That was when we were 14. Then we turned 15. And my problems at home intensified.
Shawn seemed just plain weird to me now. He rarely spoke to any of us, not even Mom, and I’d seen him talking to himself. He spent almost all his time in his room with his Bible. Dad was worried about him, but it seemed to me he and Mom had agreed on some sort of pact, and that I was my dad’s responsibility and Shawn was Mom’s. I don’t know for a fact that was true, but that’s the way things seemed to be working.
I was thrilled with something that seemed to result from that agreement. One Saturday, at the end of a week when things had been particularly tense and I was in a pretty dark mood because of it, Dad told me we were going shopping. I gladly went with him. Anything to get out of the house was the way I looked at it. He wouldn’t tell me where we were going, but we drove into town and ended up at a bike store. And I don’t mean a bicycle store. It was a motorcycle store!
“Dad, what are we doing here?” I asked, both curious and a little excited.
“We don’t have to go in if you don’t want to,” he teased, his dry sense of humor coming out.
“No, no, that’s okay. We’re here, we might as well go inside,” I responded.
We entered the store. There were bikes all over the floor, big and little, raked and cut and lowered and in all colors and styles and sizes. My eyes were about popping out of my head. I was 15, and to me, I’d just walked into heaven.
We walked around, looking at the bikes. Dad asked my opinion of several, and I tried my hardest to say intelligent things other than ‘cool’ or ‘neat’ or ‘rad’. Eventually the tension mounted and I had to ask.
“Dad, are you really thinking of buying one of these?” Hope was keeping me on the edge of sanity.
“No, Tim, I’m not.”
I felt my heart slow down, and my head returned to earth.
“Oh. Well then, we’re just looking around? Admiring the equipment?”
“No, that’s not right either. Actually, I’m not going to buy one of these. I’m going to buy two. One for you, one for me. Then, we’re going to start riding them together. Unless, of course, the idea doesn’t appeal to you. Maybe you’d prefer that I got you a tropical fish?”
I ignored the sarcasm. “Dad!” I shouted. “Yes! Yesyesyes! But, but… why?”
“Because you don’t seem to be having much fun these days, and teenagers are supposed to have fun. In a very few years, you’ll be off to college, which can be fun, but it’s also a whole lot of pressure and hard work. Then, you’ll graduate and most of the rest of your life you’ll be working. This is when you should be enjoying the hell out of everything, being adventurous and taking risks and more than anything, laughing. Instead, you’re moping around the house, and to tell the truth, I am too. So, unless you don’t want to, I thought we could buy a couple of bikes and act like, well, teenagers. What do you think?”
I didn’t even answer him. I just reached out, grabbed him, and hugged him with a huge smile on my face.
“Dad, you do know I don’t have a license.”
“Yeah, but I thought we could get you your learner’s permit, and we could ride the bikes off-road till you’re legal.”
“Yeah, that’ll work!”
We shopped, found a couple of bikes we liked, but then talked to a salesman. Dad told him what we had in mind, and he recommended a couple of different bikes, ones he said would do better off road and would also work well when I could drive on the streets. I was glowing when Dad pulled out his credit card and bought them. He arranged to have them delivered the next day. We also bought helmets and a small trailer that would carry the bikes. He then had a hitch installed on the back of the car. We were in business.
That was the beginning of a period that my dad and I really enjoyed. The weekends were now spent riding. We found lots of places where we could ride. Southeastern Ohio is covered with old open pit coal mines, and many of the ones that have had the land reclaimed were accessible for off-road use. We had fun riding, and because we were enjoying it together and had both the enjoyment and adventure, our already close bond grew stronger. I didn’t seem to have a mother anymore. But the dad I had was wonderful.
School was going well for me, too. I’d always earned good grades. I’d like to say I studied long and hard and was a outstanding student, but the truth was, I didn’t work all that hard. It came pretty easily for me. I paid attention in class, and I did the assigned homework, but other than that, I didn’t spend a lot of time with schoolwork or independent reading or anything like that. By paying attention, by doing the homework, I found the tests we took were rather easy. I ended up getting all A’s.
I was okay socially, too. I wasn’t athletic, I wasn’t a jock, and I wasn’t cute, so I wasn’t popular like the really popular kids were. Small kids generally aren’t unless they have great, outgoing personalities. I was small and, while not shy, I didn’t light a room with my incandescence when I walked in, either. I wasn’t part of the real in-group at school, but I had lots of friends, everyone knew me, and school was fun. I was extroverted enough, I guess, and I was involved in things, and so I enjoyed life at school. We even had a club that I was part of, the Storybook Club. It was for kids who liked to write. I’d been writing in my journal faithfully, and of course the fictional stories I was still writing were becoming better the more I wrote. When I heard about the club, I joined it and, surprisingly, I became president when they had to pick officers. That was unexpected and kind of cool.
Home was another matter. Mom was really into her religion now. Most of what she talked about had a biblical basis to it. She was terribly concerned that I wasn’t born again and had no interest in becoming saved. She was quick to point out all the areas in my life that were wicked and evil, all the things I did that took me further and further from a state of grace. I often had very little idea of what precisely she was going on about but had learned it was best not to engage her by asking for a clearer explanation. I’d found that was a serious mistake.
Because of her attitude toward me, I tried to spend more time at Jed’s house, where I was accepted by his parents as a good kid and a good influence on their son. If they only knew!
Missy had taken to totally ignoring us, though she tended to scowl a lot when she saw me. I knew she was still suspicious and resentful of us, but it appeared she’d moved on. She didn’t bother us any longer, and that made it easier for Jed and me to pursue the activities we still both enjoyed.
As I was there a lot now, frequently when only Jed, or only Jed and Missy were home, and because Missy had taken to ignoring us, we felt much freer. It became fairly frequent that we’d come home from school, go to his room and get naked together. Maybe 15 is a little old for this, but I was pretty sure I was gay and, while I thought it likely Jed wasn’t, he was horny as a billy goat and about as selective in choosing partners, and I saw nothing wrong with taking advantage of my opportunities with him. I didn’t love him any more than he did me. For both of us, it was all about sex.
It had been a difficult week for me at home and I was stressed out. I was in a grumpy mood, and when we got to Jed’s room that afternoon I wasn’t thinking about sex. Jed, however, was.
As soon as he shut the door, he began shedding his clothes. I looked at him, and when his shirt was off and he was loosening his belt, I said, “Jed, forget it. I don’t feel like it. Life’s fucked up at home, I got a C on the English test because the ambiguous way he’d worded two of the questions had me confused. Also, my bike needs a new front tire. And Mrs. Davis gave us beaucoup homework tonight.”
“Yeah, so what you need is a little of my personal attention. I’ll cure whatever’s bothering you, get your mind off it.” He opened his belt.
“Jed, I’m not in the mood. Forget it.”
His pants were sliding down, and he was kicking his way out of them. “Come on, Tim. I need to get off. I was looking at Rachel all afternoon and my balls are starting to ache. Let’s do it.”
“No. I’m going to start my homework. You want to get off, be my guest, but don’t include me.”
Jed slipped his boxers down, revealing his half-hard cock. Even though I wasn’t feeling like sex, seeing that beautiful cock did get my attention. Jed was still larger than I was; all over. I never had had much of a growth spurt. He was almost six feet tall now and was well proportioned—again, all over. I loved looking at him all over, and especially at his cock. It was the cock I wished I had.
He stood there grinning at me, watching me look. He knew how I felt about his body. I’d sure told him enough times. He also knew if I looked long enough, I’d get turned on.
But I didn’t want to get turned on. I wanted to stay grumpy. So, perversely, I turned away from his nakedness and went to his desk, laying my books down.
That’s when he grabbed me from behind. He sort of wrestled me to the bed, and threw me on it. Then he fell on top of me. I wriggled and pushed, but he outweighed me by a lot. He was laughing, which made it difficult for me to stay sulky, and he was grinding himself into me. I couldn’t help it, he was turning me on.
Still lying on me, he began unbuttoning my shirt. I didn’t struggle enough to keep him from doing that. When it was open, he reached down for my belt, and between unbuckling it and rubbing my crotch, I was hard by the time it was unfastened.
“Lift your butt,” he commanded, a little breathlessly, and I complied. Within moments, I was as naked as he was.
This was familiar territory, and we both knew what the other liked. One thing we both loved was mutual sucking. I loved the feel of his hard cock in my mouth, its texture and taste. Running my tongue over it, sucking on it, and moving up and down on it drove me almost as wild as it did him.
I always found it a little distracting trying to enjoy the feeling of him in my mouth when he had me in his mouth at the same time, and in fact we rarely brought each other off simultaneously because we liked it better going one at a time. But at the beginning, we both liked to suck each other together.
We were experts at this now and began tonguing and bobbing and giving each other a lot of pleasure. He was big enough that I could give his crown a good workout with my mouth while stroking the base with my hand. I was shorter than he was, and he could get all of me into his mouth, so he didn’t use as much hand stroking with me as I did with him.
He also liked me playing with his balls while I suckled him, and I did that a lot too. I was doing that, working his cock, stretching and playing with his scrotum, when Missy came into the room. With her camera.
She came in quietly, and we were both concentrating on each other and our own feelings, and the first I knew she was there was when the flash filled the room.
“What the…!” screamed Jed, letting my hard cock pop out of his mouth. He was looking back at her, my hard wet cock still inches from his mouth, when she took her second picture.
Jed tried to jump up, but I’d never released his cock from my mouth and he scratched it on my teeth, letting out a holler in the process. He got it free from my lips and that resulted in a third picture, one of him kneeling on the bed, naked, with his long erection hovering over my face and open mouth.
He was kneeling, I was on my back, and we were both looking at Missy, who had a gleam of cruel delight in her eyes. “Fuck you guys, fuck you both,” she said, all her pent up anger and sadism spewing out, and then she turned and ran. Jed had trouble getting off the bed and was only at the door to his room when we heard the front door open and close. Jed stopped. His erection was fast fading, but he was still naked, it was four in the afternoon and she was outside. I think he realized he couldn’t chase her without dressing first.
Jed turned and looked at me. I looked at him. Neither of us knew what to say. But the disaster that lay before us took but little imagination. Those pictures would ruin our lives, nothing would ever be the same for either of us ever again, and Missy would have no conscience about distributing them wherever they’d do us the most harm. If she could get them on national TV, she’d do it. She wouldn’t see the difference between us making her suffer some intense disappointment for a few days, and her destroying our very existence. Forever.
We were both quiet, thinking, for several minutes while we were getting dressed. Finally, Jed asked me what we could do, what was going to happen.
“I just don’t know, Jed. I can only think of one thing. We somehow have to get those pictures. If she gets them developed and people see them, we can’t live here any longer. This isn’t the same as just someone passing a rumor that someone’s gay. Or even coming out to people that you are gay. That’s a controlled situation, or as controlled as you can make it. This… this is just awful. You spring any of those pictures on someone, they can’t ever look at us the same after that. We’ve got to get hold of the pictures, and do it before anyone sees them, but I have no idea how to do that. One thing I’m pretty sure, asking Missy for them won’t get us anywhere.”
He didn’t respond. We sat and thought, but that didn’t do any good either. This wasn’t a terribly complicated situation. I realized pretty quickly what had to be done. And that it was awful. Truly awful.
I told Jed what we had to do. He turned pale, and argued, but in the end, agreed. There wasn’t a whole lot of choice in the matter. And Jed found it fairly easy to reconcile himself to the fact that, as long as he could remember, Missy had been screwing up his life. This was just more of the same.
~ ~
That night, I told Dad I had to talk to him privately after dinner. We waited till Shawn was in his room and Mom had left for a church meeting.
“Dad, I don’t know any way to say this but to spit it out, and hope you’re not too disappointed in me. I’m pretty sure I’m gay.” I stopped and waited for a reaction from him. He reached out, grasped my shoulder, and squeezed it reassuringly.
“I thought maybe you were, Tim. You never talk about girls, you never date anyone, and you’re 15. So, I guessed at that possibility. You know me well enough to know I love you, and this doesn’t affect that at all. If you ever doubted that, then I haven’t done the job I hope I’ve been doing. We can deal with this, Tim.”
I smiled at him, relieved at his acceptance. I felt a little weight come off my shoulders, but not much. I hadn’t thought my telling him I was gay would be a problem, and it hadn’t been. I had a great dad, we were close, and, well, there was no surprise here. It was the next part that was difficult for me.
“Believe it or not, that’s the easy part, Dad. The hard part is, and I’m sorry to have to tell you this but I do have to. Jed and I have been messing around together for years. I’m telling you that for a reason. You know how he and Missy don’t get along; I’ve told you all about that. Well, today Missy caught Jed and me together, and she took pictures of us. They’re pictures that no one should ever see. You don’t know—Jed’s parents don’t know—the virulent dislike she has for Jed and for me, too. She has the film and there’s no question she’ll show the pictures to people once they’re developed and printed. I don’t know who’ll process them; they’re really bad, but she’ll find a way. Dad, if people see those pictures, we don’t think we can live here any longer. They’ll ruin us. We won’t be able to face anyone. And I simply don’t know what to do. My only thought is, perhaps if you and Mr. and Mrs. Tuckman confront her, she can be convinced to give up that roll of film. I don’t think there’s any way she can be forced not to tell people what she saw, but telling is just telling, and a lot of people won’t believe her.”
I took a deep breath. “A lot of people know about her feelings about Jed and me, so her saying we were doing things might just be looked at as something she made up to hurt us. It would just be rumor. Showing pictures, well, that’s going to be more than we’ll be able to deal with. Dad, Jed and I need your help with this, and we need it right now.”
I took another big breath. I’d hated to say it, but I’d had to and so I had. I looked closely to see any change in Dad’s eyes. If I saw what I didn’t want to see, disappointment, I didn’t think I’d be able to handle it.
I didn’t see disappointment. I saw determination. “Do Jed’s parents know? Is he talking to them?”
“He’s afraid to. His mother has always taken Missy’s side over his, and his father isn’t as tolerant as you are. The thing is, Jed isn’t gay. He might be bisexual, I don’t know, but he’s not gay. I’m pretty sure of that. But he’s scared to death to talk to them about what we do. He doesn’t know how they’ll react if they find out he’s being sexual with another boy.
“I’m scared too, frankly. I’m afraid they’ll never let me in their house again if they think I’ve corrupted their son. This whole thing is awful. If I couldn’t talk to you about it, I don’t know what I would have done. And Jed doesn’t have a father like you to go to, or at least he isn’t sure whether he does or not. He’s as upset with all this as I am.”
I shuddered, but had more to say. “In any case, something has to be done fast. Can we go over and talk to them together? Jed hates the idea, but agrees that’s the only thing that can be done. They’re the only ones who can possibly stop Missy. We should do it now.”
Dad sat and thought for a moment, then said, “We have to remember something else, too. At some point soon we’ll have to talk to your mother and brother about this. We don’t want them hearing rumors. They need to hear it from you. That’s going to be difficult, and in some ways maybe even worse than talking to the Tuckmans.”
He stood up. “This feels really awkward, going over to talk about something like this, but you’re right. We need to do this, and we have to do it before something happens with that film. I think I’d rather do almost anything but this, but we don’t have much choice here. Let’s go.”
And so we walked next door to the Tuckmans, climbed the steps up to the porch, and knocked on their door.