B E T T E R T H A N A D R E A M
by Dean Lidster =======================================================================
PART TWO DISCLAIMER ~~~~~~~~~~
This story contains sexual acts between boys. If this is not to your tastes, then why in God's name are you reading this in the first place, huh? If you're curious, then that's fine by me - just remember: an open mind and an open heart is the secret to a good and happy life. If you are UNDER the age of concent for state / geographical location / planet that you're in / on etc, please leave now (unless you want to be educated and have an open mind that is!)
I spose this story is copyrighted. By this, I mean that I wrote it and would not particularly want anyone to subtly alter it and pretend it is their own. However, you MAY post it to any newsgroups, archives etc, print it, give it to friends without my prior permission PROVIDED THAT I STAY ACCREDITED AS THE AUTHOR AND YOU DO NOT CHARGE FOR DOING SO. Easy :-)
The story, when it concerns the relationship between myself and Lee, is very nearly true-to-life, however everything else took place in my mind only (unfortunately!)
If you like this story, mail me at dean@deans-domain.nu. If you don't like it, mail me anyway and tell me why!
The latest version of this saga may be found at my web site: http://www.deans-domain.nu/ourplace/stories
Cheers, Dean
Dedicated to Lee - I will love you forever.
Author's note: This story is part five of an ongoing work entitled "Midlands of Nowhere" - it is strongly recommended that you read these parts before reading this!
The order is as follows:
"A Date with Taylor"
"Touring with Hanson"
"Zac and Mac"
"The Exchange"
"Better than a Dream"
Chapter Two - Injustice
In order to stop myself from being disappointed when I found out that our new "neighbours" were the biggest bunch of arseholes creation could've possible come up with, I decided to assume that they were "guilty until proven innocent" on that count.
Curious as to who / what (delete as appropriate) I would have to put up with over the next few years, I decided to go and make some introductions. Now, as any of you who own roller blades will no doubt know, trying to get yourself down a shale driveway with a pair strapped to your feet is more difficult than you may initially think. Due to this, I was now sure that I had presented myself to the new neighbours as a complete and utter fool, staggering about as I was. Thankfully, the actual bit of the drive in front of the enormous house was good, solid concrete, allowing myself to regain at least a little composure before addressing the enemy.
"Hi," I said, directing the hopefully neutral comment at the head of the family who was clambering out of the leather arm-chair Mercedes had the audacity to call a seat.
"Oh, hello," smiled Eddie. Just that one sentence and the way he smiled at me somehow put me at ease - his face, although looking well worn, was covered with laugh-lines that were obviously well used.
"I'm Dean Lidster, your next-door neighbour, if you can call a couple of hundred metres next door,"
"I'm Eddie Clarke and this is my wife, Roz," he said, beaming over at his better half who, judging by the look on his face, he loved dearly.
"Hello, Dean, pleased to meet you," she cooed in a wonderfully soothing voice.
"I just thought I'd say hello and offer a hand if you need it," I said, now convinced that they were not the ogres I had imagined them to be. In fact, they seemed to be a perfectly pleasant, normal, not-at- all stuck-up, well off, late-middle aged couple.
"Well, that is good of you, Dean - I think we'll be OK but I'm sure Lee could use someone his own age to show him round,"
"Lee?"
Being preoccupied with the far-more-pleasant-than-anticipated surprise of meeting Roz and Eddie, the third member of the Clarke family had remained completely hidden from my gaze in the back of the car.
"Honey, say hello to Dean," said Roz, stooping down and addressing the person in the back seat.
The back door of the car opened and I watched, almost in slow motion, as a foot wearing a blue CAT boot, closely followed by a jeans- covered leg descended from below the door sill and met the driveway. A set of four smooth, pale fingers grasped the top of the door, followed a second later by the top of someone's head. As more of the blonde hair came into view, time practically stopped. The more of this person that became from behind the tormenting shield of the car door, the more I was entranced, and the nearer my jaw got to the ground.
As he continued to climb out of the car, I deciphered that his hair was centre-parted. An un-furrowed brow emerged, leading to a pair of dark blonde eyebrows that framed the top of two dazzlingly deep blue eyes. Gentle cheekbones offset a graceful nose that naturally directed one's gaze to a set of full-bodied, moist, red lips that ached to be kissed gently for hour after hour, placed in front of a prominent but smoothly curved jaw.
As his emergence went on, I became aware of his broad shoulders and obviously well looked after upper body, the long sleeved grey top he was wearing that had a white stripe across his upper chest making his stature seem all the more impressive.
In a graceful and obviously sub-conscious way, he flicked his moderately long hair from his eyes, the silky strands proving obstinate and falling back into a position not too dissimilar from the ones they were in.
Still in slow motion to me, his eyelids (that sported exquisitely long blonde lashes) blinked and on re-opening, those wonderful eyes were directed straight at me.
I melted. I swear I nearly feinted on the spot. Something this beautiful couldn't exist - it just wasn't possible! Yet it had to be - he was standing but a few feet away from me.
Almost immediately, those wonderful lips twisted up slightly at the corners into the faintest yet ultimately seductive of smiles, and he drooped his head slightly to face the ground. Still smiling that feint smile, he bit his bottom lip on one side and once again looked at me, this time slightly more secure knowing he was hiding behind the blind his hair was producing.
For probably the first time in my life, I was genuinely speechless. Here I was stood unbelievably close to the most handsome guy I had ever had the fortune to meet, and my entire vocabulary, complete with witty repertoire and engaging conversation-starters, had decided to take an impromptu holiday from my speech centre. Bloody brilliant.
"H... Hi," I stuttered, even the basic concept of breathing failing me as I tried to utter a simple one-syllable word.
"Hi," the god mumbled back as he continued to hide behind his hair, swivelling nervously on the heel of his left foot.
"Dean, meet Lee," smiled Roz.
"Pleh... Pleased to meet you," I stuttered, rolling forward on my blades to shake his hand.
'Oh my GOD, I'm gonna TOUCH him!' my mind screamed as I extended my hand, which was quite visibly shaking with nerves and anticipation.
"Likewise," he almost whispered. As his fingers clasped the side of my palm, we were both mutually surprised at the firmness of the handshake. As if on cue, we both looked directly into each other's eyes, Lee raising his head to allow a more direct line of sight.
That was it. My brain short-circuited for a second and, if it weren't for reflex reactions, would have ended up in a quivering heap at his feet. Eddie's voice suddenly snapped what was left of my mind away from the maelstrom of adoring thoughts that were flying through it about Lee to the present.
"Dean, there are a few boxes in the boot you can start shifting and don't let lazy-arse here let you do all the hard work!"
"OK, Mr. Cl..."
"Eddie."
"Eddie,"
Lee broke the stare, returning his concentration to the ground once more and walked round to the car's boot. He opened it and manoeuvred a large box full of posters and nick-nacks out and handed it to me. He then picked up another box, glanced at me with that same feint smile and then walked towards the front door of the house.
That's all it took: A glance. Not a word had to be said, and never did it seem rude that he didn't ask me to follow him. That glance said more than any words ever could in that situation, and I felt all fluffy in my stomach again.
As I followed him, I was treated to the most wonderful view of his muscular arse-cheeks flexing beneath the modest cover that the tight jeans he was wearing afforded him. I can't remember who described them such, but they really did look like two peaches wrapped in a handkerchief. The inevitable happed: I got hard. VERY hard. Almost to the extent I couldn't move my legs more than a couple of inches. Thank God I was still wearing my blades, so allowing me to coast behind him rather than surmount the exceedingly uncomfy sensation of walking. We got inside and Lee quickly headed for the stairs, sprinting up them, his arse cheeks being squeezed even tighter in his jeans. I very nearly creamed myself at that sight - if it was art, it would surely have won the Turner prize.
"Hey Lee! Wait up!" I yelled, realising that trying to go up stairs in roller blades inevitably resulted in a rather rapid reversal of the process, usually as you'd got to the penultimate step so as to cause as much physical damage as possible.
I put the box down and undid the straps on the blades, looking up the stairs as I did so. Lee had stopped half way up and as I looked at him he smiled broadly as he pictured me trying to skate up the stairs.
Oh, that smile! His face seemed to radiate joy - a joy that was terminally infectious. Within moments I too was grinning back at him and continued to do so for the rest of the time he was. I pulled my blades off, abandoning them in a break-neck position at the bottom of the stairs and bounded up to meet him.
He looked me right in the eyes again for a second and smiled widely.
"What?" I asked, smiling back.
"You might want to bring the box," he replied, turning to look down the stairs.
I followed his gaze to see the cardboard box sat by the door. As I went to retrieve it, my mind was marvelling at his accent - on the few words his soothing, moderately deep voice had uttered I could only place it as London-ish with a strong hint of Birmingham - a truly strange mix but one that suited his appearance frighteningly well. I decided: Lee Clarke was perfect.
I ran back up the stairs for the second time, now complete with payload, and followed Lee along the hallway to his room. Only now did it strike me how large this house was - we actually had to walk down the hall rather than take the four or five steps it would have taken in a more modest abode.
He opened the door to reveal a fairly bare room, albeit stacked with boxes with "Lee" scrawled across them in black marker. All the essentials were present, however - a large single bed was placed about half way down the room perpendicular to the wall with a chest of draws on one side and a bedside table on the other. Opposite the bed there was a door that I assumed was a cupboard and in the far corner a kitchen-style worktop that would serve as a desk. Finally, a huge window that spanned from about a foot from the floor nearly all the way to the ceiling allowed the summer sun to flood into the room, highlighting the fine particles of dust that were suspended in the still air that only an uninhabited house could have.
"This is a cool room," I commented, placing the box I'd carried up next to the others.
"Yeah," came Lee's monosyllabic reply as he sat on the edge of his bed and began to rummage through the box he'd been carrying.
I walked over to the window and rested my arms on the wooden cross- piece that held the lower pane in place, my breath briefly fogging the glass as I exhaled. Somehow I expected the lack of conversation to give rise to an uneasy feeling as the lack of conversation usually does, but it was strangely lacking in this instance. Instead, I felt strangely content and... Yes, safe - I felt safe. Inexplicably so.
I turned to find Lee looking at me, but he quickly returned his concentration to the box, obviously hoping I hadn't seen him looking. Dismissing it as idle curiosity, I noticed what looked like a well worn PC packed fairly hap-hazardly in one of the boxes. For the first time since I'd seen Lee step out of the car, my brain came up with a half-intelligent conversation starter.
"You like computers?"
"Yeah," said Lee, looking up. "You?"
WOW! Reciprocation! My mind was leaping through hoops at this, until I realised I was so pleased at getting a response I'd completely forgotten to give an answer.
"Err... Yeah, actually," I smiled back. "My dad's an IT manager and I guess he passed the bug to me,"
"Cool," he smiled. I wanted to do a happy dance right then!
From that point on, everything just got better and better. The conversation stayed on computers for a while, it being the initial common ground we both knew about. The conversation bowled along about the machines we owned, how we hated Microsoft on principle, how we hated the internet for being so slow, how we hated BT for charging us to access the internet that was so slow and how Linux was going to bankrupt Microsoft, prevent famine and unify the world into working towards the common good.
Somewhere the conversation had got silly and by the end of this we were both laughing harder than either of us could remember in some time.
"So, what music d'you like," asked Lee, now keeping eye contact with me nearly permanently, which, incidentally, was driving me wild with desire.
"Nearly anything except R'n'B," I replied. "I guess I'll listen to anything that sounds good, but I really like Mike Oldfield and that kinda stuff... And Hanson," I smiled.
Lee looked at me slightly quizzically for a moment, then got off the bed and began rummaging through one of the other boxes.
A moment later, he produced a set of Mike Oldfield CDs and 'Middle of Nowhere'. "Snap," he smiled.
"Un-beeee-lievable!" This was just too good - things like this just didn't happen to me, not ever. I guess it was the too good to be true thing that provoked me to tell Lee I was gay then - if he was a homophobe, at least we wouldn't become really close friends and then me go through the secret-lover thing or risk having the shit beaten out of me when I did come out to him. So I said it.
"Err, Lee, I... I need to tell you something..."
He kept that wonderful half-smile on his face and cocked his head just ever so slightly, the way I'd said it sounding almost comically over-sincere.
"I... Well, I'm gay..."
His head snapped up and he gave me the most ambiguous look I had ever seen from another person. In the second I had to 'read' it, it seemed like a tortuous mix of hope, scepticism, revulsion and, most of all, abject horror at what I had said. I took a step towards him, feeling almost guilty at what I'd done but before I could say anything he leapt up, jumped over the bed and ran out of the door.
Knowing this would be the only time to salvage what may be left of this situation, I ran after him and caught him as he tripped on his shoelace running up the attic stairs.
He was as white as a sheet when he turned over to face me, tears streaming down his face, quite obviously as scared as he could possibly be. He tried to back up the stairs, the fear he was experiencing not allowing him to co-ordinate his movements correctly as hit feet slipped on the shiny wood.
I was stunned. All I could do was look at him - those wonderful blue eyes now exhibiting the same futile emotion of a baby bunny caught in the blinding headlights of a speeding car. We stayed there in that position on the attic steps for a few moments, both of us equally confused as to what was happening.
It was Lee that broke the deadlock.
"You're not gonna hurt me?"
I had to swallow very, very hard to get rid of the lump in my throat.
"Wh... Why would I?"
"I just.... I thought that...."
Cautiously, I extended my hand to the quaking boy and after a moment of contemplation, he took it, allowing me to help him up and to gently lead him back to his room.
For the next five minutes we both sat in silence, Lee not wanting to say anything, me not knowing what to say.
"Lee, if there's something... You can tell me anything, OK? I promise I won't tell another soul..."
Not a word for another five minutes.
"Dean?" I turned my head to look at him and once again he was looking me straight in the eye. "I'm gay too,"
I could actually feel his body tense as the words left his mouth, his eyes leaping all over my face trying to gauge my reaction. Inside, my reaction was to scream as loudly as I possibly could with euphoria, to take this blonde god and kiss him so deeply and to wrap my arms around him so tightly that we could never again be separated... But now was neither the time nor the place. I simply smiled as reassuringly as I could back at him: Right now, my job was to listen.
The term "emptying one's heart" attempts to describe what people do when they recount something that is upsetting them. From this moment on, I knew Lee had a very, very big heart.
Lee's alarm clock went off at 6:00am as it did every morning, weekends included. As quickly as he could, he pressed the 'silence' button so as not to wake his father and the live-in bitch he'd brought home a few months back. He'd learnt the painful way that waking them more than a minute earlier than he'd been told to simply wasn't acceptable and the way he felt right now, another thrashing from his old man was the last thing he could do with.
As quietly as he could, he threw the covers back, shivering as the intensely cold air bit at his skin. He swivelled round and dropped his feet onto the threadbare carpet, producing a squelch as water bubbled up from the underlay. It had rained again last night.
Tiptoeing across the carpet, he pulled a towel from the top of his wardrobe door and stood on it while he put on his last clean school shirt, his only pair of school trousers and the jumper with the hole in the arm. He kept meaning to darn it, but he'd had to buy a new pair of shoes three weeks back and didn't yet have enough money to cover the cost of the wool. He'd thought many times about just walking into old Mrs. McLaughlin's shop and taking some when her back was turned, but he refused to let himself fall to that level - in his mind just one step above his father.
He sighed and carefully eased his arm past the hole, doing his best not to aggravate it's condition, then pulled the pair of socks that smelled the cleanest on to his blue-cold feet, followed by his new shoes.
He opened his bedroom door and shivered once again as a wall of even colder air hit him from the landing. Again treading carefully and lowering himself over the two squeaky steps, he went downstairs to get himself some breakfast, pausing momentarily at the outline on the wall where the only picture of his real mother that he knew of used to be. He could remember distinctly coming home one day to find "Her" peeling his mum's picture out of the frame. He had objected strongly at the time, but was soon silenced by his father's fists.
After a half-bowl of Rice Krispies, his next task was to give his dad's pride and joy - two pedigree Rottweilers going by the names of Aaron and Moses - their morning walk.
As he unhooked their leads from behind the front door, his father's voice boomed out in his head: "Loose these animals and I'll loose you,". It was true - Lee knew these dogs meant infinitely more to his father than he ever did... Taking the leads, he opened the door to the sitting room and was immediately faced with four rows of gleaming-white teeth, backed by two spine-chilling growls.
"Recede!" he said in as firm a voice as he could muster, the dogs immediately lowering their lips and trotting off back to their beds.
It seemed ironic to him that the dogs would respect his command when he had next to no respect for himself, but providing they didn't ever realise that fact, he reckoned he'd be OK.
"Present!" he ordered them, the dogs turning and coming back to him, one on each side, to allow him to attach the leads to their collars.
As he walked them down the street early on that April morning, the orange glow of the streetlamps making the polluted air seem even more unreal, Lee wondered if this was all there was to life.
To look at, he wasn't bad for a twelve-year-old - moderately tall with a centre-parted, undercut hairstyle, dazzling blue eyes and a cheeky smile when it had the rare chance of showing itself. But when he looked in the mirror he saw none of that. He saw an empty, meaningless person that was living an empty, meaningless life. A life that was not worth living.
As he walked round the corner of the block with the dogs, his mind flashed back to that one evening in the bathroom. As he looked through the steamed-up mirror at his blue eye, gently dabbing at it with a tuft of cotton wool and Dettol, he noticed the razor glinting on the side of the sink. A second later, he had it in his hand. Three seconds later, the corner of the blade was being pressed firmly into the vein on the underside of his wrist. But he couldn't move it. Something, somewhere in his mind would not allow him to end it. Instead, the pain of the nick he'd made in his skin began to emerge, combined with a steady trickle of blood which made "plop" sounds as it fell into the milky water in the basin turning it a ghostly red.
He dropped the blade and grasped his wrist, falling to the floor crying violently.
Lee increased his pace; the dogs now trotting to keep at heal. Tears streamed down his face, but they were tears without the motions of crying, the whole mechanism having been beaten out of him by his father.
He stopped, the two dogs looking up at him quizzically. Showing no emotion on his face, his hands gradually let go of the leads he was holding, the chains falling to the concrete pavement. Fuck them. Fuck his dad. Fuck the world.
Lee turned and began retracing his steps, going through the confrontation he intended to have with his dad. The dogs, being completely mindless, simply turned and followed him, leads trailing musically behind them. He stopped and looked at the two sleek, black mouths on legs. He couldn't even loose a pair of dogs properly.
Lee didn't have many friends, and the ones he did have were more 'acquaintances' than anything else. He purposely kept his distance from people so as they wouldn't find out how he lived or how abusive his father could be: The last thing he wanted was for someone to be present during one of his Father's whirlwind rages, and God help someone who was in the path of one...
There was one boy, however, Lee could not help but talk to. His name was Matthew Quarterman and, initially, Lee didn't know what he found so intriguing about him. As the weeks went by, though, it soon became perfectly obvious. Lee was in love.
Unlike some, Lee simply accepted the fact he was attracted to other boys. It seemed perfectly normal to him that the only opinions he held about girls were that they could have mood swings faster than Norman Bates and whenever he walked past a group of them, one of them would point at him, smile then the whole group burst out into intensely annoying giggling fits. That couldn't be normal, could it? No - where he was concerned, boys held a far higher level of fascination. Especially Matt.
As time passed, this fascination turned into infatuation, and finally from infatuation into lust. To Lee, Matt was 5'6" of brown- haired, hazel-eyed, bubble-butted ecstasy. Just recently, Matt's voice had started to break, taking on that uneasy warble as his larynx did it's best to settle on one tone, but never quite managing it. This, of course, sent Lee's lust-monster into overdrive, his mind fantasising what the deepening voice and fuzz on his top lip translated to in the trouser-department. Not that fantasising was always necessary - the prominent bulge in the front of his trousers sending Lee crazy with desire.
Throughout the day Mat would, unbeknownst to him, tease Lee perpetually in the most innocent of ways: Chewing the end of his pen, bending over in a hallway to retrieve some dropped item, even just smiling so his dimples showed - they all turned Lee on beyond belief. If anything, it frustrated him as there was no way of telling Matt how he felt and no way in which to spend more time with him: He simply did not want to get in a situation where Matt would have to face the ridicule his Father would inevitably give him. As such, Lee eased the tension in the only way he knew how and, unbeknownst to him, this tension-relieving would ultimately be a blessing, albeit very deeply disguised.
It was a Tuesday afternoon and school had just finished. Lee ambled along the pavement towards his house, his mind in neutral. He had found that thinking about things simply evoked emotion in him, be it positive or, as was more usually the case, negative. If he didn't think about things, he didn't get upset or envious and not being upset or envious meant his mind could relax. For want of a better term, he was a spaceman - a complete and utter pacifist who held few or no opinions about anything. Anything, that is, except Matt.
Whenever he tried to mentally coast along the road that was his life, Matt-shaped potholes would present themselves when he least expected it and, no matter how hard he swerved to avoid them, inevitably a 'wheel' would hit one, sending a massive jolt through his chassis. Literally. This worried Lee as he had spent many years honing his technique and, up until now, there wasn't anything he couldn't choose to ignore. Matt had to be thought about, long and hard.
Lee reached his house and fished his key chain from his pocket, the chain serving to keep the keys within the confines of his near- bottomless pockets as well as to stop him dropping them. Unlocking the door, he commanded Aaron and Moses to cease the attack they were about to launch on him and legged it up the stairs to his bedroom. He threw his tatty backpack into the corner of the room and flopped onto his bed, doing his level best not to think about Matt.
He nearly succeeded; unfortunately his dick had other ideas. It was thinking about Matt in all his glory and the uncomfortably tight feeling it was making in the crotch of his trousers forced Lee's mind to Matt.
He sighed in frustration as he knew his dick simply would not give up until it had been 'seen to', so see to it he would. Smiling with self indulgence, he pulled his flys down and manoeuvred the near six inches of steely-hard dick into the open, his fingertips gently teasing and twisting his foreskin which in turn rubbed exquisitely on the sensitive underside of his head. Shuddering with excitement, he rolled onto his side and opened the draw of his bedside cabinet; fishing out the one picture he had of Matt - a tatty Polaroid that was taken at a fundraising sports day his school had held.
In the picture, Matt was sprinting down the home straight of the four-hundred metres in a pair of tight-white shorts and trainers, his top not present as in order for there to be four teams in the race, one team had to go skins. Lee could not believe his luck. Moreover, he could swear blind that he could see the outline of Matt's dick under the thin cotton of his shorts...
Lee's mind focused on this mental image, soaking up every last detail of Matt's body the lousy resolution of the photo could expose as he manically pumped at his now leaking dick, rapidly approaching the brink of sexual ecstasy that would allow him to temporarily avoid thinking about Matt.
Unbeknownst to him Lee's Father was, for some reason or other, home early that day and the first he knew of it was when the words "I always knew you were a little tosser," reached his eardrums.
Lee did his best to maintain his decency by curling up into the foetal position whilst trying to return his unco-operative dick to the safety of his trousers, but with no great success.
"Who is she, then?" his Father leered, the smell of beer on his meat-festering breath nearly making him throw up. Before he could do anything to stop him, his dad snatched the freshly dropped Polaroid from the bedclothes.
The grin on his ugly face contorted into a look of sheer revulsion as he looked at Matt's picture.
"You're a fag..." he barely whispered. That volume level didn't last long, though. "You're a FUCKING FAG!"
Thankfully, Lee had managed to get himself presentable and only just managed to avoid his father's fist, his knuckles coming into contact with the pillow where his head had been with a thud. Lee knew his dad was drunk and thanked his lucky stars as his reaction times would be down slightly, possibly giving him the upper hand.
"C'mere you little queer!" drawled his dad, climbing over the bed and making a second lunge, Lee managing to side-step once again, his Father's misplaced fist this time making a rapid exit through the window.
"FUCK!" he yelled, bringing his fist close to his chest as the blood started to ooze from his lacerated skin. But Lee didn't hear him. He was down the stairs and out of the house before his dad had a chance to catch up with him. He ran and ran as fast as his legs would carry him, not daring to stop as this would allow his mind to try and come to terms with what just happened. Eventually, though, fatigue overcame him and he stood bent double in an unfamiliar street, his chest heaving in and out in a desperate attempt to get some oxygen into his blood.
Opposite him on the other side of the road, three kids nudged each other and pointed at him, giggling and shouting snide comments but they fell on deaf ears.
Lee's mind was occupied with a dilemma of such an unencountered magnitude that his brain simply had no idea of how to handle it. Bit by bit, Lee lost coherence, collapsing in a pile against the brick wall that bounded someone's front "garden". For a while, he just WAS. Existing, but not existing. 'I think, therefore I am'. According to this, at that moment, Lee most definitely was NOT.
TO BE CONTINUED!!!!
Dean Lidster dean@deans-domain.nu http://www.deans-domain.nu/ourplace/stories =======================================================================