Free Boy Crazy: Coming Out Erotica by Unknown

doesn’t mean them.” I looked for malice in his face, or a threat, but saw nothing there but honest curiosity, and even kindness.
     
    “We’re out in the middle of the ocean, boyo,” Angus said, waving his arms to encompass the ocean. “Anything you say out here, well, it stays out here. I don’t care, myself. Sometime, a guy just wants the company of another guy. I’ve been known to—well, let’s just say I’m open-minded myself. ”
     
    I said nothing. My ears were full of the sound of blood thundering and the vast emptiness of ocean and sky all around us.
     
    Angus stood up and walked slowly and surely over the deck to where I was standing. He put his arms on my shoulders and leaned in. “That stuff you were saying back there, about your sister being in love with me? Being in love with me for years?” I smelled beer on his breath, and sweet mint.
     
    Those ocean eyes again , I thought, conjuring the bluff above the dunes in the lambent August light, picturing Angus below, in the sand and the girl beneath him, whose face I again, blissfully, couldn’t picture in my mind.
     
    He whispered, “You weren’t really talking about your sister, were you, buddy?”
     
    When he kissed me, his mouth on mine, his body against mine, I swear I was just about to say, No, of course not, Angus Treleaven. I wasn’t talking about my sister. I was talking about me. I love you. I’ve loved you all these years. But boys don’t love other boys, and boys like you especially don’t love boys like me. Boys like me don’t expect love, we just dream of it and watch other people receive it, and even now I’d never tell you I loved you because there’s only one answer you could give me that I’d survive, and I don’t trust you to give it to me. But his mouth was on mine, cutting off words, so none were spoken, nor were they needed.
     
     
    Eliza was waiting up for me when I got in at ten. I told her I’d given Angus her message and he was cool with it, and he’d taken me out on his boat. She seemed irritated, but said she’d get Angus to take her out when the cast was off.
     
    “August is almost over anyway,” Eliza said. “I’m going to be back at school in a few weeks, and I don’t see myself bringing”—she laughed here, clearly on the mend, sounding more like her old self than ever— “ Angus Treleaven to Brown with me, do you?”
     
    “I thought he was your muse, Eliza? I thought he was your incubus.”
     
    “Well, muses come, muses go,” she replied, already tiring of the topic. “It’s not like I’m in love with him.” Eliza yawned. “I’m going to bed.” She looked at me quizzically. “Did you have fun tonight? You seem different.”
     
    “How?”
     
    “I dunno. Older, I guess. It’s about time you grew up anyway.” She turned with her crutches and began limping down the hallway. “Goodnight, Jem. Thanks for delivering the message.”
     
    “No sweat, Eliza.”
     
    That night, before sleep, I replayed it all in my mind: the weight of his body, the feeling of his cock in my hand, the taste of him. Even the brief, sharp pain, when it had come, had been endurable because he’d held me so tightly and licked away the tears when they’d come. It was the first time for me, and whatever it meant or didn’t mean to him, he honored it.
     
    He asked me not to tell, and I said I wouldn’t. I never did. I never will.
     
     
    The following year, my grandmother died, and my mother and her siblings sold Flyte for more money than they’d ever seen. My mother remarried, and we never went back to Prothro.
     
    I never saw Angus Treleaven again.
     
    But my sister was wrong, as she so often was in those days. Muses come, but they don’t always go.
     
    I will remember that night when I am a very old man. I will dream of him off and on for the rest of my life. And in my dreams, the sun is always sinking into the ocean. I see him from my perch above the dunes. He turns, but this time when I