It was the second week of summer, the summer between his junior and senior years of college, probably the last summer Brandon would ever be able to spend like this.
Perhaps, by this time next year, he would have found and accepted a full-time job, and be headed for a lifetime of working forty-eight or fifty weeks a year. And even if he chose grad school, he might well be relocating to a new city to get a head start on finding housing and part-time employment to pay his way.
No, this would be his last leisurely summer as a college student, living for free at home with his parents, working some but surrounded daily or nightly with equally care-free friends. He knew it, and appreciated it.
Already, he had settled into a comfortable and glorious routine. On mornings when it hadn't rained or when the dew wasn't too heavy, he mowed. The family owned a small tractor, an old Massey Ferguson with a mower attachment, and his father had been more than pleased to let him use it to earn easy money, grooming the spacious lawns of the big lakefront properties of the summer people from the city.
He could be done by early afternoon, while his friends continued to slave away in the hardware stores and feed mills and highway crews that offered short-term employment in the area. Home sometimes for an early dinner with his parents and younger brother; or at the very least, a short chat with his dad as the older man sipped a Scotch and soda in his recliner and watched the pre-primetime re-runs of M*A*S*H or Frazier.
Then he would head out to the football field at the high school to play ultimate frisbee, or over to his friend Mike's house to play three-chord rock and roll and twelve-bar blues with the makeshift band that maybe, just maybe, would be ready to play a party before the end of the summer.
Then maybe a half-hour hanging out at the Tastee Fresh, watching the carloads of teens and young adults cruise through, flirting with the girls who were scooping the ice cream into paper sundae dishes.
(He didn't date during the summers. The past two summers, he had been maintaining a long-distance relationship with a college girlfriend, but that had ended two months ago after she hooked up with someone else on her spring break trip. Just a week ago, during finals week, he had gone on a promising first date with a new girl, and he planned to ask her out again as soon as school resumed, but he was content to be romantically unattached for the summer.)
After ice cream, maybe pick up a single six-pack of beer and split it two or three ways while watching the stream flow over the old millworks by the city park. Not enough to get into trouble, although his parents would no doubt be asleep before he got home. Just a pleasant buzz to end another perfect day.
In the morning his father would already be at work when his alarm went off at seven. He would have a cup of coffee and talk for a while with his mother, who might have been writing letters to her sisters or preparing for a Bible study; and then by eight be firing up the tractor.
And after he finished his day's work shortly after noon and put the mower in the barn, usually there was no one home to even ask where he was going or what he would be doing for the rest of the languorous afternoon.
Where he was going, usually, was the lakeside home of one of his customers, Roger Aaronson. Roger was a fifty-something English professor at a prestigious private college downstate that his family couldn't have afforded even if Brandon had applied. But it was Roger's second career as a novelist that paid for the expansive summer home with the 180 feet of lakefront.
Brandon had started cutting Roger's lawn the previous summer, and they had become something like friends, or mentor-mentee. This summer, he had accepted the professor's invitation to come over any time he wanted, to swim off his pier or sunbathe on the deck while the older man worked diligently in his study on his next book. Around three, Roger would come down, fix them each a single cocktail, and they would play backgammon and talk about film and current events and Brandon's own hopes of becoming a writer.
And then Roger would take Brandon upstairs, to his bedroom with the floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the lake, and lay him down on the cool white 600-thread-count sheets, and fuck him in the ass.
***
He had figured it out the previous summer, when he first met Roger and began mowing his spacious lawn -- that Roger was gay. Or bi, whatever. He had none of what Brandon thought of as the stereotypical "tells" of being gay. Other than perhaps a casual sense of style -- linen shirts, topsiders, nice haircut. Mostly what Roger exuded was an air of competence and confidence.
And face it, Brandon had to tell himself. He was a little bit star-struck. He had never met a published author of this stature before, someone who wrote "literature" instead of textbooks; and someone who engaged him as worthy, intellectually, over the beer that he offered Brandon sometimes after mowing. Or at least, worthy of grooming.
That summer, he would mow Roger's yard, and find himself feeling oddly jealous of the young women -- college girls themselves, no doubt, or slightly older -- who showed up in their convertibles in Roger's driveway and sunned themselves on Roger's deck before disappearing with Roger into the darkness of the house after the professor finished his writing around three o'clock.
"It is one of the perks," Roger admitted, over one of those beers on an afternoon when he didn't have company.
"So," Brandon explored, boldly. "They drive all the way up here from the city?"
"Sometimes," Roger replied. "Some years I find someone local to just hang out all summer and... enjoy my company."
Brandon thought about that. He tried to picture some of the young women he knew, girls who had been three or four years older than him in school, wondering whether any of them had become the professor's summer fling. Maybe, more likely, he thought, another one of the vacationing summer "lake people" up from the city.
"So... with local girls... where do you find them?"
"It's more like they find me," Roger shrugged. And then he added, casually, "And not just girls."
And that is when the notion of being Roger's summertime fucktoy had first, shockingly, occurred to him.
It was the fact that he was dating someone at school, that had stopped him from exploring this forbidden desire last summer. If it wasn't for Megan, he realized at the time, he might have offered himself up last summer. It wasn't like it would be cheating on her with another girl, a rival for her romantic affection, for her status as "girlfriend." But, to Brandon, it
would
be sex. And so in March when Megan came back from her spring break trip, seeming oddly "off," and eventually admitted that she had been with another guy in Florida... Brandon decided to let that relationship go.