'Cause there ain't no cure for the Summertime Cruise
****
Barb's reaction was hardly surprising. I had already pictured it fairly vividly many times in my imagination.
"You what?"
Her brown eyes bugged out, the expression was exasperation, wifely disbelief, maybe even disdain.
"You're telling me you're gonna buy a sports car?" She shook her head.
"No, that's not what I said."
"You said 'Porsche', for crying out loud, Clay. You're going to insist that isn't a 'sports car'?"
"It's going to be a project, Barb. Not going to cost a fortune. A fixer-upper Roger and I have plans for. A project."
Barb puckered her lips. "Clayton Thomas, not a 'fortune' up front, you mean. Just over time, a few hundreds here, a few thousands there, I know how these guy things go, not just at your age."
"You always said it wouldn't hurt for me to have a hobby." I felt defensive and always disliked it when she addressed me with my full name.
"Right. More up the line of model trains, or stamps maybe. Home brewing. Something simple and cheap. But this? If this doesn't fit the description of 'male midlife crisis' I don't know what does."
She was frowning. I liked her even when she was annoyed, her eyebrows furrowed on that sweet face. I wished we made love more often, but that wasn't happening much. At forty-four she was still fairly trim, dark hair now streaked a bit with gray, but her eyes would typically sparkle whenever she was amused.
But right now she looked peeved as peanuts.
"At least it's not a boat." This was more of a concession than it sounded. She turned and walked back into our farmhouse kitchen. I watched her sweet ass work its way from side to side.
She would be even more upset if she knew the real motive behind it all.
My down-the-way neighbor, Roger and I, had been an "item" all summer, all secret and hidden and deliciously subversive. Our summertime adventures had been a splendid discovery of gay sex, although we never said 'gay' and the word 'bisexual' only came up a couple times. Roger grew a bit uneasy whenever our sex talk got to that level of abstraction.
The immediate trouble was that our trysting times had mostly been outside, a particular thrill of ours (fresh. sweet, summer air on bare cocks and rumps, balls free, the excitement of outdoors in general) and with the Fall and colder New England weather just around the corner, it was going to be harder to come up with meeting places that would be suitable for our increasingly ardent adventures.
To tell the truth, our whole scene reminded me of being a teenager again, with all the obstacles to intimacy involved back then: dodging family members and having limited times and places for fun, squeezing in exciting, breathless sex whenever and wherever we could.
So Roger and I had contrived a reasonable winter-time cover for our clandestine encounters.
I'd spotted an advertisement for an early model Porsche 911, a Cobalt blue 1971 to be exact, which was just about perfect, since by then the engineering folk had relocated the rear suspension pick-up points for the axle rearward, minimizing the built-in oversteer all rear engine cars have, which had plagued earlier models. Pre-emissions controls, the model was retro enough that vehicle inspections wouldn't be an issue, not needing to meet the stricter controls required of newer cars. Someone's restoration had got out of hand, and the owner was ready to bail for a price. Not a low price mind you, but something I could afford.
Roger and I would be making the trek down to Chapel Hill, North Carolina next month to check it out and if we were satisfied with its condition, take delivery.
I had been putting off telling Barb, but it was time. She was predictably upset, but I also knew she'd get over it, and as long as I didn't squander the family fortune on it, turn myself into an absentee husband, or burn the garage down, all would be fine. As long as she didn't discover the real reason for my apparent profligacy.
This whole marriage thing is one tricky business, I tell you. Monogamy has more wrinkles than a cerebral cortex. I love Barb, we have been twenty-five years legal, and we had made a fine family with two grown boys, a sweet comfortable house here in the Berkshires.
But midlife horniness had intruded big time and landed a gut punch to me and my buddy Roger. A punch we were happy to roll with.
****
So one Saturday morning in October, Roger showed up on my doorstep before dawn, with his backpack and a flask of coffee for the trip.
Roger's sort of a backwoods everyman: flannel lumberjack shirt untucked, sturdy northern European bones, bit of a beer belly, but taut and strong through the shoulders. Dark eyes, level gaze, dense but fairly closely cropped beard, easy smile. Passes for pretty much any regular work guy in our neck of Massachusetts. Working man, middle height, hair thinning, but as we joked with each other, we posited that the hair had just "migrated." Plenty on his chest and elsewhere.
Although clean-shaven, I wasn't all that different in appearance, just smaller, but between the two of us we had enough body-fur to cause nightmares for anyone in the "manscaping" business.
But Roger had a nice cock on him, especially when erect, as I knew pretty well at this point. Big hanger balls, with a sweet forest of dark brown hair surrounding. The sweaty smell under those testicles would give me an instant erection every time my nose was under there, if I didn't have one already.
By midday we had managed to snake my Ford 150 and the empty trailer through the New York-New Jersey mess and across the various bridges okay, with the cruise control set at a comfortable 68 mph, the rental trailer riding decently in the back, even unloaded.
For the first part of the drive we hadn't talked much, and not even about anything sex related, but just after DC we had inevitably gotten around to our favorite topicsβthe enjoyment our genitals liked best and journeys they had taken in earlier life.
Roger had relayed some pre-Carrie adventures with a sweet chubby girl named Joellyn who would give him sweet hand-strokings as foreplay. He had gone on for quite awhile about how she had reluctantly come around to licking him, although never far enough, or long enough, for his liking.
"Not sure she even enjoyed it that much, to tell the truth."
He looked over.
"So tell me about the first penis you sucked, Clay. You sure were more adventurous than I was, anyway."
"You really want to know?" My eyebrows arched. He'd never asked this before.
"Sure. You can tell me just about anything at this point, Clay. Whose was it? Your old high school buddy Lenny?"
I had told him a little about my early messing around with Lenny, and it was a logical guess.
"Nope. Me."
His eyebrows went way up.