"Is Colorado near California?"
McCoy winked at Givens and replied, "Almost spitting distance."
Billy was inside a coach traveling west from the Kansas orphan farm. They'd barely started on the journey before McCoy, the man in a black suit sitting across from Billy, started telling Billy where they were going and what the deal was.
Nothing had been said about this back at the farmhouse when the men had arrived and Mary had called Billy in to tell him that he was going with them. Jeremiah was off on his supplies buying spree. Billy had spied Jeremiah fucking Clyde in the hayloft the afternoon before Jeremiah left on his trip, so Billy didn't really care where Jeremiah was. And once he'd heard one of the men in the black suits tell Mary that they were headed West, Billy didn't have to hear any more to be good about going with them.
"We're going to a mining town in the Colorado Rockies called Cedar Hill," McCoy told Billy. He was leaning in toward Billy in the compartment of the couch, which meant that he almost was in Billy's lap. The distance between the two facing seats was so narrow that the man's knees were nearly in Billy's crotch. Billy's legs were spread around the man's. The other man, Givens, who was pretty silent and who was shorter, beefier, and somewhat younger than McCoy in appearance—but also wearing a black suit—was sitting beside Billy in the forward-facing seat.
A black man was up top, driving the team of horses. Billy hadn't seen many black men in Kansas, but he knew that there were some who had drifted there away from the Civil War fought some ten years earlier. If this black man had been in the Civil War, he would have had to be very young when he did it, Billy thought. He appeared to be a strapping, large-framed, very muscular young man.
"You'll be working in a saloon," McCoy continued. "They need fresh, young men coming in to work the saloons in those mining towns. You'll do quite well from the look of you."
"Thank you." Billy couldn't think of much else to say. As long as it was getting him close to California, he didn't particularly care what his job would be. It would be his first job as a man—leaving the orphanage.
"Mrs. Atwell says you have no relatives."
"Not that I know of—none that have shown up for the last ten years," Billy said.
"It's hard to believe you are nineteen," McCoy said. "Or even eighteen for that matter. But I have a birth certificate here that Mrs. Atwell gave me that says you are."
He looked at Billy as if he expected Billy to explain the difference between what was in print and what the man observed, but Billy had nothing to offer.
"We lose track of the passing years in the orphanage," was the best he could offer.
McCoy put his hands on Billy's knees and pushed the young man's legs apart a bit more. At the same time Givens put an arm around Billy's neck and palmed Billy's bicep.
"Mrs. Atwell assured me that you lay under men. Was she telling the truth?" He was giving Billy an intense look.
"Under men?" Billy answered with a gulp.
"Yes. She said you would let a man put his pecker inside you. I must know if she lied. If so, we will take you back and recover what we paid for you. The job in Colorado requires you to let men fuck you. Will you lay under men?"
How did she know? Billy wondered, feeling panicked. He was shamed and embarrassed all at once. But why should he be? He hadn't chosen that. It wasn't his fault that it seemed natural enough to him. He could never go back now. And he didn't want to go back. He wanted to go to California. He'd do anything to get there.
"I might will lay under men," he answered, hedging as far as he was concerned, but that wasn't exactly the way the two men heard it.
It was like both men had been holding their breath to that point. Smiling, McCoy moved his hands to between Billy's legs, running his fingers up and down Billy's crotch. Billy felt himself becoming aroused. Givens moved a hand to the back of Billy's neck and ran his fingers up into the blond curls on the back of Billy's head.
"We'll need to have proof of that."
"Proof?"
"You'll have to lie under both of us. And of course we can't go too much further on our journey without testing out the quality of what you will do with a man."
"The quality?" Billy asked, somewhat confused.
"The quality, yes, how well you do lying under a men—how much pleasure he gets from penetrating you and releasing his seed. How well you make him hard and pleasure him. Am I embarrassing you?"
"No," Billy answered not wanting to appear naïve. But scaring me more than a little, he thought.
"Have you sucked a man's pecker?"
"Yes," Billy answered. It was, after all, the truth.
"And you have had a man's pecker inside you?"
