We stood there in the middle of the Atkinson Park parking lot, the three of us, watching the last of the cars picking up the members of the soccer team of the fall Henderson recreation league take off into the late afternoon waning sun. Ricky Rusk and I, both students at the Graham Hill Academy, Ricky eighteen and I nineteen, were staying back because Coach Denton was driving us home. He'd said he had to stay here until the rest had gone. Graham Hall was an all-male-student post-high school prep school to bring promising athletes up to the academic standards needed to get athletic scholarships to universities or to hone their athletic skills to go directly into the pros.
That wasn't really why we were hanging back—that there was some reason he had to be the last one to leave—but that's what Coach had told the others. Ricky and I knew otherwise. We both had every reason to know Coach Denton's motives.
Clay Denton, at twenty-six, wasn't that much older than the guys on the team he was coaching. We all were students at the Graham Hill Academy in northwestern Kentucky, across the Ohio River from Evansville, Indiana. Coach Denton had been a student there too once. He'd gone to the University of Louisville after leaving Henderson and having starred on the football team there, but he had married our friend, Greg Gerard's, mother and come back to town to work in Mrs. Gerard's real estate firm. She was old enough to be Coach's mother, and just about everyone wondered what was up with that marriage other than that she was rich as sin and was still a good looker. Some of us at the prep school had very good reason to wonder why he'd gone after that tail, unless it was for protective coloring. We didn't question, from experience, that Mrs. Gerard had an interest in younger guys—and in getting them into bed with her.
Greg, twenty, was still at the Graham Hill Academy but was dickering with semipro football teams for a starting position. He was working for a landscaping company into the fall, so he wasn't playing soccer with us. I worked off and on there too, mainly off now that school had started, but I didn't put in the hours that Greg did. I also hadn't muscled up like Greg had from the hard manual yardwork, but I didn't have a boy's body anymore, either. In one way, that wasn't working in my favor. But the change was inevitable, I knew. One can't stay in a teenager's body forever. I was muscling up a little late for an athlete, but that didn't matter that much for a soccer player.
It also didn't matter to Mrs. Gerard, who had hopped my bones a couple of months previously when I'd come to see if Greg wanted to do some pickup basketball. He wasn't there, but Mrs. Gerard was there, in a revealing negligee and holding a liquor glass. She was half looped and on the prowl. I'm a young guy with testosterone, so, even though I was really interested in guys more than women, she was enticing enough. She was a voluptuous, experienced older woman, so, yes, I laid on my back on her bed while she rode my cock. And then three days later, knowing Greg wouldn't be there, I went back and fucked Mrs. Gerard in a missionary. I was well on the way to being actively gay, but that gave me pause to consider the advantages of being bi instead. Other guys who went both ways had told me that sex was sex was sex—that the gender of the partner didn't matter as long as I got off on it—and I had to say there was reason in that perspective. It helped that Mrs. Gerard didn't fixate on me. She'd take any good-looking guy's cock. She certainly took Coach Denton's.
I wondered if she knew Coach Denton's broader interests. He was the main one who told me that the gender didn't matter that much as long as I could get it hard and get it off.
Coach Denton was coaching the academy team in the league to, he said, give back to his old prep school, but Ricky and I knew he had other reasons. Mrs. Gerard was a lot older than he was. The chatter between us guys in the school was that Denton hadn't come back for Mrs. Gerard—that he'd come back for his older teen athletes at the prep school.
"What say we take a run on the paths through the wooded section of the park here next to the playing field before we knock off," Coach said to Ricky and me when the last of the cars exited the parking lot. It wasn't really a question. Coach was stripping his athletic shirt off his chest. He was a developed athlete. He'd played both soccer and football at Louisville and was in great shape, muscular and not an ounce of fat on him. He had a swirling black and blue tattoo covering his left breast and down that arm to his elbow, which made him look mean and dangerous—and cool. The coaches at our school strongly discouraged the guys getting tattoos, telling us that that was thuggish and they wanted their school to have a clean-cut reputation. That, of course, made tattoos that much more inviting to us student athletes, especially when coaches like Denton had them.
Denton wasn't tall. He was compact and solid and was built close to the ground, which had made him hard to bring down when he was carrying the ball at Louisville. It also emphasized how muscled up he was. But he was a handsome, square-jawed guy, who exuded robust sexuality. Mrs. Gerard obviously liked that, but it also went a long way with the guys at the prep school, who were raging with hormones and imagination.
The chatter in the school was Mrs. Gerard had bought him to be her boy toy and that he'd married her to get close to the young guys in the school. When he and Greg, Mrs. Gerard's son from her previous marriage and only six years younger than Clay Denton was, stood side by side, they looked more like brothers than stepdad and stepson. Greg had even grown into the same solid, athletic frame that Coach had. When some of us had heard that Mrs. Gerard and Denton were getting it on, there were jokes about how Greg and Denton looked alike and speculation that Mrs. Gerard was doing Denton because she really wanted to do her own son. When Greg heard that muttered about, though, he went ballistic and that talk stopped because Greg was popular at school. I didn't think Greg knew that Mrs. Gerard would fuck boys Greg's age—she fucked me—I must say I wondered about that, though, considering how fast Greg had heated up over rumors of the possibility.
"Sure, Coach," Ricky said to coach's proposal that we take another run with us. Ricky's voice was a little uncertain, although I was sure he knew what we were doing here. It wasn't his first time. Last year, when Denton had first coached the team, it had been me who played the rabbit here. It was no secret in the school that Coach cultivated eighteen- and nineteen-year-old boys, keeping it barely legal. It had just been a shock to me that he moved on as soon as his rabbit of the moment started to show signs of the "into a man" change. He concentrated on the soccer players at Graham Hill, because playing that game depended more on dexterity and swiftness than muscle and height. I was growing out of what he preferred when he could get what he wanted. And, here in Henderson, Clay Denton could get what he wanted. It's probably why he came back.
Ricky spoke up, a bit uncertain, although I could see his body trembling in anticipation of what consumed his thoughts these days—as it did mine. "So, you want me to—?"
"You can take out first, Rick," Coach said. "Kyle and I'll follow after. There's a bench near the water fountain half way into the woods. You remember where it is, I'm sure. Meet up with us there."
Ricky stood there. He was wearing just athletic shorts and running shoes. We'd all ended practice with running two laps around the field. Coach had run along with us, being no more winded when we were done than any of the guys were.
