Boys of Summer

Obligatory warnings and disclaimers:

1. If reading this is in any way illegal where you are or at your age, or you don't want to read about male/male relationships, go away. You shouldn't be here.

2. This story isn't based on anyone in particular, alive or dead, so any resemblance to anybody is unintentional.

Questions and commentary can be sent to "writerboy69@hotmail.com". I enjoy constructive criticism, praise, and rational discussion. I do not enjoy flames, and will not tolerate them. Unless I often hear from you and would recognize your address, please put the story title in the subject, or my junk mail filter may screen you.

Thanks to everyone who has written so far. To answer a frequent question from those who are unfamiliar with my other stories, they're called "Brian and Tommy", "Thieves", "JC's Hitchhiker", "Tangle", and "Rebound", and they can all be found in the boybands section.

Running out of the house to introduce myself seemed like a great idea until it was time to do it. I'd darted upstairs, dropping my towel into the hamper by my bedroom and praying that my mother wouldn't take it upon herself to do my laundry this week and finding it, and quickly thrown on a pair of shorts and a t-shirt. I didn't really notice until I was halfway down the stairs that the shirt was old, and starting to get a little small, pulling tightly across my chest when my arms moved. I just liked to wear it because it was comfortable, but now I was suddenly worried that he would think I had picked it out on purpose to.

Well.

To what, actually?

Because I was definitely crazy if I thought he would look at it and think anything besides, "Hey, he's dressed. He's wearing a shirt." Besides, I hadn't thought anything when I put it on, so it was a stupid train of thought in any case. I didn't even want him to think something like that, anyway, because if I did, then it would mean something else, something that I didn't want to think about. I especially didn't want to think about whether I wanted him to think I'd worn a tight shirt on purpose, and whether or not he would appreciate it. Instead I decided that I needed to just go outside, talk to him, and see that he was a normal guy with bad breath and faults and everything else that would make me stop thinking about him and the way he looked and the way he might smell and how his skin would feel.

Shit. This wasn't going to work. Not only could I stop thinking about him, but I skidded to a halt at the front door when I realized that I didn't have any idea what I was going to say. "Hi, I keep seeing you half naked in the driveway and wanted to get to know you better," didn't really seem like the best way to start conversation, but I couldn't think of anything better. Coming right out and asking what he was doing over there seemed too much like interrogating him, and just walking over and introducing myself seemed kind of lame and dorky. I didn't know anything about him, or the kinds of guys he might want to be friends with, or even if I would end up wanting to be his friend, but I was certain that I didn't want him to think I was a dork.

Because planning out the conversation in advance like this was completely non-dorky? Jesus. I wondered if I was cracking up, if I might be losing my mind, and decided to just get out there and wing it before he went back in the house and I blew my chance and had to wait God knew how long for him to come outside again. However idiotic and socially lame I might sound fumbling for chat in the driveway, it would be a thousand times worse to walk over there and ring the doorbell just to ask if he could come out and play. This way I might run the risk of alienating him, but going over to the door was so uncool I wouldn't even want to hang out with myself.

Taking a deep breath, I opened the front door and walked casually onto the porch. I felt another flutter of panic as I realized that I still had no reason to come outside, other than to talk to him, and I didn't want him to think that was why I was out here. Granted, it was the truth, but I didn't want him to think that I, well, never mind. I was getting tired of listening to that same thought circling in my own head. Turning my head to see if he was still out there, I saw the mailbox at the end of the sidewalk out of the corner of my eye. Perfect! I began to walk toward it, stepping down of the porch and sauntering down the sidewalk, but felt my heart falling in my chest a little when I saw the car sitting by itself in the driveway, water dripping off of it, but the hose coiled back up by the side of the house and the neighbor boy gone.

It was all I could do to keep from slapping myself in the head. Why had I taken so long in the house? Why had I stopped to jerk off, and then to stand in the hall and agonize and just be stupid? Now he was gone, and I was going to have to keep thinking about him, wondering, not knowing anything at all about who he was or where he came from or why I was so fascinated with him. What if he left? What if he was washing the car because he was about to get into it and drive away? I'd never know what he was doing here, and would never have talked to him, and never gotten to be his friend. What if I had blown my only chance to get to know him?

What if he walked out of the front door right now, still in his little tiny soaked denim shorts, carrying a couple of towels toward the wet, dripping car?

"Hi!" I blurted from the end of the sidewalk with my hand still on the mailbox, so surprised and happy to see that he was still here that I forgot I was nervous. He stared at me curiously, his thin eyebrows going up a little above his dark navy eyes.

"Hi," he said cautiously, his voice quiet. He didn't make eye contact when he said it, his gaze instead landing somewhere near my mouth.

He turned away and opened one of the towels, flapping it in the wind, and I had to force myself not to follow the way his body moved with my eyes. He was still tanned, and wet, and built, and I was starting to feel half hard in my shorts even though I'd just blown a load upstairs. He turned away and began drying the hood, ignoring me, and I remembered the last time I'd seen him, when he had just said hi and vanished into the house. He wasn't very friendly, so I decided to make more of an effort. I began walking over across the yard, and he kept wiping down the car as if I wasn't there. His back looked smooth and golden as I stepped toward him, the muscles all fanned out above the curves of his ass, and as he leaned over the hood to reach a wet spot on the far side I could almost see just the top of his crack. I jerked my eyes away, blushing, and was glad that he wasn't facing me.

It wouldn't occur to me until much later, when he mentioned it, that he could see my reflection in the fender he was drying off.

"You did a really good job on the car," I blurted, voicing the first thought that popped into my mind. He paused, but didn't turn around, and then his back shifted as he began wiping down the side of the car again as if I hadn't spoken at all. "It's really, um, really clean."

I should have just stayed in the house. I wanted to fall into the driveway and die. I couldn't think of anything to say, and what was coming out was just stupid sounding and idiotic. At least when he rounded the car his face was still neutral, and not condescending or snotty. He was watching what he was doing, but also glancing at me, and I realized that his eyes seemed darker somehow when you were near him, like the closer you got the darker blue they became. It was an odd effect, and I found myself wanting to stand even closer, to see how dark they would get and whether they would still look blue at all. >From this distance I could see that I was right about his face, about the thin dusting of stubble on his chin and jaw that you could only see if you were almost on top of him. It was almost invisible, light blond that seemed to glow when the sun caught it, much lighter than his hair, which was curling up a little at the ends where it was wet.

I couldn't figure out why he was so unresponsive, though. Maybe he was just unfriendly, or maybe the thought of how sparkling and clean his car was didn't really get him whipped up into a storm of chatter. I tried a different approach.

"My name's Nate," I began haltingly. His stare was so blank, so neutral, but I got the feeling somehow that he was appraising me, too, even if I couldn't see it from his reactions. I jerked a thumb over my shoulder. "I live next door."

He might have already realized that, having seen me enter and exit the house a few times. No wonder he was just staring at me as he worked his way down the car. I probably sounded like I went to a special school. On the other hand, what kind of a jerk was he, exactly? Here I was trying to be friendly, coming across the yard and actually making an effort, and he couldn't even talk to me? I knew he wasn't mute, since he had said hi twice now, so why the hell was he being such a putz? Was he socially inept? Did he just not like me? And why did I care?

"Look," I said, jamming my hands into my pockets. "I just wanted to come over and say hi, but I guess you're busy or something. I didn't mean to bother you."

Screw him. If he was too good to talk to me, or too brooding bad boy, or whatever this Johnny Loner rebel without a clue thing he was trying to pull was supposed to be, then fine. I'd made the effort, and I didn't really have to know much about him anyway, not if all I was going to do was think about him. Wait, I didn't want to think about him. Why would I want to jerk off to some asshole? Or not jerk off. Just because I thought about him when I jerked off didn't mean that I was jerking off to him. And why was I thinking about jerking off just because I'd talked to him for a second, especially when he couldn't even be bothered to talk back?

"You're not bothering me," he said softly. His voice was level, and when I turned around he was already dropping his eyes back to the car. He'd been polishing and drying it for so long that he was probably about to start wearing the paint off. I watched him, his eyes darting toward my legs to make sure I was still there, and I wondered if maybe he was just shy.

"Are you sure?" I asked. "I mean, you're not exactly chatty."

"Sorry," he said, without elaborating. Each time he talked, he flicked his eyes up toward me again, letting them slide over my face and meet my own eyes for just a second before he flicked them back down again. It could have seemed kind of rude, but the vibe I was getting from him wasn't really an unfriendly one. Instead he just seemed guarded.

Since he wasn't looking at me, and knew that I was looking at him, I figured I might as well take advantage of the opportunity to see him up close. My eyes flicked over his torso, noticing the way that the little happy trail below his bellybutton was darkened by the water that was still beaded up on his skin. His chest looked even better this close than it had from the porch or my window, the muscles moving with fluid smoothness beneath his skin. It wasn't as smooth as it had looked, either. Instead I could see that right between his pecs was a tiny dusting of dark hairs, not even enough to be called a patch, and there were a couple around his small, brownish nipples, too. I'd never really noticed anyone's nipples before, not even girls', really, but my eyes just kept darting back to his, to the way they looked, the tips standing out, looking rubbery. I wondered what one would feel like if I reached out and caught it between my fingers. Would it be hard? Firm? And what would he do?

Probably beat the shit out of me, actually.

What the hell was I doing? He was washing his car, and I was practically drooling over him. Never mind the hose. I could probably spray him down with my mouth and get him just as wet. Rather than pointing out the absurdity of my behavior, or shocking me back to reality, it instead gave me a little shiver inside.

What was happening to me?

When had these kinds of thoughts become not just common in my head, but also accepted? And how could it have happened so fast? It was one thing to wonder about stuff like this, and even to fantasize about it a little when I was jerking off and already letting my mind wander, but now? Standing in my neighbors' driveway with my half hard cock still leaking a little, letting my eyes crawl all over some guy who still hadn't even given me his name? This was beyond fantasizing, beyond daydreaming. Coming out here like this, getting all nervous about what to say and how to say it and even how to act, was too real, suddenly. I couldn't breathe for a second, couldn't think, because suddenly I couldn't understand what I was even doing out here.

He stood up, wadding up the towels in his hands, snapping me out of my train of thought, and I blinked, shaking my head a little.

"Nice to meet you," he said, shrugging.

Before I could say anything else, he started walking away, which was probably for the best. I watched his back as he walked away, and then turned and began retreating back to my own house. Again I couldn't think of anything to say to him, but now I wasn't sure that I wanted to. I needed to sort things out, and it didn't seem like I'd be able to with him right in front of me, half dressed and dripping wet. I really wanted to talk to Sam, but this didn't seem like the kind of thing we could chat about. I wouldn't have the foggiest clue of how to bring it up, and what would he say? How would he react? What if he said he'd never thought anything like that? What if he didn't want to talk about it? What if he thought, well, what if he thought I was, you know, gay?

Sam and I hadn't ever talked about anything like that. We'd talked about girls, and we'd talked about sex, exchanging stories about how far we'd gotten, how it was, and everything else. During our high school years we'd both complained about our frustration, and horniness, and everything else guys talked about, but we'd never discussed that. There weren't any gay kids at our school, at least not any that we knew. I'd met some at college, and was surprised to find out that they weren't really all the way I thought they'd be. People seemed to think it was a little more ok there, a little more acceptable. Not completely, of course, but more than they did here. Here, I didn't know what anyone would think if I mentioned even thinking about that, and that scared me, too. Just because it was acceptable to be gay, or bi, or maybe just confused, didn't mean that I wanted to be.

I paused at my door, sensing something, turning to look across my yard, trying to figure out what it was, but didn't see anything. I started to turn back around to go inside, and saw the curtains in the Beckers' living room twitch. Oh my God! Oh my God, was he watching me? Was he watching me walk back across the yard? Or even, maybe, was he doing what I'd done before, standing at the window, his shorts down, watching me with his hard cock in his hand, jerking off like I had? I felt my own cock throb in my shorts as I pictured him standing there, his wet cutoffs down around his ankles, his abs crunched a little from being bent over, his arm flexing the same way it had when he'd been working on the car, except now he was working on himself, pulling, stroking, touching. I raced up the stairs to my room, slamming the door behind me and barely pausing to make sure my shade was down, and when I came again, it sprayed everywhere.

When it was over, I lay on my bed, out of breath, my shirt crumpled in the corner and my pants down around my feet, my chest and abs covered with a sticky, drying spray, and I wondered again what the hell was happening to me. I guess I wasn't the only one who thought I was being a little weird, because my mother brought it up at dinner.

"Nate? You ok?" she asked, spooning herself out some peas.

Dinner with my parents was always kind of laid back and quiet, maybe because I was an only child or maybe because my parents were just quieter, more relaxed people. I was one of those later in life babies, an only child who had surprised my parents in their thirties long after they'd already resigned themselves to not having any kids, and because of that my parents always seemed a little different to me from everyone else's. They weren't really strict, and were kind of the favorite, "cool" parents among all of the kids I knew, which seemed like the opposite of the way things should be with them being at least a decade older than everyone else in the PTA. They let me more or less do what I wanted, offering a gentle correction when they thought I needed it, but for the most part letting me figure things out by myself, and the few times that Sam and I managed to get into something a little more serious, like getting caught toilet-papering our math teacher's house on Halloween, they'd punished me out of what seemed more like a sense of obligation than anything else, like they really just wanted to laugh and were going through the motions of discipline because that's what good parents were supposed to do.

At Sam's house, dinner had always been a little tense, even before his parents split up. His father was always stressed at work, and he snapped at Sam and his mother even when he was trying to be nice. As the years had progressed, he'd gotten used to me enough to snap at me as well, but I had the advantage over Sam of being able to go home if I wanted to. Out of loyalty to our friendship, though, I never did, and always stayed as long as I was supposed to rather than running away if things got a little tough. After Sam's dad left, we didn't have dinner over there as much, eating much more often at my house, because Sam's mother was either working or too tired to really cook. Thinking about it, I hadn't eaten a meal over there since before we graduated from high school, as I preferred my own tension free household, and Sam seemed to as well. My parents got along with each other, and without another child around they'd always treated me kind of like a little mini-adult, not talking down to me, and they treated him the same way when he came over.

"Huh?" I asked, blinking as I looked up from my pork chop. I'd been thinking about, well, I hadn't been thinking about anything, really. My dad chuckled, looking up from his plate with his eyes twinkling behind his little round John Lennon glasses. I had harbored a sneaking suspicion all my life that my parents, for all their normal careers, were actually a pair of gracefully aging ex-hippies.

"Apparently I already have the answer," Mom said gently, chuckling. "What's bothering you?"

"Nothing, really," I answered, shrugging. "I just, I don't know, I feel kind of out of it."

It wasn't so much that I was out of it than that I couldn't really think of a way to discuss this with my parents, either. Mom, Dad, for the past couple of days but really even more so for the past couple of hours all I've been able to think about is the guy next door, and how much I want to get to know him, especially if he has his shirt off. Nope, I didn't really think that would fly so well. Just like with Sam, I didn't really know how my parents would take such a discussion. They hadn't ever said anything bad about gay people, and once in high school they'd even told me that it was natural to experiment with sex, but I think the gist of that discussion was more that they thought it was natural for me to fool around with girls and to jerk off, a point that was further emphasized by the sudden appearance of a box of condoms in the medicine cabinet of my bathroom right after we had that discussion. And while they hadn't ever said anything bad about gay people, they hadn't really said anything good, either. They just hadn't said anything.

Not that it mattered, of course, because I wasn't gay.

I was just, um, just, I was, well, whatever.

"You're not coming down with something, are you?" Dad asked, both of them looking concerned now. I shook my head, shrugging at the same time. "Miss your friends? I know it's been a quiet summer for you and Sam."

"I missed my college friends when I was home on breaks," Mom agreed, nodding. "It's ok to be a little down."

"It's not that," I said, shaking my head. They both looked at me a little skeptically. "OK, maybe a little, but this is something else."

"Something you want to talk about?" Mom asked. Whenever they asked me stuff like this, they probed a little, but didn't force it. They'd let me know that they were there if I needed it, but I could hold off until I was ready.

"I don't know," I said, shrugging, not trying to deliberately be difficult. "I don't know if there even is something or not."

"Is it Sam?" Dad asked. "You two have a fight?"

"No, no, it's something else," I said, pushing my food around my plate more than I was actually eating it. "It's not Sam."

"Good," Mom said, shrugging. "I don't like it when you two fight. Is he coming for dinner tomorrow night?"

"Yeah," I answered quickly, happy that we were finally changing the subject. "Yeah, he said he would be."

"Good," Dad said, glancing down at his plate again as if he'd just realized he still had food on it. "Hey, did anyone catch that thing in the newspaper about a boat show this weekend?"

"Oh, where?" Mom asked, perking up. We didn't own a boat, but someday they were going to buy one, and in the meantime they were willing to drive all over the state, or even to the states next door, to go to boat shows. Parents can seem so weirdly funny sometimes. "We should go!"

"Give the boys the weekend alone to drink beer and have wild parties," Dad said evenly, snickering. All three of us rolled our eyes, and that was the end of it, at least until I went to bed, and tried to sleep.

Long after everyone else in the house was asleep I was laying in bed in my boxers, staring at the ceiling, trying to shut off my brain, but it just wasn't happening. Every time I closed my eyes, it was like a flashback to the driveway. Every time my lids slid down, I saw a wet, muscled chest, water beaded up around the nipples and trickling down toward his abs. I tossed and turned, seeing his strong back stretch across the hood, his thighs flexing as he bent and moved, his arms reaching up, and my cock was hard as I imagined running my hands over him, stretching him out across the hood of the car and just touching and feeling him wherever I wanted to. I saw my hands touching that corded neck, running over that slightly stubbled chin, touching those firm lips. I saw his eyes in front of mine, and I couldn't sleep.

What was he doing over there? Which room was he sleeping in? Was he naked again? I knew without being told that he must always sleep naked, that you could just grab the end of the sheet in your fingers and pull it back slowly from that amazingly hard body and nothing would be in the way of your eyes or your hands, no sheets or stupid denim cutoffs or anything else. What if he wasn't sleeping at all? What if he was awake, walking around the house again, passing by the windows unaware? My bedroom was on the wrong side of the house, so I slid out of bed, telling myself that I was just going down to the kitchen to get some water. If I happened to see him while I was at the back window, well, wouldn't that just be a nice coincidence? Maybe he would stand in front of the refrigerator again. Maybe he'd even have a light on this time. Maybe instead of seeing the top of his ass, I'd see the whole thing, or maybe I'd even see, well, something else.

The Beckers' house was dark. I drank my water as slowly as I could, standing by the window, watching the black rectangle that held their kitchen, but I saw nothing. I sipped my water through the living room, walking quietly, my bare feet padding over the carpet as I paced the house in my boxers, but I didn't see him in any of the windows, and there weren't any lights on. Maybe he was asleep. Maybe he wasn't insane, like I obviously was. I mentally kicked myself as I climbed the stairs to bed, telling myself that I was obsessed, that I needed to get him out of my head because this was stupid and scary and it was just going to get me into trouble, but thinking that and doing that were two different things. I drifted off to sleep with the same thoughts plaguing me, the same visions of torso and thighs and pecs and dark, dark blue eyes, and when I woke up and crawled into the shower I jerked off again, still trying to tell myself that it didn't really matter if I thought about him, about touching him, about opening my lips and tasting that soft, smooth skin while I did it.

I drifted through the day like a sleepwalker again, doing some laundry, puttering around the house trying not to think about certain things, or certain boys next door, and by the afternoon when I headed over to the pool I was starting to feel very tired. I'd been working so hard at pushing things away, at forcing myself not to see things in my mind that I was actually starting to feel strained, like I'd been lifting weights all day long. There was a lump in my throat that wouldn't go away, and I plunged into the water hoping to lose myself, hoping to let everything fall away for as long as I could stay in there, hoping for a moment's peace. As always, it worked. Once I was in the water, my mind cleared and emptied, and all I could think about was my pace, finding my rhythm, when to breathe and when to blow. I didn't count my laps, knowing by the feel of my body and the beat of my heart how long and how far I'd gone, and when I would need to stop. I was barely aware of the other people around me, having trained myself over the years to block out everyone else in the pool and on the deck, so when I propelled myself toward the end of my lane and looked up into those dark blue, almost navy eyes, I was so startled that I fell off beat and had to catch myself.

"Hi," he said softly, smiling at me. It was a shy smile, not really showing any teeth, and his fantastic body towered above me on the deck as he squatted down in a pair of wet trunks. Oh my God, he'd been in the pool. He'd been in the same water I'd been in. I wasn't going to be able to get out of the water for a few minutes, especially not in my swimming speedo.

"Hi," I bleated like a startled animal. I was treading water in front of him, afraid of swimming too close, forcing myself to keep my eyes on his and not let them wander down his chest or crawl up his tanned legs.

"I wasn't sure it was you," he said,, shrugging. "But I asked the lifeguard, and he said you were Nate."

"That's me," I said, not sure what I could add. He was here, at the pool, and he was talking to me! But why? He'd had ample opportunity to talk to me yesterday and hadn't said more than a couple of words. "What's up?" "Nothing, really," he said, still smiling. I wondered what I could say to make him grin, because it seemed like it would just light up his whole face, and I wanted to see that. "I came over to check out the pool, and I saw you, and thought I would say hi."

"And so you did," I said, raising my eyebrows with an unspoken question.

"Casey," he said, smiling a little more, a sheepish grin that looked somehow innocent on his mature features.

He held out his hand, and I reached out and took it, feeling his strong grip, the soft slide of his palm against mine, my thumb brushing the back of his hand and feeling the hair there, thin and golden, much lighter than the brown hair on his head. As we held each other's hands, shaking them for no more than a second or two that seemed so much longer, my eyes locked onto his, really looked into them, and I felt like the whole pool took a slow, lazy spin. I let go quickly as I started to sink, and began treading water again. I felt sure that I was blushing, and thought maybe I caught the lightest hint of red on his face, too. In the back of my mind a voice was screaming that I'd touched him, I'd actually touched him, and somehow he avoided mentioning the stupid look that had to be on my face.

"It's nice to meet you, again," I said, feeling like it was a stupid thing to say but unable to think of anything else.

"You, too," he said. "I also wanted to say that, um, I'm sorry for yesterday."

"Yesterday?" I asked, as if he hadn't been a complete jerk. Who gave a shit about yesterday when today he was here, talking to me at the side of the pool, shaking my hand?

"I was kind of standoffish," he clarified, still looking a little sheepish. "I didn't mean to. I'm just, well, I'm not always good with new people, and you kind of startled me. I didn't want you to think I was unfriendly or something."

His voice had just the slightest hint of an accent, a more northern sound, and I wondered where he was from.

"Well, like I said, it's nice to meet you, and, you know, welcome to the neighborhood," I said, resigning myself to the fact that every word out of my mouth was apparently going to sound horribly lame. Why couldn't I talk to him? Why couldn't I dazzle him with my wit? Why couldn't I say something smart and funny that would impress the hell out of him instead of these blandly inane phrases that were just tumbling out of my mouth like water from a faucet? "You staying long?"

"A while," he answered noncommittally. "My aunt said I could crash at their house for a while, so I am."

Before I could ask anything else, like why he was crashing there, or where he was from, or even what his last name was, the watch on his wrist started to beep, and he frowned, shutting it off.

"I'm sorry," he said, standing. I looked up at him, my eyes sliding up his body as he stood above me. If he stepped forward just a little I would be able to see right up the leg of his shorts, but instead he stepped back. "I have to go take care of something, but it was nice talking to you."

"You, too," I said. He started to walk away, and I realized this might be my only chance, that he might not talk to me again unless I made the first move. "Casey! You want to maybe, I don't know, hang out sometime?"

Finally he broke into that grin that I'd been hoping for, his eyes crinkling and sparkling at the same time, his teeth white and even and perfect, his whole face lighting up like the sun coming out from behind a cloud. Oh my God, he might be the most gorgeous person I'd ever seen close up, and more than anything else I wanted him at that moment to come back to the side of the pool and touch my hand again.

"Yeah, that'd be cool," he said, throwing me a little wave before he turned and walked toward the locker room.

He had a name, and he wanted to hang out.

It was really hard to swim and keep the pool water out of my mouth with a big stupid grin on my face.

To be continued.

Sorry for the long delay. Much work came up, and I was without the computer for a few days. I'll try to answer all the e-mail as soon as I can.