A black boy enters the shower in the bathroom of his home. It is the main place he can be assured of privacy from his parents and siblings. He is fifteen.
The glass stall fills with steam and clouds over as he stands under the warm spray. If he tilts his head forward the water lands on the short skullcap of tight, wiry hair, crisp as Velcro, a gentle sweet sandpaper of jet black, sharply trimmed to a distinct line from his neck to his forehead. He tilts his head back and the water sprays his face: the thick smudges of black eyebrow, the long, curling eyelashes over the almond eyelids, now closed and covering the hazel eyes beneath. His nose is broad but not flared, rounded around the nostrils. From just below the nose the flesh of his mouth pushes out at an angle to end in a wide top lip that flares like two flags, like the wings of an angel, purple or maroon mixed with brown. His lower lip is a full plum roll of similar color. The lips part for a moment, revealing a flash of perfect white teeth behind.
The water runs over a round chin and strong jaw, then down the strong, long column of his neck. Underneath his firm, round chin are a few whispy black hairs that he is too proud to shave. The boy's skin is a tobacco brown, deep and rich, a brown your eyes can get lost in. The water spreads out onto strong shoulders, prominent collarbones beneath triangles of muscle that run up to his neck. Over the end of each shoulder a wave of muscle rolls at the top of each arm, then narrows, then swells again in muscles above and below, more waves that rise and fall down the length of his arm. There are gentle valleys beneath the muscles on top and on the bottom of each arm, valleys where the beat of the boy's heart can be found in deep arteries. His lower arms are thin but corded hard with muscles, small branches of oak. The boy lifts first one arm and then another, rubbing soap into the short thatch of dense, black hair in each armpit, the white froth of the soap nestling into the thick texture of the hair. When he puts each arm down, you can still glimpse small tufts of hair sticking out.
The boy's rich tobacco color is darker where the skin is folded or creased, darker in the crook of his elbow when he bends his arm, darker in the whorls of the outside of his elbow when he straightens his arm, lighter in the lines of his light tan palms, darker along the neck when he puts his head first one one side and then on the other to let the water play on his small ears. His dark tobacco color is dappled with old, deep honey here and fudge there, and his colors shift with his movements as the blood moves from one muscle to another and as the light plays on the water rolling on his skin. Large triangles of muscle run from each shoulder down into his chest, the muscles pushing up the tight skin, gripping the bones of the chest hard in the very middle. His pecs are an inch and a half thick, each one, and just above the lower edges of their curves, a little to the outside, ride his nipples, very dark cones of flesh, not flush with his chest but tiny cones awash in the rivers of water that run around each one. There is no hair on his chest or belly. The boy stands by habit with his chest out and shoulders back, with his pelvis pushed forward in offering or threat, and his body makes a gentle "S" curve as he stands. The boy's dark hand slides over his chest with a bar of soap, then down the gentle valley between two rows of belly muscles, barely formed, just beginning to cover the soft rounded curve of a boy's belly that he is growing out of. The soap slides over and around his navel, a tiny ring of flesh with a snail of paler tan nestled inside just flush with the taut skin of the belly.
The small hills and valleys of his belly even out as his abdomen rides between the downward pointing lines of his pelvis, his hip bones making two arrows that point towards his groin. Down everything points, down everything goes, the lower belly and the hip line are arrows and his dark hand with the soap slides down as well, down into a short, dense thatch of jet black hair, heavy with water now, flecked white with the soap. Then down some more the water flows, over a penis that is now half-erect, a beautiful fruit, purple black, an eggplant, narrow as it leaves his body, swelling to fit the palm, then narrow again toward the small flared cockhead, now peeking out tan and red from beneath the very dark skin, the extremely dark folded foreskin that the slowly growing penis is crawling out of like a butterfly from its cocoon. The boy's dark hand runs the soap casually over the dark, densely textured scrotum that hangs beneath his penis, a scrotum dusted with the tiniest black hairs, holding two egg-sized balls within, each heavy with young sperm and hormones.
The boy soaps his fingers well, then puts the soap on the shower ledge, turns, and reaches behind him. The water runs down his strong back, collects in the deep valley of the spine between smooth, strong muscles, emptying into the tight canyon between his ass cheeks. His buttocks are slab-sided but rounded behind, and pushing up, higher above by just a slight angle than they are below. He could almost, but cannot quite, rest the soap on the natural ledge of his own high, tight, rounded bottom. He slides his soapy fingers into the canyon, lingering to push gently into the tight, brown and maroon starfish of an anus. The boy doesn't bother with his legs, with the strong, dark brown waves of muscle that rise and fall from pelvis to knee, then again on the back of his calves to his ankles; these can take care of themselves as the water rushes down them. The light tan soles of his feet soak in the water at the base of the shower as he stands there under the warm spray. The black boy is beautiful in his African body, and what is African about him is what is beautiful.
The black boy is thinking of a white boy he saw in gym class that day, the same one he sees every day. He has figured it out so he knows just exactly when the white boy hits the shower, knows just when the white boy is back at his locker. If the black boy hurries at his locker after the shower, he can be dressed and waiting in the painted cinder block hallway of the gym in time to see the white boy at the other end of the shower, still dressing. They have looked at each other beneath hooded eyelashes, out of the corners of their eyes, making secret unacknowledged contact, making a private bubbled world in the midst of the laughing and shouting of the showers after gym class. But they never speak. They share no other classes. Each time, the white boy is gone when the bell rings, vanished down the hallway ahead of him as the black boy emerges from the locker room, looking left and right.
The black boy is thinking of that white boy now, and has grasped his wet and soapy penis with his hand, put his palm around the swelling middle of his penis that seems made for caressing, is slowly rubbing back and forth, now and then clenching his tight bottom muscles and pushing something in his imagination out through the hardening, lengthening penis as his hand slides up and down his shaft. He is thinking of the white boy taking notice of him, of the white boy looking, of the white boy touching, of the white boy's rose, pale lips surrounding the penis that is now rock hard and throbbing in the splashing rain. His hand moves faster and faster now, thinking of the white boy. He thinks he knows the white boy's name, and he whispers it now. The name is your name.
Ten blocks away, a white boy pulls the shower curtain shut in the bathroom of his home. It is his only privacy from his mother and brother in their small apartment. The white boy steps into the steaming water from the shower. His cornsilk hair, which floats down over his ears and just brushes his collar, his hair which when dry catches any slight breeze and stirs, that blonde cornsilk hair now darkens and mats down in the water that flows over and through it. The boy is fourteen.
Water flows over the white boy's forehead and through the thin lines of blonde eyebrow, over the almond shaped eyelids now closed over eyes the blue of a summer sky, the blue of clean, deep water. His nose is small but cute, a pert button of flesh sitting above the pale rose of his lips, a rosebud that parts in the middle into two perfect petals of rose to reveal perfect white teeth and a pink tongue that darts quickly out then in, tasting the shower water. The boy's rounded cheeks show just a dusting of freckles. His cheeks and chin are smooth and hairless, and his hair makes elfin points that hang in front of his ears where sideburns will some day grow.
Water runs over the white boy's thin neck. His body is muscular but thin. The collarbones stand out from smooth muscles that lie passively from his neck to his shoulders. Each shoulder has just enough flesh to keep it from being boney. The white boy's chest is only lightly padded with muscle, the thinnest pads to show the promise of a manhood only recently begun. His arms have long, thin muscles, strips of promised strength with just the gentlest swell to them. He is not short for his age, but he has outgrown his muscles recently, and in some ways looks like a tall little boy. On the lower curve of his thin chest pads, in the middle of each pad, is a small, dark rose button of a nipple, perfectly flush with his flesh.
The white boy's skin is like peaches in a dish of cream, darker light rose and peach washed by off-white cream. He is a darker rose where the skin creases and folds, in the armpits where only a few whisps of dark blonde hair grow, darker in the scuffed whorls of his elbows when he straightens his arms out, a little darker in the crook of his elbow when he folds his arms, but lighter in the pale parchment skin of his palms. When he does fold his arm, the gentle rise of his arm muscles pops up a little, little rolling hills of boyish strength.
The white boy has no hair on his chest or belly. The belly itself shows only the hint of muscular development, just little swellings that pop up mainly when he bends over. When standing ramrod straight as he does, the white boy's belly has a slight curve out, a gentle wave of muscle sheathed in pink and cream skin. His pelvis is barely visible, no rolls but just a thin, thin layer of baby fat still covering his hip bones and making that curve of a belly from chest to groin. His navel is small and recessed, just a wink of a dot in his perfect, curved belly.
The white boy has been shampooing his cornsilk blonde hair. He has no soap. He slides his hands, sudsy from the shampoo, over his body, over this thin chest, down the belly, then around in back. He turns to let the water run down the tight, flat, thinly corded muscles of his back, past the boney shoulder blades down the slim back to the slim, flat sided buttocks, each one firm but rounded below, each making a perfect "U" when seen from behind. The white boy slides his soapy fingers into the tight slit between his thin, nearly-white buttocks, sliding up and down, then probing gently into the pink and reddish whorl that is his anus, pushing in to the first knuckle, then out.
The white boy slides his soapy hands back around to the front. He spreads suds into the dark blonde, small patch of hair above his penis. His penis was slack when he entered the shower, but now it is getting stiff. Not large, not thick, but a little longer than the dicks of the other white boys of his age, his penis slowly cranes its way out from his body, now it is standing straight up, and if he flexes certain muscles and tendons in his body he can make it slap a little against the wet lower belly. Thin, it nevertheless has a wide, flared hood, now completely freed from the dusky foreskin that used to surround it, a dark pink head above a rapidly reddening shaft. Beneath this stiff rod two testicles like small eggs are pulled up tight in a hairless scrotum hung just below the shaft of his cock as it arches up and away from his body. The white boy's legs are thin but muscular, the same long, gentle swell and fall of muscles you can see in his arms is echoed in his slim, hard legs. Pink toes splash in the gathering water at the bottom of the shower. The boy has inherited a beauty from his English and German ancestors, he is beautiful in his slim pink and blonde body, his whiteness is beautiful in him.
The white boy is thinking about the black boy he sees in gym class, the black boy he thinks is maybe a grade higher than he is. The white boy sneaks looks at the black boy when he can, and is sometimes surprised, and then afraid, when he sees the black boy looking back at him. He is often afraid in gym class. The white boy leaves the class as fast as he can at the end of each period because he doesn't want to answer any questions, and, much as he would like to talk to the black boy, doesn't want him to be mean. But the white boy can dream, and he does. He dreams the black boy speaks to him in the shower, showers next to him, reaches out to touch him when the others are not looking. He dreams they meet in the shower after school is over, some impossible chance bringing them alone there, and that the black boy encircles him in his strong, brown arms, pushes his thin white body against the wet shower wall and braces his brown feet against the wet floor of the shower to push into his white body. He thinks all these things as he begins to slide his hand up and down the vertical shaft of his thin, hard penis, up and down, slowly and slowly pushing his hips back and forth, calling the name that he thinks the black boy is called by. That name is your name.
Across town, the black boy's fist and lower arm beat faster, faster, sliding up and down the swollen shaft of his thick black fruit. He whispers your name, more quickly now. The white boy's fist and arm move faster, up and down, now his hips are pistoning back and forth, and your name is a high pitched squeal of a whisper in his mouth. Ecstasy surprises the black boy, gathering from his thighs and loins, while joy wells up in the legs and pelvis of the white boy. Two plumes of semen, each colored just the same, arc out into the air. Each calls your name one last time. Each fist slows, then stops. Water swirls down the drain.