Author's note and acknowledgements
This story has sat on my hard drive for four years now.
I wrote it, all twenty chapters and 95,000 words of it in eight days of a frenzied, near trance-like state, sitting on my couch with my wife's laptop. She would occasionally have to remind me to eat.
When the dust settled, and I looked up, I realized a couple of things: one, I had just written a fucking novel in a week, whoa. Two, it seemed to be pretty damn good, double whoa. And three, what the hell was I going to do with it?
I tried editing it, I even enlisted the help of a Lit-Editor, who was invaluable for early editing, and confirming it was in fact, pretty good, or readable at least. I spent several months then, editing, unashamedly forcing it on writer friends to read, regular friends to read, and total strangers on writer boards. Everyone had different opinions of course, as people do, but all of them seemed to think it was pretty good, and I should probably try to do something with it.
So I spent another year trying to sell it.
Well nothing happened.
And I can't blame them, agents and publishers. It's kind of a niche story, hard to market. It's got too much sex for a coming age story, too much teenage drama for adult fiction, and not a single word about vampires or bondage to make it work as erotic fiction.
So it's sat on my hard drive for four years. I'll occasionally open it up, tinker with a line, or try to figure out how to re-work it into something more marketable. I always end up wasting a weekend trying to figure out how to change it, without losing the essence of the thing which I, and several others, feel is, "pretty good."
So fuck it. Here you go Literotica. I just want people to read it. I want people to get to know Jack the way I did. Writing his life made me feel like I was a part of it. He's a pretty good guy, I wish I knew him in real life.
So NEXT, some disclaimers.
This is a coming of age story. Which means first it starts out when the characters are too young to have sex (on literotica.) So there's no sex for a couple chapters. I hope that's okay. Second, this is a novel length story, including the prologue and epilogue, there are twenty-one chapters in all. Some are longer than others, and there is not a sex scene in every one. (Though some have more than one.) More importantly, sex is a thing that happens, it's not written to be titillating, but rather just as events in Jack's life.
So there you go. It's a story with sex in it, not a story about sex. I think it's pretty good anyway.
If you have not read the first chapter, please click on my profile and pick the story up at the beginning, its better that way, trust me.
*****
Let me back up a second.
It's the first term of my freshman year. I've finally got the route to my classes down. I'm still a dear in the headlights when I see a cute girl, especially one of the more developed upperclassmen seniors or something. I'm still a nerd who's never had a girlfriend, kissed a girl, or even attempted to speak with one since hitting puberty.
Before I met Beth.
I didn't ride the bus home from school. I rode it too school, but not home. I didn't live very far really, only about two miles. It was a pain to walk in the morning, but walking home was fine.
Besides, Todd Smith rode my bus.
Our freshman year, Todd was not the giant around school that he was by the time we were seniors. He was tall, sure, a head taller than me in fact, and a year older. I think he'd gotten held back third grade. But he wasn't on the basketball team yet, he wasn't on the wrestling team yet, he wasn't dating Beth Jenkins yet; though he was going to be doing all of these things later this year. It just hadn't happened yet.
What he was though, was a bully.
We'd been going to the same schools since 4
th
grade, when he'd moved into my neighborhood. His first week of school he'd made friends with John Nelson, the other bully of our elementary school, and the two of them tormented me all the way through middle school. It took the two of them less than two weeks before one of them was holding my arms back and the other would punch me in the stomach as hard as he could.
I guess because that was funny or something.
The summer between 8
th
and 9
th
grade, John Nelson had gotten shipped off to juvie (so I'd heard) and Todd was left as sole commander of the posse of jerks and malcontents they'd co-led up until that point. This was sort of good, because John had been the real bruiser of the two, but it was also pretty bad because Todd had been the brains, such as they had. By the start of our freshman year, Todd was a head taller than any other guy in our class. He had started working out too, so he was also about twenty pounds of muscle up on most of us as well.
Let's see: tall, good looking, athletic, and a jerk to pretty much everyone. Except cute girls, where he had just enough charm and charisma to disarm them.
Yeah, pretty much my anathema.
Todd and I lived just a few blocks from each other. Far enough away we had different bus stops, but not so far away that he was entirely avoidable. In the mornings when I'd get on the bus, he was already on it, but he and his friend's generally sat in the back, so I could avoid that encounter by sitting up near the front or middle. Usually my best friend, Tommy, would save me a seat, so that wasn't an issue most of the time. After school though, my sixth period class was about as far as you could get from the buses and still be on the same campus, so I had to run to make the buses after the bell rang. As a result, the seats were almost always full. Tommy's mom picked him up for piano lessons after school three days a week, so he couldn't save me a seat.
So obviously, that meant sitting in front of Todd and his cronies was inevitable roughly 100% of the time.
After a couple of weeks of spit balls, gum in my hair, wet-willies, getting poked, taunted, and otherwise tormented beyond what was reasonable for any rational human being to bear; I'd started walking home after school. It was only two miles or so and it wasn't a bad walk really. Hell half the time I could get there just before the bus did anyway, because of the route it took. Also, walking took me right past one of my favorite places in the world: Elliot's Coins and Collectables.
Elliot was a fifty-seven year old super geek. He was the sole owner and proprietor of Coin's and Collectables. C&C was really more of the 'Collectables' side of things than 'Coins'. The coins part was just there for the yellow pages and people looking to off load grandpa's buffalo nickels. His real trade was baseball cards and comic books.
It was comic book nirvana really.
He had thousands - tens of thousands maybe. Back issues going back to the 1940's of every title you could imagine. He had all the new stuff too; Marvel, DC, and a half dozen Indies. Image comics wasn't up and running yet, but he carried them too once they were. He had it all, including Heavy Metal magazine, which was my personal favorite. If you aren't familiar, Heavy Metal was (is) a science fiction mag that had graphic violence, dark fantasy, and erotica. Impossibly proportioned men and woman spilled each other's blood across its pages in every state of undress. There was nudity - lots of nudity - both men and women; and more violence than a slasher movie. But there were good stories too, and some of the best artists in the business. It was most certainly an NC-17 publication, but I loved it, and Elliot would sell it to me anyway.
Elliot was a nerd's nerd. He knew all the facts, all the artists and writers, all the characters of every imprint. I was in awe of him really. C&C was a home away from home, and I spent many afternoons there hanging out, reading back issues, chatting with Elliot, his one employee and the other patrons, buying sodas from the small mini fridge he kept to sell to kids like me. I bought tons of stuff from C&C, but moreover, it was a refuge from the social ecology of school. In school I was just a smart kid who was a little short, way too skinny, and painfully shy. At C&C I was one of the guys. A fellow geek, one of the people who knew the secret code and handshake. (
