Mikey, a studly 18-year old finds himself intimate for the first time with Mike, his namesake 24-year old uncle whom he's idolized all his life during a cross-country drive. Steve is the 20-year old collegiate gymnast who hitches a ride with them.
As I-80 threaded its way through the Rockies and made its descent into the basin of the Great Salt Lake, we were totally engrossed in the beauty of the landscape. Neither Steve nor I had been this route before. It wasn't until we entered Salt Lake City, a rather dreary place despite its setting against western escarpments of the spectacularly beautiful Wasatches we'd being crossing, that conversation began to take a more focused shape. Mike asked Steve, who was sitting in the middle this time, to tell us more about Mark.
He began thoughtfully:
"Well, it's hard to know exactly what to say. All of my life, until he went east to school, it seems he's rarely been more than a few feet - or at most a few minutes - away. We grew up on the ranch, where of course we were the only kids. The local school in Saratoga wasn't a one-room school - it actually had four rooms, but it might as well have been a one-room school because it only had one teacher and all the kids from first grade to sixth were taught in the same room. There were only 16 of us, and these days it's closed entirely. As you saw, our Cheyenne house is also out in the country, and our 'high school' - it goes from grade 7 to 12 - was fairly small, but surprisingly good. Nevertheless it was the kind of place where chemistry and physics were taught only alternate years, and shit like that, so that Mark and I were often in the same classes.
"Anyway, I thought Mark was just wonderful. He's only 14 months older than I am, but that's significant. When we were young kids he always was able to throw a ball further, read easier, do harder math problems, etc., and he was usually an inch or so taller than I was. Just generally he was bigger and more competent. When you are kids, a year makes a difference, and I thought he was just fucking wonderful.
"Because there weren't many kids around, and our closeness in age, and the fact that we went to such a small school, we always shared the same friends, too. That continued when we went to school near Cheyenne. His friends were my friends and vice versa.
"He always was willing to teach me and show me how to do stuff. So I usually was reading his books, and if I ever had a question with fractions, say, he'd always know what to do.
"And of course he started puberty a year sooner than I did. For a while, that was strange, instead of him being maybe an inch taller than me, he was like three inches taller, though naturally before long I more or less caught up. And of course during those years his dick grew noticeably bigger than mine, and he began to show hair down there before I did. But he was just paving the way for me, and I came to understand that I'd catch up. Not catch up with him, but rather follow where he led.
"It's not as if I didn't know every detail of the changes he was going through, because we were always completely intimate with one another. We'd always bathed together, showered together, slept together in the same bed. We exchanged backrubs, and even as little kids once we learned (from a classmate, actually) how to masturbate, we did that in the bed (or hid in the closet) together, and it was easy to discover that it was fun to do each other. Of course Mark 'came' before I could, still just another reason to admire him.
"Under the influence of those raging hormones, by mid adolescence we learned what came natural about kissing each other's cocks and sucking 'em, and of course we got very, very good at it, one on the other, and even sixty-nining. And god did I think he was handsome! And the more we were flooded with sex hormones, the handsomer he seemed. Actually, I think the handsomer he actually got. We'd beat off together in front of our mirrors, and blow each other and look at the reflections in the mirrors. And it wasn't an occasional thing. No matter how tired we were, almost never went to sleep without jacking each other, or something.
"It wasn't till a few years later that we learned about fucking each other. Somehow that didn't seem as 'natural' as handjobs and blowjobs, but once we tried it, we discovered there are about a million different ways to have fun that way.
"And that's how it started; and that's how it is today. Whenever we are together, we almost always sleep in the same bed, and enjoy each other in all the old familiar ways. It's really miserable his being 2000 miles away most of he school year. He's an incredibly sweet-natured guy. Everybody loves him.
"Even when we were still out on the ranch, our parents made sure that we had chances to get together with friends, sleepovers and camping trips and stuff like that, but for the most part away from school we were more or less together all the time. On the ranch, we were, frankly, little kings. Our grandparents and our parents lavished us with love and non-stop affection; the housekeeper and ranch hands seemed to love us to death and indulge us in any way they could. At the same time our parents and grandparents expected us to do chores. Not that they didn't have plenty of hands to do anything that needed to be done, they just thought that it would be good for us on the one hand, and anyway, one day we would inherit everything and we ought to know how the ranch worked.
"As we grew, we became more competent, and we progressed from stuff like feeding the chickens that you can do when you're just four or five years old to mucking out the barn and eventually driving the baler. Along the way we learned to ride and rope, and my grandpa, my dad, and the hands taught us a lot about horses and cattle. So Mark and I spent a lot of time together out in the pastures and on the range, looking for a strayed cow her calf and stuff. Even when we moved to our Cheyenne house, we always spent our summers on the ranch, and lots of weekends too, especially during in calving season in the spring and roundup in the fall.
"Thrown together so much alone, we always seemed to be team, and cooperated. I can't think of a time in which we got really mad at one another, and certainly we never had a fight. I dunno exactly why, because I hear stories from classmates and friends in which brothers are fierce rivals and competitors. In our case, there wasn't much (or anything) to compete for. We were like swamped with love and affection no matter where we turned, and it always seemed like we had everything that we could want before we even could know we wanted it. We got ponies as soon as we could sit em, and horses as soon as we could manage them, and cars as soon as we were legal, and so forth. Our parents seemed to think we could do no wrong, and you know what, we never did. We always seemed to want to please our folks as much as we could. And anyway it was easy. Schoolwork has always been easy for us, and our teachers just seem to love us. What can I say.
"We were just naturally good riders,it seemed, and with practice we became really good at calf roping. The bareback stuff came later, after we'd become proficient gymnasts. Our father had been a gymnast in high school later at Columbia. When we were little he taught us the rudiments of tumbling, and how not to be afraid to take a chance while on the mat. And he got us familiar with the apparatus (though really using the apparatus that really doesn't come until later). The main thing is that that we stayed with it and continued to be very flexible, and with time developed some reasonable skills. Luckily, our high school (as I said, grades 7 through 12) though small, had a good gymnastics teacher. He was a math teacher but had been a collegiate gymnast and taught gymnastics as a side thing. He was really a very good coach, and our school, even though it was small, always fielded a team who could whip butt around the Cheyenne area.
"Anyway, both Mark and I were pretty good. My dad built us a gym of our own (I think, Mikey, you may have seen it this morning), and when we practiced at home, he coached us. Our parents were hugely proud of us and almost never missed a competition, even if it were miles away.
"Gymnastics is mainly made up of individual skills, but Mark and I worked up some sorta fancy exhibition routines that people liked. In any case, we really enjoyed it (and do to this day), and of course there were a lot of good sort of by products from it, too. For one, it really helps in bareback riding. But it also kinda helps to develop the body real nice. Mark and me, we were never going to see 5'8", not by a long shot, but nevertheless we were considered very studly in our highschool and very datable.
"Actually, we dated a lot. It was just another one of those things that came easily to us. And we got a lot of action, too. We very often double-dated. And quite a lot of times we would wind up four in the same bed somewhere. A surprising number of the nicest girls in our school thought that it was really hot to double-date with Mark and me.