While Nifty provides its services free of charge to both budding authors and readers, it is not free of costs. Please consider donating at http://donate.nifty.org/donate.html.
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
When we arrived at the bungalow, the other guys were just returning from church so when we made our way in we didn't look too out of place.
There was a lot of discussion about what had happened in the mess hall that morning, and much hilarity about the way that Parvus Excrementum, otherwise known as Little Shit, had almost lost his head at the hands of Big Ben Jordaan, and then had copped it anyhow when he messed his drink all over his neighbour at the mess table.
Everybody (except Parvus) came and stood around our bunk bed as we settled in, and there were many curious looks. The guys were completely silent.
"Wha-a-at?" Ben asked, pretending to be busy at his trommel. I lay back on my bunk, pretending to read a comic book.
Nobody said a word. Just broad grins all around. Eventually Tobie started.
"S-o-o-o...? Tell us...!"
""Tell you what?" Ben shot back, blushing all the way into the roots of his blond hair.
Wessels continued.
"Where were you two when we went off to church?"
"What do you mean? We were right there with you, didn't you see us?"
Parvus made the mistake of chiming in.
"Hu-uh! You were not. I was looking out for you because..." and that's how far he got.
"SHUT UP!" a chorus of male voices silenced him. His words dribbled like shit down his ugly little chin and he slunk off out of the bungalow.
"Fucking snitch..." Wessels voiced what we all felt. "But he's right, of course. You weren't at church. So come on, what's going on?"
The comic book held my attention as I pretended not to be involved in the conversation at all even though I was smiling from ear to ear on the inside.
"Guys," Big Ben Jordaan started, "we have something to tell you."
Wessels immediately chimed in "Bennie and Ben, sitting up a tree..."
"Shut the fuck up, Wessels," Tobie shouted, joined by a myriad of other voices. "Let the man speak, for crying out loud!"
The cabal subsided and Ben sat down next to me on the bunk. He reached back and put his hand on my shoulder.
"I asked Bennie if I could be his man...and if he would be my Gay-boy..."
You could hear a pin drop. I became alarmed and for the first time looked up from the comic, afraid that we had started a riot. Nobody said a word. No expression changes, nothing to indicate that anything untoward had been said. Finally Coert Bruwer, a boy so shy that you sometimes wondered if he even had a voice, almost whispered:
"I told you."
That did it. They fell on us and shoved and poked and thumped and hugged and the noise was overpowering and wonderful in its congratulatory intensity. It lasted for minutes and when I thought our bunk would collapse with the combined weight of the melee, it subsided and red-faced and grinning to a man, the boys sat back on the surrounding bunk beds and just stared at us, eyes shining with happiness for us.
"So, aren't you guys, like, shocked or...'the moer in' (the hell in)... or..." His voiced trailed off.
Coert was again the unlikely spokesman.
"Listen here..." His quiet voice barely disturbed the Sunday quiet of the bungalow, where late morning sunlight was now streaming onto our bunk bed, lighting big Ben and me as if in the rays through stained glass window in a church.
"My father is a pastor. When he does a wedding, it's the most beautiful thing in the world. The two people stand there and everybody is so happy for them, because you know that these two people chose each other, and now, they are no longer two halves, because, like two pieces of a puzzle, they fit together with no spaces between them..." There were gruff, manly rumbles of assent, and I'm sure nobody, not even God, noticed the mixed metaphors.
Wessels continued where Coert left off.
"We have been watching you guys for a long time. We've seen how Ben looks at you gay boy. I don't think he even knew that he loves you. But every time he looked at you, you could see in his eyes that he carried you like light in the dark. When you walked by, it was something to see his big old face. Shit...!" he sniffed. There were a couple of other sniffles around the room.
Coert rescued them again, as the sniffles continued.
"When God puts two people together, he doesn't look at whether they are men or women. He looks at their hearts and then he says: `Look at Ben Jordaan when he sees how beautiful and sweet gay-boy is.'"
The nearest guy, Johnny du Plooy, reached over and put his hand on my head and ruffled my short, dark hair. I ducked and took a swipe at him with the comic.
Coert continued. "Look at Ben Jordaan when he sees how beautiful and sweet gay-boy is. Shall we give them to each other?' And then the angels nod their heads and then God says, Yes, it's good!'"
There were assenting voices from all of the guys.
"Who the fuck cares anyway?" Peter Lewis, an English guy from Cape Town volunteered. "Not one of us is a whole man anymore."
He stood there, red in the face, wiping tears off his cheeks, and nodded down at his leg, one of the most severely damaged in the room. He had only his hip on the left side remaining, and he had only just avoided dying and losing his right leg too, because he had fallen behind a Casper (military armored vehicle) when the blast had hit. It had shielded him, but all the other guys in the platoon had died.
"We of all people know that you grab hope where you can find it, and you guys are hope to us. Hope that a man can find another person to love him just the way he is, and to hold him like the treasure he is!!" Once again a chorus of masculine assent supported his impassioned outpouring.
Wessels again.
"We already knew you guys were going to happen. So we decided that we would give you the morning here alone, and we will stand guard outside and let nobody in, and if the brass decides to visit, then we will warn you."
For the first time I spoke.
"Why are you going to leave us alone?" I immediately regretted it and I blushed, because I knew what his answer was going to be.
The entire platoon looked at me ...like `duh?' and after a moment looked back at Big Ben and Peter spoke for all of them.
"So you guys in?"
I answered.
"Thanks guys, that would be great. Anybody wanna watch?" I was kidding of course.
A chorus of Fuck yeah" and "Sure thing' and Fok Ja' resounded through the room.
"STOP!" It was Wessels. "No ways we gonna watch these guys. This place has little enough privacy as it is...! You guys, you have two hours to be alone. The way this place goes...who knows, it may be all you ever get."
"Just kidding guys, it would be great to be alone and we really appreciate this...!"
"Ja so what you guys going to get up to...?" Wessels' voice rose at the end of the sentence, majorly suggestive.
I suddenly had a horrible feeling in the pit of my stomach. What if these guys were setting me up? I reminded myself to take a nice deep breath and remember that these were all straight guys in the armed forces in Apartheid SA, where queers get beaten up all the time. Why would they all of a sudden be so nice and kind to me? What if it was some dark plot to get me into a compromising situation and prove that I'm a dirty, perverted queer?
Author's Note THE FOLLOWING IS BASED ON FACT. SEE http://www.thegully....25aversion.html There were stories about what happened to gay guys in the army. Queers were seen as a potential security risk, and so there were concerted efforts to reorient them. Electric shock therapy, chemical castration, and sometimes even physical castration was not unheard of. They were put into psych wards along with objectors (people who came to the army but refused to carry arms due to religious or ethical reason) and every other kind of security risk. When parents objected, it was claimed that the person in question was the property of the state.
I suddenly felt a dread fear ice my bones and my heart sped up. I looked at the guys surrounding my bunk and the goofy grins on their faces took on the ghoulish appearance of death masks. Entrapment was frequent in South Africa, even in the Police, and gay people were often the victims of bogus sexual advances, and even sex, by attractive police officers whose sole purpose was to lure them into circumstances where they could be accused of unnatural acts. I reminded myself that even sex between people of different races was illegal and considered unnatural, and homosexuality even more so, in a Christian National State where people disappeared for having an opinion considered a threat to National Security.
FLASHBACK
I remembered when my ex and I had gone to a pay phone at a train station to call his mom, and a group of straight guys had spotted us. Before we knew it, they had cornered us in the booth, and one of them had smashed his bike helmet into Grant's jaw, breaking it in three places. Just for looking like a gay man in a public place. We went off to emergency at the local hospital, and his jaw was wired for the next six weeks. His teeth never fit together in the same ways again. I had quit smoking, but that night I smoked several cigarettes with Grant's mother as we waited for him to receive treatment for an injury that he received at the hand of a bunch of cowardly straight fuckers. So excuse me for being a little leery at the warm fuzzies displayed by our straight roommates.
Ben's warm hand on my cheek brought me back to reality.
"Hey baby, what's wrong?" His kind voice shook me from my reverie. "You look like you've seen a ghost...!"
It took me a moment to fully surface from the cold dark fear that had gripped me. I looked at him as if he was a stranger, the questions in my eyes alarming him and all the guys who could see me.
"Ben, I just had the most awful feeling. For a moment I was so scared of you all... why would you be so nice to me? Straight men normally hate gays..."
Ben turned to the crew that surrounded us.
"Guys, you said you were going to leave us alone for a while. Can you go now, please? I want to talk to Bennie alone."
A chorus of "sure" and "no Problem" and "see you later" filled the air and the guys filed out on their collection of crutches and wheel chairs. When they were all out, Ben stretched himself out next to me on the lower bunk and pulled me into him.
"Bennie, what's going on?" he whispered softly into my ear as he put his arm around me and hugged me gently into his muscular embrace.
"I don't know. I have a very bad feeling, Ben. I remembered a time when my ex and I were beaten up for being gay...no, really just for looking gay in the wrong place at the wrong time. It was terrifying. And then I suddenly wondered if you guys weren't just playing me to lead me into a trap. It happens all the time."
With my head on his strong shoulder, and his strong heart beating right up against my chest, it sounded like madness. He didn't say anything. He just placed his soft Afrikaner-boy lips on the corner of my own mouth and rested them there. I could feel his breath on my cheek through his nose. His eyes, with the long, transparently blonde lashes, were almost closed and when I looked out of the corner of my own eyes, I saw his light blue peepers with impossibly dilated pupils trained on mine. He liked what he saw. Either that, or his body was a superb liar.
I turned my face towards him so that our lips could align, and he breathed in as I opened my mouth to receive him. I turned to him with my body as well and tilted my head back to be kissed by my straight lover. I leaned up with my arms and put them around his neck, wrestling him closer still. We paused, our lips locked, and with his left hand he caressed my cheek. My eyes were closed by this time, swooning in the embrace of the man that had chosen to make me his own, across the boundaries of gender and convention. Once again I could feel moisture drip on my face as a tear escaped his pale blue eyes. I leaned up and kicked the tiny trail all the way to the corner of his eye and kissed his eyelid.
Ben started to turn his body towards me so that I was forced onto my back. His arm under me, effortlessly lifted me so that I was placed delicately down. He was on his knees and he overshadowed me, looking like a khaki clad, shorthaired Thor. His face was flushed as he poised over me, his eyes ablaze with love and desire. All the while his eyes were open and looked straight into mine with a look of such tortured love that I could only begin to believe that the impossible had happened: that the gods had blessed me with a lover both passionate and strong that would abandon the expectations of his former life to add himself to me, to form a union that was as unique as it was real.
Bennie continued to make love to my mouth. He feasted on my lips, as at the most satisfying banquet, and I had to call my fears of before liar, if the honesty in his actions was to be credited. He held my chin in his strong, callused hand as if to prevent me from escaping his ravishment, sucking my tongue painfully into his gorgeous mouth, and I groaned with ecstasy and lust.
At last he brought his pelvis within range. I felt at once afraid and exhilarated as he descended on me, his weight pinning me to the bed and my breath left my body with a whoosh! He dove into my mouth like a starving man and continued to kiss me with a passion and intensity that sucked from me what breath still remained.
Immediately I encircled his hips with my maimed legs, trapping him against me where I could feel the eagerness with which his body desired mine through his bulging brown army pants. I longed to take into my mouth that heroic member with which he had penetrated and satisfied me the night before, so I disengaged my arms as if to make my way down to his nether regions.
"Huh-uh" he said, denying my efforts by pinning me further to the complaining army bunk. He relinquished monopoly of my mouth and licked my cheek and chin, laved my ear on the left side with his broad, warm tongue. He breathed in through his nose as he stuck his tongue into my ear and then sucked deliciously on my ear lobe. I was astonished that a rough, masculine man like this could truly treat such an insignificant body part as the main event.
But just as I got used to that, he started to make his way down my neck, and as he encountered the top button of my army shirt, he nimbly undid it, exposing just enough flesh to continue his feast. He rubbed his coarse chin in the hollows of my clavicle, sending shivers up and down my spine. His warm breath in my neck and on the top of my pec made my trapped penis lurch in my pants. I thrust upwards into his crotch and he met me, grind for grind.
He opened my whole shirt and took my right nipple in his warm mouth and electric currents passed from his mouth to my desperate dick and I knew that my boxers were getting soaked with pre-cum.
I had my hands on the back of his head, and was running my fingers through his short, course hair. His mouth was now driving me crazy in my belly button and his hands were lightly caressing my upper body, pinching at my nipples. He abruptly made his way back to my face again, and ravished my mouth in a repeat performance that left my heart thumping in my chest.
He didn't hang around there for long, but before he made his way down again, he whispered in my ear.
"Bennie, I will show you that I'm not playing with you. I want you to know I am in love with you, my gay boy, and that I will do whatever it takes to convince you that I'm here for you, that I'm your man."
Then he slid down my abs and when he encountered my pants, he quickly undid my buttons.
"Mmmmm.... naughty boy. No underpants... Did you know I was going to visit this spot again?"
"No, but a man can hope... " I managed. Ben chuckled. He licked at my pubic hair and mouthed at the root of my cock that was exposed in the V of my pants. He then pulled my pants down and over my buns and my rigid, pre-cum leaking cock escaped and slapped against my abdomen.
Ben quickly removed my pants off my legs (lucky, because I didn't have any feet, I wasn't wearing any boots!) and flung it on the floor next to the bed. Then he lifted my legs high into the air and I thought he was going to fuck me for sure, and my aching ass throbbed and starfished in anticipation. But instead he approached with his beautiful face and sniffed deeply when he a reached his destination. He nuzzled at my balls and then slowly sucked one into his mouth, gently savoring the texture and warmth, while pulling it away from my body. It was borderline painful but the sensation was delicious and my body writhed and lashed under the skillful ministrations of my determined, gentle lover.
His hands still held my legs up and he played with my balls for a while with his sensuous mouth. Then he shocked me when he released my balls to root a little lower to my waiting asshole. Once again he sniffed appreciatively and with his nose lifted my balls out of the way so that his nose and questing mouth had access to my waiting anus. He tentatively took a lick at it and the touch of the ever-straight boy's tongue on my most intimate place send shockwaves up my whole body. I groaned and hyperventilated, the hunger for his dick up my fuck-shaft now consuming my every irrational thought.
"Oh Ben, fuck me, I need you to fuck my hole with your big, big dick," I babbled like a porno. "I need you to pour your hot semen into my body to make me yours forever!" I begged like a whore in heat.
"Be patient, Bennie my love, be patient, all in good time!"
Then gently, ever so gently he opened his mouth, and with the same awesome passion as he had kissed my mouth and made love to me, he French kissed my asshole. He lifted my legs further back and spread my legs so that he could have better access. I put my hands around my stumps so that his hands were free, and he took each of my buns in a huge calloused hand and spread my ass wide. With his two thumbs he massaged the endanger hole and chuckled again as I groaned in ecstatic agony. Then he dived in, eating my sphincter, sucking the pulsing hole as if he hoped to get some life-giving nourishment from it. This straight man munched on my man cunt, possessed by the need to love me in a language that I would comprehend. He spoke to my body directly, short-circuiting the brain and truth-saying my gay heart and mind, calling liar the terror that had stolen my peace only shortly before.
When I thought I would have a seizure from his attention to my convulsions asshole, he dropped me to the bed and lucked swiftly up my rigid shaft and engulfed my leaking cock into his warm, wet mouth. He swallowed the whole thing and the spasms of his welcoming throat sent wave upon wave of pleasure radiating from my groin upwards through my whole body.
Then he licked upwards again all the way up my shaft, and took first the head and then the whole of my dick in his mouth. He literally swallowed the whole length of it in one swoop, and the contractions of his throat around my cock edged me over the precipice into headlong orgasm. He struggled to stay attached to my spewing cock as I thrust into his mouth with my entire lower body, and the pressure and pain on my stumps as I anchored myself to do so only enhanced the sweet agony of the orgasm.
Ben swallowed all my ejaculate and in some deep recess of my cum-seized brain it registered that my lover was indeed just that: my lover, not some shadowy decoy, destined to mislead me into incriminating unnatural acts that would see me imprisoned at best, and institutionalized for corrective behavior at worst.
My lover had concluded that words were the least effective way to demonstrate his love for me, and had chosen instead to perform the most giving sexual act on me to teach me of his love.
My mind had not yet full recovered from the earth-moving ejaculation down the lovingly receptive throat of my heroic Ben, when a commotion shattered the peace of the sunny morning.
"Guys, guys, sorry to disturb you," shouted a breathless Tobie, from the door, his eyes wide with terror. "There's a whole battalion of rank on the way and it looks like they're coming here, and they mean business!"
"Shit!" Ben cussed, and reached down off the bed and handed me my pants. He was still fully dressed, so he helped me to quickly get decent. By the time a group of men entered the large room, I was in my wheelchair and Ben was sitting on the side of our bunk bed. I saluted Lt. Vosloo, who led the charge from a seated position. Ben stood to attention as best as he could using his crutch. Vosloo was followed by the chaplain, a distinguished Afrikaans man in his sixties, and three MPs (Military Police) who brought up the rear. When I saw Parvus in their shadow, I knew things were about to get bad.
"At ease!" Vosloo commanded. "Jordaan, there have been accusations that you have engaged in homosexual actions with Pretorius, here. Is that true?"
I could see from my vantage that Ben was thinking at lightning speed. If he admitted it, he was incriminating me, and I was likely to get into trouble as well. If he denied it, they would trot out a witness and there was no prize for guessing who that would turn out to be, with the Excrementum lurking slimily in the background.
"Lt. I forced Pretorius to have sex with me. He tried to resist me but I'm just bigger. So yes, I had homosexual sex, but Pretorius wasn't a willing participant.
"Ben...!" I shouted. "That's..." He turned to me with a look of resignation and determination in his eyes and I saw love and protection war with anger and rage, that he should have to deny what we were to each other. My words died in my throat.
The chaplain, Major Verster, spoke up.
"Jordaan, you know we can't have that kind of thing in the Army. Your evil influence has most likely already done a great deal of harm to Lance Corporal Pretorius. It breaks my heart to do this but..." He looked at Vosloo and nodded sadly.
The latter gestured to the MPs, who brusquely made their way over to Ben. The rank made way, and they roughly ushered my Ben out of the room. As he disappeared around the door he turned one last time too look at me, but he was roughly pushed so that my last sight of my beautiful man was of him meekly succumbing to the rough handling of the MPs, to save me.
Lt. Vosloo stood in front of me. He looked at me, the expression in his eyes neutral.
"That could have been you. I'll see you at 14h00." Then he turned around and he and the Chaplain walked out. Parvus beat a hasty retreat as the bungalow suddenly filled with noisy soldiers who all converged on my bed to ask what had gone down. Wessels was, as usual, the spokesman.
"What the fuuuuck? Where have they taken Jordaan?"
"They said that somebody had accused him of homosexuality acts. He lied and said that he forced me to have gay sex." I said. My voice was dead. "He gave himself for me. You know what they do to queers in the army. And he wasn't even gay..."
You could hear a pin drop. The sun disappeared behind a blue-black cumulonimbus. Thunder rattled the windows. Rain was coming.
We all just sat there. Tears streamed down my face as sobs wracked my body. Tobie hobbled over to me and sat down next to me. He put his arm around my shoulder and pulled me close. He kissed my cheek.
"Parvus is so dead... " he whispered in my ear.