Free It Takes Two by Elliott Mackle

to bite,” I explained. “I’m gonna get in the water and cool off.” The sight of the nearly naked, scarred-up ex-Marine was raising my temperature. And it seemed like a complication the day didn’t need.
    Bud said he thought he’d skip the swim this time. So I turned my back, dropped my shorts, pulled off my T-shirt and dove overboard.
    Twenty minutes later, back on board, as I started toweling off, Bud seemed to stare at me; then he brought up his old coach again. “Can’t get over it,” he said. “You even walk like him a little. Voice ain’t the same. He talked loud, and I don’t hear you doing that. And your ears is kind of different. But you got his red-haired chest and green eyes and long cock.”
    “Hey, thanks,” I said, still determined to keep the conversation locker-room light. “Don’t remember what any of my old coaches’ ears or hairy cocks even looked like. Guess they had ’em. Swim coaches don’t necessarily shower with the team.”
    “Course he was older,” Bud continued, his voice gone low, clearly not caring about my old coaches. “So I guess he looked bigger and hairier to me. I was just a kid.”
    The grown kid, I saw when I glanced over at him, was blushing. He was also throwing a first-class boner. His erection, stiff and unmistakable, strained against the thin cotton cloth of his shorts and raised a pup tent along the open right cuff.
    “He must’ve been quite a guy,” I said. “For you to remember him this long.”
    “Guess I thought of him as my best friend at the time,” Bud explained. “He got me through to graduation. So I kind of hero-worshiped old Coach Andy. Course I see now he probably never even noticed me—as anything more than just one more of his junior Shoeless Joes.”
    Then Bud did something that really surprised me. He stood up, looked me straight in the eye, shucked his shorts and skivvies, stood there a moment with his stubby hard-on bobbing well above horizontal, and said, “Yeah, what the fuck, I guess I had a thing for him.”
    Then he jumped into the water feet first, came up shouting at the chill and swam away.
     
     
     
    Bud’s hard-on had considerably lessened when he hauled back into the boat. Toweling off fast, he pulled on his pants and shirt while I hoisted the anchor. Though he rode home seated beside me, he refused another beer and kept his mouth shut. When I tried to lighten the situation with a joke about his earlier display—“Glad there weren’t any weasel-eating barracudas out in the Gulf today”—he gave me a sour look.
    I was probably out of line there. Then as now, grown men seldom referred to each other’s equipment, much less aimed jokes in that direction—not regular guys, anyway.
    And, at that moment, Detective Spencer “Bud” Wright looked like one helluva regular guy. The bone he’d thrown had nothing to do with me, I figured, except that I’d served as some kind of trigger for memories of his boyhood crush.
    That was his privilege. Heterosexual men were allowed to remember getting hot and sticky with their high school team-mates and coaches. All they had to do was laugh it off as a phase, then mention the bitches they planned to fuck.
    At least I hadn’t made any jokes about Coach Andy—or mentioned the checkered history of my own Mr. Slugger.
    Back at the dock, Bud thanked me and said he’d had a pleasant day. But he refused to take any fish. “Got a rented room,” he said, staring down at the wooden planks under his feet. “And I ain’t going to try cooking fish fillets in a coffee percolator. Anyhow, you can probably use ’em at the hotel.”
    He also didn’t say anything about wanting a second lesson in the fine art of fishing. So I didn’t offer.
    But five days later, I picked up the phone in my office and there he was, sounding friendly and a little out of breath.
    “Hey, Coach,” he said. “That boat of yours didn’t sink yet, did it? You got any more fishing trips planned? I probably still