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“One thing I’m still not clear about Frank, is how you and Chris met,” my dad asked my boyfriend as he turned the steaks on the grill, but then he interrupted himself to ask, “Medium rare — right?”
“Actually, I like my steak rare, sir — the redder, the better,” Frank answered. Dad tried to hide his disgust, but not very effectively and so Frank added, “You should really try it that way. The less you cook it, the juicier the steak.”
“I’d rather not be able to taste the animal’s blood,” Dad answered, actually looking a bit green around the gills.
Ever since I could remember, I’d always had my steaks, and hamburgers, for that matter, prepared medium rare, with just a little pink in the center. I guess that’s the way my parents always cooked their meat, and so that’s how I was used to it. Still, I was game to try anything, particularly now that I had a boyfriend to impress. Not that my parents knew that Frank was my boyfriend. If they knew, they’d freak, and they certainly wouldn’t let him spend the night. I think they were glad I was being more sociable of late and were thrilled that I’d picked up a close friend. But that’s all I wanted them to think of Frank as being — a close friend.
We were in our back yard, enjoying a Fourth of July barbecue. With encouragement from Professor Dawson, I’d completed high school a year early, and had applied to a number the top undergraduate Physics programs in the country, including his. I got acceptance letters from nearly all of them and chose Stanford to go to in the fall. My high school commencement had just taken place, and Frank was over to help us celebrate my graduation, to watch the fireworks with us and to spend the night.
“I think I’ll try mine rare, too, Dad,” I called out, and my dad visibly grimaced.
“Frank, you’re a bad influence on my son,” Dad said with a chuckle.
“I’ll take that as a compliment, Mr. Michaels,” Frank replied, causing the three of us to laugh.
“Chris,” I heard Mom call from inside the house, “Could you carry some things out for me?”
“Sure Mom,” I called back. “Be right there!”
“So how did you two meet?” Dad asked again, and I would have really liked to hear Frank’s answer, but I couldn’t exactly keep Mom waiting.
Running inside to the kitchen, I saw that Mom had a ton of stuff to carry outside. She had a platter filled with corn on the cob, a large bowl filled with baked beans and franks, another filled with coleslaw and a third filled with potato salad, all home made. It all smelled delicious.
She also had paper plates, plastic cups and silverware, napkins, a selection of soft drinks, and a six-pack of Budweiser for Dad. I started by carrying out the baked beans, since that bowl was the heaviest. As I headed out the door, I overheard Frank saying, “Professor Dawson is an amazing guy. I learned so much from him. It’s really a shame my parents won’t let me go there on Saturdays anymore.”
“Why is that, Frank?” Dad asked, and I really, really wanted to hear Frank’s answer — not that I expected he’d tell my parents the truth — that his parents discovered he was gay and didn’t want him spending time with so many boys. Unfortunately, I needed to get back inside to carry more stuff out of the house.
As I put the potato salad down on the table, I overheard Frank saying, “I’m really grateful that Dr. Dawson had Chris get in touch with me. I can still keep up with the lessons, and I really like Chris as a friend, too.” I returned inside with a smile on my face.
Next came the coleslaw, and this time it was my dad who was talking. “Chris has always been a shy boy, but he’s so thoughtful and considerate. He’ll make a great husband someday.” Why did parents always have to try their best to embarrass their kids?
When I carried out the platter of corn, Frank and Dad were laughing hysterically. When I stopped and just looked at the two of them, Frank cracked up yet again and my father followed suit. What in the world was that about?
With the paper plates, napkins and plastic silverware, I overheard Frank say, “With me being an only child and Chris’ brother and sister being so much older than him, I think we relate to each other more as brothers than just as friends. Chris has really become like the brother I never had. I know it hasn’t been all that long, but in a way, I feel like I’ve known Chris all my life.” Wow! That made me feel tingly inside.
Then I was carrying out a six-pack each of Coke and Seven-Up and Frank was saying, “It’s really too bad my parents didn’t let me take early graduation the way Chris did, so I’ll just have to make the best of it and amass as much advanced placement during the coming year as I can.”
When I returned with the six-pack of beer and a package of plastic cups, Dad and Frank were again laughing hysterically. Man, what in the world did I miss out on?
Mom followed me out, carrying a tray with the steak knives, steak sauce, ketchup, mustard, relish, salt and pepper — not that I figured we’d need anything more than the knives. I set the picnic table for the four of us, and Dad called Frank and me over and dropped our steaks onto our plates. Since ours were rare, they were done sooner than Mom’s or Dad’s. Frank and Dad both had a point. There was no doubt that our steaks were a lot juicier than what I was used to, but at the same time, the juice almost did look like blood.
After Mom and Dad sat down with their steaks, too, Dad reached for a Bud, and so did Frank!
“Very funny,” Dad said with a smirk on his face, to which Frank replied, “Well, it was worth a try. After all, in less than a year, I’ll be able to drink it legally — in Kansas if not in Missouri.”
“Hmmm…” Dad began, “You do have a valid point, there, Frank. It’s hard to think of you boys as being nearly grown up, but you’re both seventeen, and Chris will be going away to school in the fall. He’ll almost surely be exposed to beer at Stanford, and probably plenty of it.
“OK, boys, you can each have one beer, but only one,” Dad agreed. Wow, I wasn’t expecting that.
Frank opened the beer he’d already grabbed and immediately started chugging it down, right from the can. He musta drank a third to a half of it in just a few gulps.
“Hey, take it easy,” Dad admonished Frank. “You’re only getting one, so make it last.”
“Sorry Mr. Michaels,” Frank replied with a sheepish look on his face, “I was just thirsty.”
Not to be outdone, I grabbed a can of Bud, opened it, threw my head back and started to drink my first ever beer right down. SHIT! It tasted like piss! Before I knew what was happening, I was spewing the beer out of my mouth and onto my parents, who were sitting across from Frank and me.
Frank was laughing in hysterics, while Dad and Mom were less than pleased. Finally, Frank said, “That was what your father and I were laughing about when you came back out. He’d already agreed to let us each have a beer, and I made a bet with him that I could trick you into trying to chug it down. I opened the beer, but you failed to notice that my hand went around a can of Seven-Up and it was the Seven-Up that I chugged down.”
“I knew you’d never had beer before,” Dad added, “and we both guessed what your reaction to it would be if you tried to chug it. I just wasn’t expecting your reaction to be quite so — violent.”
“That was sooo funny, though,” Frank chimed back in. “The looks on your two faces when you got sprayed was priceless. And I did win the bet!”
“You did at that,” Dad said as he took out a five and passed it to my boyfriend. Five dollars was a pretty hefty bet in 1983.
Turning to me, Dad said, “Beer is definitely an acquired taste. You may want to sip it slowly,” which caused Frank to start up on another round of giggles.
“You sneaky bastards!” I complained, to which Dad admonished me, “Watch your language, son. You’re in mixed company.” Yeah, right — like I hadn’t heard him use the word in front of my mom before.
Cutting right into my steak, even more blood-red juice poured out, nearly making me gag. The meat was not only red, but it was dark red, and almost looked raw. With Frank looking at me expectantly, I had no choice but to pop it into my mouth. When I tasted the flavor, however, I moaned. I actually moaned. After I finished chewing and swallowing it, I said, “This is so much better than medium rare, it isn’t funny.”
“Told you,” Frank said, and then he took a bite of his own steak. After he took a bite of the potato salad, he asked my mom, “Man, this is the best potato salad I’ve ever had! What’s in it?”
“It’s my own secret recipe,” she answered with a wink, “but what really makes it so refreshing are the seedless grapes.”
“That’s what makes it so bad,” Frank replied, and Mom added, “That, and shredded carrots, raisins, a little celery, a dash of oregano and a little thyme. Of course I use only Hellman’s real mayonnaise,” which made us all laugh.
The barbecue was so groovy, man. It was far out! I had a great time bein’ with Frank, and after a while, I even enjoyed the beer.
After we all carried everything back inside, while Dad cleaned the grill, Mom banished Frank and me from the kitchen, telling me I had a guest to entertain.
“Hey, want to check out Kong?” I asked Frank.
“Is that something you use to smoke pot?” he asked innocently enough.
“No!” I laughed at him and gave him a quick slap to the chest. I led him into the family room and grabbed my new toy off the shelf.
Frank looked at the strange contraption while I hooked it up to the TV and plugged it in. “What the Hell is Nintendo?” he asked.
“Hell if I know,” I answered. “My dad has a friend who picked one up in Japan on a business trip recently. It hasn’t even been released yet, but I guess his friend got it through a friend of a friend sort of thing. He said it’s gonna bury Atari.”
With a laugh, Frank replied, “Wouldn’t take much,” and I heartily agreed.
I turned on the TV and a bunch of Japanese characters flashed across the screen before the title appeared in English.
“Donkey Kong?” Frank asked.
“Don’t knock it ’til you've tried it,” I responded. “It’s fun!”
It didn’t take Frank long to get the hang of it, and then to master it. Before long he was beating me every time.
In exasperation, I stated, “This game’s lame.”
“You only say that ’cause I’m better at it,” he replied. I shrugged my shoulders, ’cause he was right!
“That is sooo cool,” Frank stated as he set the controller down, and then asked, “Hey, have you seen those pocket-size calculators?”
“Seth Carson at school has a Casio SL-800,” I said. “It’s pretty neat. It’s flat and it uses solar power. If they ever come up with a scientific version, I’ll probably get one.
“So far I’ve been getting by with my trusty slide rule. Something tells me it’s gonna get real old, real fast at Stanford.”
“I think you’ll have to break down and buy a decent scientific calculator,” Frank commented. “The first time you take a test where you’re trying to do your calculations on a slide rule and everyone else is using a calculator…”
“Wow! I hadn’t though of that.”
“I bet you’ll be able to get a nice discount on an HP at the Stanford bookstore,” Frank suggested. “After all, Hewlett and Packard both graduated from Stanford. The company’s even located on Stanford land. Maybe you’ll even be able to afford one of the programmables!”
“Oh, that would be so fine,” I agreed, “but something tells they don’t offer discounts. They probably figure anyone rich enough to pay Stanford’s tuition can afford an HP calculator. The tuition went up nearly ten percent this year, over nine thousand dollars, and room and board adds nearly another four.”
“Man, that’s gonna take a bite,” Frank agreed. “Textbooks aren’t cheap, either. The worst part, though, is that you’ll be there and I’ll still be here,” Frank lamented.
“Yeah, I know,” I agreed, “but I’ll be home for Thanksgiving and Christmas, and then we’ll have next summer, and then maybe you can get into Stanford, too.”
“Actually, Cal Tech would be my first choice,” Frank countered, “but to be with you, I’ll settle for Stanford.”
“You’ll settle, ha,” I said as I pounced on him and gave him a noogie.
“Boys?” Mom called out from the kitchen.
“Let’s go to my room,” I suggested.
“I like the sound of that,” Frank agreed.
No sooner were we in my room with the door closed and locked behind us than we were all over each other. I really, really liked Frank — maybe even loved him if it’s even possible for a boy to love another boy — and I sure loved making out with him. In no time at all, we had our shirts off and were nibbling, licking and sucking on each others’ neck, collarbone and nipples.
Then Frank crossed a threshold we’d never crossed before — he unbuckled my belt, unzipped my pants and pulled them down. He deeply inhaled my brief-clad crotch, which was unbelievably exciting in and of itself. I knew I kinda liked the musky, funky scent of my crotch, but it was a real turn-on to know that Frank liked it, too.
He pulled my briefs down, exposing my dick, which was pointing straight up in the air. He kissed the tip of it, and then licked up the underside, nearly causing my eyes to roll back in my head. I’d never felt anything like that before. I moaned out loud.
“Shhh,” he admonished me. “We need to be quiet.”
What happened next was something I would never forget in a million years as he closed his lips around my boner and slid all the way down on me. At first he gagged, but then he relaxed his throat and I felt the head slide into his throat. Needless to say, I didn’t last long. I came with a vengeance. I came long and hard, and Frank swallowed nearly all of it. How did he do that?
“I love you, Chris,” he said when he came up for air. “You can’t imagine how much I love you. I know we haven’t known each other long, but I already know I’m totally in love with you.”
“I love you too, Frank,” I replied, and now I knew I meant it. “Just don’t find someone else while I’m away,” I implored him.
“You neither,” Frank admonished me, and then we kissed. The taste of my spunk on his tongue was a little weird at first, but I kinda liked it.
“Now let me taste you,” I commanded my boyfriend. When I sniffed his brief-clad crotch, I realized I liked his smell a whole lot better than I liked mine. I found his scent absolutely intoxicating. When I went down on him, however, I realized that it’s a lot harder than it looks. At first I kept gagging on him, and I accidentally nipped him with my teeth. By the time we finished, my jaw was aching, man. It was a good thing he didn’t last long, either, and when it was over, I was rewarded with my first taste of his spunk, and it was heavenly.
We were still making out with our jeans around our ankles when Dad knocked on the door, giving us both heart failure. Man, I don’t think I ever got dressed so fast in my life. When he entered the room, he actually sniffed the air, and smiled.
“I just wanted to see how you boys were doing,” he explained. “I wanted to be sure you weren’t smoking pot or doing anything else you shouldn’t be doing.”
“Dad, you know I wouldn’t do that,” I complained.
“And I expect you not to,” he reiterated. “I’ll just leave you alone and let you get back to whatever you were doing,” and actually winked at us as he started to leave and close the door behind him.”
At the last second, I called out, “We’ll be going to bed, soon, anyway.”
“Do you think he knows?” I asked after he was gone.
“He probably thinks we just jacked off together,” Frank replied. “After all, a lot of guys — straight guys — do that.”
“Yeah, you’re probably right,” I acknowledged. “At least I hope your are. My old man would freak if he knew we were trading blowjobs. He’d go ballistic if he thought I was queer.”
“My parents weren’t thrilled about it,” Frank admitted, “but they assumed they could fix me by keeping me from being around other boys.”
“Speaking of which,” I began, “How did you talk them into letting you stay the night with me.”
“I told them it was your parents that invited me,” he explained, “and that the two of us would go out to the mall tomorrow and maybe try and pick up some girls.”
“Shit, you’re evil,” I commented with a grin.
“And you’re just now figuring that out?” he asked. “I didn’t say we were going to try to pick up girls — only that we might.”
“You are such a clever liar,” I acknowledged, right before I brought my lips to his.
After a little more making out — actually a lot more, we took turns showering and brushing our teeth, and then put on fresh pairs of briefs.
“It sucks that you have twin beds,” Frank commented, and then he added, “Now that you’re almost an adult, you need to talk your folks into getting you a double bed. You’re too old and too tall for twin beds.”
“Yeah, but I’ll be going away to school at the end of the summer,” I pointed out.
“Which is even more of a reason for them to redecorate your room. With a double bed in it, they could use it as another guest room. You won’t even be here most of the time anyway, and when you come to visit, at least we’d have a decent bed to share.”
“I do like the sound of that,” I agreed.
What Frank did next surprised me. He really was a sneaky devil. He took the bedspread off his bed, rolled it up and stuffed it under the covers, making it look like someone was sleeping in the bed. He then turned to me and said with a mischievous smile, “Let’s go to bed.”
It was a tight fit with the two of us in a single bed, but the feeling of his skin on mine was unbelievable. We ended up slipping our briefs off and fondled each other a lot as we made out in the dark. It was sooo sexy. We ended up humping each other until I felt our cum mixing and spreading between us. Our second round of lovemaking made us feel exhausted, but sated, and we drifted off to sleep in each others’ arms.
I was having a wildly erotic dream about Frank when I started to sense a familiar sensation. I felt like I was floating outside my body in space, but yet the feeling was still inside my head. Then another presence started to materialize before my eyes, the familiar form of Chris-24. Why was he here on this night of all nights? He wasn’t supposed to come tonight. What if I spoke aloud and Frank heard me? Actually, I had no idea if I looked or sounded strange when I was communicating with myself.
But then a third presence started to coalesce in front of me from out of the fog. It was Frank!
“What the hell is he doing here,” Chris-24 asked.
“I could ask the same thing of you,” Frank replied. “There I was, snuggled up with my boyfriend in bed and having a really amazing dream about him when all of a sudden, this fog descended around us. Needless to say, I was curious. I didn’t know what was happening, so I decided to check it out.
“But how is that possible,” I asked. “This conversation is taking place inside my head, in the present and in the future. How in hell did you get inside my head?”
“I’ve always had this kind of a sixth sense, kind of like ESP — not that I can read people’s minds or anything, but I sometimes can sense things. I also have this weird ability to share people’s dreams. I was doing that before future guy here showed up.”
“You mean you were having the same dream I was?” I asked.
“I was driving that dream as much as I was experiencing it with you.”
“You really have a dirty mind,” I said with a smile. “That dream was groovy. I would sooo like to try some of those things when we’re awake.”
“Me too, Chris,” Frank agreed.
“I still don’t see how this is possible,” Chris-24 said.
“Well, you initiated a shared dream between yourself and your past self, and I was already experiencing a shared dream with my boyfriend, so now we’re all three sharing the same dream.”
“But you don’t have time tunnel technology to facilitate a link between our minds,” Chris-24 challenged.
“I may not have ‘time tunnel technology’, but we have physical proximity, shared love, and my own abilities to make this possible” Frank explained. “You may not understand it, but it’s the reality in any case. I’m not going anywhere, so get used to me being here.”
“How much exactly do you know?” Chris-24 asked my boyfriend. “You obviously know I’m Chris from the future.”
“And you look fucking handsome, too,” Frank replied, causing both Chris-24 and me to blush. I know that in the future, you’re gonna invent something called time tunnel technology and use it to change the past. I can already feel some of the changes you’ve made. For example, originally we didn’t even know each other. We never met, and certainly never became boyfriends, so that change is definitely one for the better.
“So have you had the dream yet?” Frank asked.
“The dream?” Chris-24 and I both asked at the same time.
“The one where we meet when we’re thirteen,” Frank answered, and then he added, “I’m gathering you haven’t, but you will. I’ve been planting subliminal messages in my Chris’ brain, hoping they’ll make their way up and down the timeline. I’ve been hoping you’d get Chris involved in Dawson’s program a year or two earlier, when I was still in the program. If that had happened, we could have been boyfriends for the last four or five years instead of the last five weeks.”
“It hasn’t been five weeks,” I started to point out, but Frank interrupted and said, “I know — I was just being figurative rather than literal.”
“Oh,” I replied.
“Listen,” Frank said, going off on a tangent, “You’ve gotta be more careful about what you’re doing. You act like you’re altering the past, but that’s not the way it works. Each time you intervene, you cause the timeline to branch, creating multiple realities in the process. There are hundreds of realities, now, which is causing time itself to break down.
“On the plus side, with so many realities, many of which are similar, some of them are starting to merge together again after a while, making time look more like a web than the branches of a tree, but it’s still too much.”
“What happens when two realities come together if there are slightly different histories between the two?” I asked in curiosity.
“If the realities are close enough for them to merge, then the present time in each of them must be virtually identical. What someone would perceive is a feeling of uncertainty about the past — as if they can’t remember it precisely,” Frank explained.
“How do you know all this stuff,” Chris-24 asked.
Shrugging his shoulders, he answered, “I can sense the existence of the different realities and even communicate with myself in the other realities. It’s like this gift I have. From that, I was able to piece together the rest of it.”
“That’s incredible,” Chris-24 exclaimed.
“Since I know this isn’t exactly a social visit,” I started to ask, “Why are you here?”
“Because I’m gonna need your help,” he answered. “In 1989, Marion Dawson will disappear off the face of the earth, without a trace.”
Both Frank and I whistled in response to what Chris-24 said.
“He wasn’t supposed to disappear like that,” Chris-24 went on. “Originally, he continued his teaching and research until he was banned from receiving federal dollars, due to some ‘financial irregularities’ in his records, at which point he focused only on teaching. After his retirement, however, even though he kept on teaching and kept the high school program running, the University marginalized him more and more until he eventually committed suicide in the early part of the twenty-first century.”
“Whoa!” I said.
“On top of all that,” Chris-24 added, “our PhD thesis defense was sabotaged by a Russian scientist who claimed they could explain our results away based only on variations in the Earth’s magnetic flux.”
“Damn,” Frank interjected. “It sounds like the Russians got hold of our time tunnel technology.”
“We think the Russians got wind of the existence of TTT, and used their leverage to force Marion Dawson to do their bidding,” Chris-24 explained.
“They used David, didn’t they?” I asked.
“Who the fuck was David?” Frank asked.
“David was Dawson’s boyfriend,” Chris-24 related. “He was one of the first MIAs in Vietnam.”
“Dawson’s gay?” Frank asked in surprise.
“Let me get this straight,” I interjected. “You can get inside my head and share dreams with me, but can’t sense that Professor Dawson is like us?”
“Hey, my abilities are far from perfect,” Frank admitted. “It’s not like I have any control of it or anything.”
“Now that’s interesting,” Chris-24 commented.
“So if the Russians are using this David as leverage,” I realized aloud, “we need to go back and prevent David from being taken in the first place.”
“Either that or kill him,” Chris-24 related, causing me to shiver in horror. “The problem is that even if we push your contact with Chris back to him at age ten rather than twelve, and even if you manage to communicate with him and teach him all you know, will he be old enough, mature enough and smart enough to build his own TTT device? Even if he manages to make contact with Chris at three years of age, what could a three-year-old actually do? And even then, it might not be back far enough in time.
“We suspect that Marion Dawson is already working on pushing TTT to reach back to the late fifties or early sixties. That may have been the impetus for him getting involved with OTT in the first place. What we need to do is to help him stay focused, and to help him succeed.
“But if it becomes apparent that he’s still working with our enemies, even in this time period, then we have to be prepared to kill him for the sake of our own future.”
“Damn!” Frank exclaimed.
“Damn, shit and FUCK,” I chimed in.
“In order for you to stay close to Dawson, you’re going to have to remain in St. Louis for now,” Chris-24 told me.
Tears started to come to my eyes as I realized what that meant. “You mean I won’t be able to go to Stanford?” I finally asked, more for confirmation than anything.
“Not this year,” Chris-24 clarified, “but maybe next if we can get everything resolved by then. In the meantime, you already have an in at St. Louis with Dawson, and it’s an outstanding Physics department, on a par with the one at Stanford.”
“But that means living with my parents another year,” I despaired. “They’ll never let me live on campus when they live within commuting distance.”
“Hey, but that means another year that we can be together, Chris!” Frank said in excitement.
“Yeah,” I admitted in realization. “That really will make it all worth it.” I went up to the vision of my boyfriend and started to kiss him, right in my dream state. It was weird, but I could actually feel my body responding to my excitement, and I could feel Frank’s responding in kind against me, right next to me in bed.
“Now, there’ll be plenty of time for that later, guys,” Chris-24 interrupted us. I just turned around and give him the finger, which caused him to smile. I knew that he knew that’s just what he would have done.
“You do realize that in saving this David, you won’t really be altering the past,” Frank interjected suddenly. “You’ll just be creating yet another reality in which the Russians don’t have any leverage over Dawson.”
“We only need one viable timeline from which to operate, free of interference from enemy agents,” Chris-24 said. “Hopefully then, if it turns out there are multiple realities, we can find a way to collapse all the others.”
“I don’t think you can collapse a timeline without collapsing all of them,” Frank interrupted. “In fact, that’s probly what happens when time gets fragmented. The more and more time is splintered and disintegrates, the less stable the spatial region becomes. Eventually time as we know it will cease to exist, and the only way that can happen is inside a spatial singularity. In other words…”
“The Earth will be swallowed up by a black hole,” Chris-24 concluded.”
The author gratefully acknowledges the assistance of David of Hope and Anthony Camacho in editing this story, as well as the support of Awesome Dude for hosting it. © Altimexis 2016