What happened after all that?"
"I came back to Tampa and lived in my parents' house until I could sell my dad's share of the business to his partners. Then I sold the house. And THEN I needed to decide what to do with my life."
"Before you go on, Doug, what ever happened to Rick, the slimy little bastard?"
"I still don't know whether I should despise him or not. He's just finished his Ph.D. at Brown."
Stan howled. "You don't mean it?"
Doug looked puzzled. "Brown's a good school, excellent graduate English program. I'm sure Rick has a great career ahead of him."
"But, sweetheart, don't you see the irony. He went to BROWN!"
Doug laughed. "Oh, my God! I had never thought of that. That is delicious, isn't it?"
Then he looked at Stan. "Would you like some more coffee? Or a drink? I've neglected you while I've been running on here."
"No, sweetheart. But the last part of the story still needs to be told. What are you doing HERE?"
"Well, I really felt as if I wanted to go into exile. You know, hole up someplace where I wasn't known by anyone. But after all those years in Kansas and Ohio, I wanted to stay in Florida. I don't see why anyone who doesn't have to tolerates those winters."
"From what I've seen so far, I'm wondering whether I'm going to be able to tolerate your summers."
"You'd better. I'm not letting you get away, you know."
Stan got up, leaned over, and kissed Doug. When a few minutes later they were both breathless, he sat again. "Sweetheart, you'd better finish your story. Ole Sluggo here isn't gonna be patient much longer."
"I'll take care of Sluggo, don't worry. OK. To make this short, I had driven through Lake Polk all my life. I knew about its Ridenour Gardens. I liked the idea that the central part of the state is less touristy than either coast. And it's only an hour and a half from Tampa when I need a big city fix. So, here I am!"
Stan licked his lips again. "Yes, and you are delicious, I must say." He paused. "Lover, I'm sure all of that was hell for you, but those very events seem to have brought us together. And that's what matters now."
He stood, held out his hands to Doug, and pulled the taller man to his feet. "Now, baby, let's go see what we can do for Sluggo and Spike."
STAN:
I had wondered what Doug was doing in Lake Polk, unemployed, when he had been a professor and when he was hardly retirement age, by most people's standards. And I had also wondered, almost from the moment I saw him, what had happened in his life to make him seem so wounded.
Now I knew the answer to both questions. I resolved to make him forget all about Rick the Prick. Doug needed to come out of his shell. He needed to develop joie de vivre, and I was just the guy to wake him up. That evening, however, he needed soothing, and I was going to see that's what he got.
DOUG:
By that time, Stan knew my house as well as I did. He put his arm around my waist and walked me to the bedroom. When we got there, he made me sit on the bed and pulled off my shirt. Then he pulled me up, took me to the bathroom, and handed me my toothbrush. While I brushed my teeth, he was unfastening my belt and taking down my shorts and boxers. After rinsing, I stepped out of my pants and underwear and put the toothbrush in its holder. He led me to the bed, turned back the covers, and told me to get in and that he would be right back.
He quickly shucked off his clothes, went into the bathroom and brushed his teeth, and was in bed with me in a flash. He lay on his side facing me and pulled me as close to him as we could get. We lay like that for a while, and I wondered if he was planning for us just to go to sleep in each other's arms. Before long, however, he began to lick my neck. There's a spot where my neck joins my shoulders that makes me shiver all over whenever he kisses it. He moved very slowly from there to my nips, which he slowly and very erotically licked and sucked. I thought for a while he planned to spend the night there, but eventually he moved further south, licking his way to, around, and in my navel.
By then, of course, Spike was doing his thing, spiking up and beginning to leak. When Stan kissed his way down my happy trail to my bush, he stopped, pulled himself back up, and gave me a long, gentle kiss. Lots of tongue, but gentle, lingering, tender. I could taste the Colgate's he'd just used. Despite Spike's urgency, I would have been happy just to lie there and kiss Stan until we fell asleep.
Eventually, though, he went back to my cock, directly this time, not taking the leisurely route. He told me he had been giving blow jobs since he was a teen. Well, so had I. But Stan was a master. He was in no hurry. He knew it took longer to come at our age than it did teens, and he didn't try to rush it. He seemed to be willing to suck and lick and swallow my dick for as long as it took. Every time he looked up at me, he had that amazing sparkle in those cobalt eyes. He often made my heart skip a beat when he just smiled at me, but when he looked up at me with my cock in his mouth and crinkled his eyes at me, it took my breath away.
I don't know how long it really was before I came. It seemed like hours, hours of delight, hours of being loved and pampered by this stud between my legs.
When, finally, I came, I lay there for a moment, spent. He moved back up to lie beside me and took me in his arms. I began to try to free myself so I could try in some measure to reciprocate, but he held me fast.
"Not now, babe. I'd rather just snuggle with you, OK? Maybe in the morning."
"You sure?"
"Yeah."
"Nobody's ever been as good to me as you are, Stan."
"Well, you deserve it, Dougie. And I'm damned glad I'm the one who gets to be good to you now."
"Me, too," I said, nuzzling his curly hair.
When I woke up the next morning, I was lying with my back to Stan. His hard cock was against the cleft of my ass, and he had his arm thrown over my chest.
He began to hump my butt gently.
"Mmmmm. What a nice way to wake up."
"Good morning, Dr. Curtis. Sluggo has a special wake-up greeting for you this morning."
"The precocious Sluggo is to be commended for his initiative. I hope he's about to perform for me."
"Oh, he certainly is."
I felt a finger in my crack, a finger that obviously had lube on it. It went away. Then it came back and gently entered my anus.
Well, you know what happened. I sort of cocked one leg up, and Stan entered me. As the previous night he was gentleness personified. He fucked me long and slow while I jacked Spike with my right hand. We hadn't worked to perfect the technique of simultaneous orgasms yet, but we came pretty close that time. When Stan finally came, his spasms triggered my climax. He came inside me, and I came all over the sheet.
It was still early, so we didn't need to get up.
After a few minutes, lying there with my arms around him, I said, "Stan, you've never told me why you left Meadville to come to this backwater."
He laughed and said, "Well, Doug, Meadville wasn't exactly Gotham City."
"OK, counselor, perhaps I should have said, why did you leave Meadville?"
"Ya really want to know?"
"Yes. As you said last night, I want to know everything about you."
"Well, you asked. So, here goes." He lay on his back with his hands clasped behind his head. I continued to lie on my side and twiddle my fingers in his chest hair.
"About four years ago, I met a young professor at Allegheny College there in Meadville. His name was Leigh. Good-looking guy. Teaches music theory. And he's still there. We enjoyed doing the same sorts of things, you know, concerts, art galleries, theater. He and I talked about everything, books, movies, politics. He even helped me in the garden. We went to San Francisco and London together, we visited that gay resort in St. Pete.
"Leigh was tall, broad shouldered, blond, blue-eyed, and sexy. He has a flat chest and a narrow waist. His ass was tiny and tight. I have to admit, the sex was pretty hot."
He looked over at me to see how I reacted. I bent over, licked his nip, smiled, and waited for him to go on.
"I thought Leigh and I were meant to be together. As I said, the sex was great, but there was a lot more than that. But it turned out that he was just in it for what I could buy him and do for him."
"The bastard!"
He smiled sadly at me. "He was, I thought, living with me. He had his own apartment, but it seemed to me he was never there. Don't you know, the son of a bitch had a coed living at his place. He got her pregnant and married her. And, you know, Meadville's small enough that I kept bumping into them all the time. Finally, I decided I'd had enough reminders of what a fool I'd been and started looking for another job. This one came up, and voila, I'm here."
There were many things I wanted to know about the Leigh affair, but I decided that would all come out in time. At the moment, however, he seemed pained by it all, and I didn't want to make him relive a bad time. Now, at any rate, I knew why he said he wanted to "feel safe" with me, and, damn it, I resolved to be his safe harbor for as long as he'd have me.
I took Stan into my arms and held him tight. I loved the smell of his hair. We stayed like that until we had to get up and go about the business of the day.
In a town of 12,000 people in central Florida, the ten percent of the population that is gay is not just in the closet, but also in hiding. In cities like Waltersburg and Tampa there were no doubt opportunities for gays to get together, to be open, even, about who and what they were. But in Lake Polk gays apparently didn't exist. And one often heard, in the routine of daily life, disparaging remarks about gay and lesbian people. Doug, who had lived in the town for several years, didn't know a soul there who was openly gay.
Obviously, then, it behooved Stan and Doug to keep their relationship secret. Doug was beginning to feel that he would rather come out than have to keep skulking around in order to be with Stan as much as he wanted. He had many friends in Lake Polk, but if they were the kind of people who wouldn't want his friendship if they knew he was gay, he was willing to move on. He was determined, however, to do nothing to damage Stan's position as city manager. So they were discreet. They continued to do things occasionally together in public, but they also appeared separately at various events.
One day Doug got a phone call from Blair, inviting him to come to Lake Lloyd to see his soccer team play Florida Southern the next Saturday afternoon. Doug said he'd be there, since he had never seen Blair play and he knew the Lloyd team was doing well that season. He invited Stan to go with him, and Stan happily accepted.
Stan was surprised that Doug knew as much about soccer as he did, and he said so.
"Well, Cranmer has traditionally been pretty weak in football, but it's always had a fine soccer team. While I was there they had a 43-game winning streak. So I made a practice of going to all the home games. It's a great sport, you know, with constant action. No long pauses between plays as in football or while the pitcher and the batter have a stare-down."
Only a couple of hundred people turned out for the game. Lloyd was a small college, and soccer was not as popular in Florida as it was in other parts of the country. Or, actually, it was not as popular as an inter-collegiate sport. In the towns of the county, soccer programs for kids were extremely popular, so that in a few years, soccer should become a very popular sport in the local high schools and colleges.
It was quite warm on the Saturday afternoon, the temperature hovering around 90. There were lots of big, puffy clouds which promised the possibility of a thundershower later in the evening, as was often the case. Stan and Doug, wearing collared tee shirts and khaki bermudas, enjoyed the game thoroughly. Blair scored two goals in Lloyd's effort, but they lost to the larger school by a score of 5-3.
Doug and Stan enjoyed the game, chatting with the people sitting near them in the bleachers, most of them friends or parents of the players.
When the game was over, Blair came over to where they were sitting.
"Hey, Doug. Hi, Mr. Mason. Thanks for coming to the game. Sorry we couldn't have won for you."
"Blair, you done good, guy," Stan said, shaking his hand and clapping him on the shoulder."
"Yeah, Blair, it was a good game. I'm glad we came. And you acquitted yourself well, you know. Two goals is nothing to sneeze at."
Blair grinned and said, "Yeah. I guess that's OK, isn't it? Well, I am pretty ripe. Gotta go. Thanks again for coming." And then he loped toward the athletic center where the team locker rooms and showers were.
"He's a great kid, Doug," Stan said. "He reminds me so much of Mark's friends, the guys in their `brotherhood'."
"You've mentioned them before. Want to tell me about them?"
On the way back to Lake Polk, driving in the T-Bird with the top down, Stan told Doug about Mark and his former roommate Cedric, who was now the partner of a young English professor, Tim Mead. He also described Mark and Cedric's friends, Trey and Chaz, varsity athletes like Mark and Ced, who had during the past summer both acknowledged that, after being very much into the straight scene for three years at the university, they were bi and had, in fact, become a couple.
"So let me get this straight –"
He was interrupted by Stan's chuckle.
"Oh, OK, let me get this clear," he said, slapping Stan on the shoulder. "Your son Mark is the only straight one in this group of four students and a professor. Mark's former roommate is now hooked up with this prof, and the other two, Trey and Chaz? are a couple?"
Stan looked over at Doug and grinned. "You got it babe."
"And Mark is OK with all of that?"
"Yeah. He's got this really pretty, really smart girlfriend, Lori. And he loves the other guys. They've all been close buddies since freshman year. And he even loves Timmy, the prof."
"How old is this Tim?"
"Twenty-six or twenty-seven, but he looks younger than the others. Ced told me that one night all of them but Mark and Lori went to a nice restaurant in Cleveland and Tim was the only one that got carded."
"I'll bet he loved that!" Doug said, smiling.
"He says it happens all the time, so he's used to it. He's only about 5'6", weighs about 135 pounds. He looks very much like a boy, and it really bothers him. He worried so much about looking older that, though he's worn contacts for years, he went back to wearing specs in class. He put on this austere pose with his students, and they nicknamed him "The Iceman." Well, actually, Trey Withers came up with that. But it caught on. I think since Tim came to terms with his sexuality, he's also come to terms with himself. He seems much more comfortable now with himself than he was before. Or at least that's what I hear from the guys."
"They sound like a remarkable group."
""Oh, and there's a new member, one I haven't met yet. His name is Max, and he was Tim's best friend at Kenyon. They had been out of touch for a while when Tim was at Stanford getting his doctorate. Turns out Max was right across the bay in seminary. And now he's the curate and campus minister at the local Episcopal church. He's gay, too, though he and Tim didn't know about each other's gayness when they were buds in college."
"Stan?"
"Yeah, babe?"
"Wouldn't it be great if we had some gay friends? Are Ced and the others out on their campus?"
"Yeah, it would be nice if we had some other friends like us. It would be especially great if we didn't have to sneak around, you know? As for Mark's friends, they are talking about coming out. All of the guys play on one varsity team or another, and that's making them take things carefully. But I'd be willing to bet that by the end of the semester, they'll all be out."
"More power to them. At a big school like that, it really shouldn't be a problem. Hell, Stan, it wasn't a problem for gay students at a relatively small college like Cranmer. And, if Rick's fraternity brothers hadn't made a project out of embarrassing me, it probably wouldn't have been a big deal for me to be outed. It's just that Rick must have told them about my sucking him and rimming him. The fraternity guys picked up on that and made my life very public and, I might add, very miserable."
Stan laid his right hand on Doug's thigh, gave it a squeeze, and said, "I know, Doug. It must have been hell for you, babe. Selfishly, though I can't help thinking all of that unhappiness you had with Rick and I had with Leigh did some good. It brought us together. Or, at least neither of us would be here otherwise, right?"
Doug put his hand on top of Stan's and said, "Since you put it like that, I think maybe the whole thing was worth it, Stanley."
One day early in November, Stan and Doug were cooking together at Stan's place. They fixed veal marsala, saffron rice, and asparagus. By that time, each knew the other's kitchen so well they operated smoothly as a team.
When they had finished their dinner and were sipping coffee on the patio, Stan said, I've got a surprise for you, professor."
"Yes, counselor, and what would that be?"
"I've got reservations for the weekend of Veteran's Day in Key West."
"You must have made them some time ago, unless we are camping on the beach with the runaways and homeless."
Stan smiled. "I did. I made them just after we fucked for the first time."
"You old romantic, you! I love the idea. I haven't been there since I was a teen, and I'd love to go again, now that it's been gentrified by the gay community."
"Well, I thought we might have everything ready and take off as soon as I can get away that Friday. We'd be able to get there before midnight, and we'd have all day Saturday and Sunday and part of the day on Monday before we had to start back."
Doug put his mug of coffee on the patio table, stood, and went over to Stan, whom he pulled upright. The two men embraced and kissed for a long time.
When they finally pulled apart, both breathing heavily, Stan said, "I guess you must like that idea."
"Indeed I do, lover. I've wanted to go back to Key West for a long time, but to go back with you is perfect! We won't need to worry about who sees us or what we do. It's OK to be gay there, for two people to be openly affectionate, whatever their gender."
Stan twinkled. "Yep. I thought that might be a pleasant change from Homophobe Central."
[It will be a few weeks before I post another chapter of this story because I need to get several chapters of "Tim and the Boys" posted to keep the two stories in synch. Lots of things are going on in Ohio. Look for "Tim" ch. 27 to be posted in about a week.