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.
He would get into another relationship. He had other girls in mind, he thought; girls that he had faithfully and loyally avoided flirting with too heavily. But first, he was going to scratch that itch that he had been suppressing. This summer, just for this summer, he was going to see what if felt like to be an accomplished man's object of desire. Take the plunge into... getting plunged into...
***
Which is what was happening at the moment, this time with Brandon on his back, his legs up, knees hooked around Roger's outstretched arms, looking down past the older man's thick, silver-haired torso, at own penis and testicles bouncing rhythmically right above where Roger's hard cock was smoothly and insistently pounding into him.
He was past the still-inevitable initial discomfort of the blunt penetration, and now all he could feel was the pleasant feeling of fullness and the incredible building sensation of ecstasy from where his mentor's knob was massaging his prostate. Brandon had understood from reading that that gland was supposed to be a pleasure center, but he had never appreciated how exquisite it could feel in practice. He almost always achieved orgasm this way, whether on his back or his knees or his stomach, hands-free. And Roger certainly seemed to love that.
Brandon still insisted, during their pre- and post-coital conversations, that he wasn't gay. Indeed, he had always and exclusively dated and had sex with young women, enjoyed being the masculine, assertive, penetrating partner in sex; and he had every intention to return to that paradigm once school started again, and beyond. This was a short-term, exploratory thing, that he was enjoying precisely because it was something you did when you were young that would never happen again, like backpacking through Europe.
Roger always shrugged at those protestations, telling the younger man that it was not uncommon, that the term was "bisexual," (and that indeed was what Roger considered himself). He also assured him that regardless, the city was full of married men who identified as strictly heterosexual but secretly engaged in at least fellatio on a regular basis. It was just sex, the professor argued. Just a pleasurable activity, a hobby, like ultimate frisbee or playing in a garage band. It didn't define who you were.
Brandon still wasn't sure. The whole issue and discussion crashed into his mind like waves on a rocky shore, then receded just as quickly. Conscious thought could not gain purchase in his brain that was responding to the increasingly urgent pulsations of pleasure racing up his spine, because right now, he was getting fucked. He closed his eyes, and felt them rolling up into his head. He blindly reached up to grip the older man's shoulders, bracing himself against the onslaught. Roger was not a big man. He was more stout than Brandon, thicker, both in the upper body and between his legs, but he wasn't as tall. He was a middle-aged academic, for crying out loud, not some hulking brutish bear; but he was insistent, especially when in pursuit of an orgasm.
As he was now.
Brandon bit his lower lip. At the moment, he could have done with some more lube, but he sensed that Roger was past that point. The friction against his tautly-stretched anal ring was becoming like an itch, an itch that needed scratching, more scratching. More scratching. Should stop scratching. Can't stop scratching. Can't stop. Can't stop. Gotta stop. Gotta stop. Can't can't can't can't... and then suddenly his orgasm shot up his spinal cord and exploded like a mushroom cloud filling his cranium, his penis spurting warm gooey liquid onto his flat hairless stomach, even as he sensed Roger enjoying his own moment of ecstasy, finally plunging into him to maximum depth and then holding there, depositing his own generous serving of semen into Brandon's bowels.
***
Afterwards, Brandon felt awash in guilt and shame, as he still did, every time. Of course, he wasn't that far removed from the years in which he always felt guilt after merely masturbating. It was the way he was raised. Sex is good, his mother had told him, it is a gift from God; but only to be experienced within the bonds of matrimony with the one and only woman that Jesus has picked out for you. She had taught him that
masturbation
was shameful. What would she think of her boy being on his back with his legs around a man older than his father, letting that man use his tight, hidden little orifice that God had designed solely for eliminating waste, to plunder it with a fat, terrible organ, thrusting in blind animalistic pursuit of his own unholy pleasure?
Jesus would not approve, Brandon knew. His mom would sure as hell not.
But that was part of why the remorse afterwards was so intense and overwhelming, that it merged with, became part of, his orgasm. It washed over him, pushed him up against the rocks and then drew him back out to a turbulent and dangerous sea, pulling him under, drowning him; until all he could do was reach out and cling to the man who was in the maelstrom with him, the man who had put him there, the only being who could rescue him or take him down to the bottom, it didn't matter which. His savior and his doom.
