A Clearing

I’m not a stranger to sex. Though I’m not as experienced as some of my schoolmates, I have enjoyed more than a few times the pleasures of spread thighs and moist crotches. I have had my own cock stroked and sucked and kissed and welcomed into the warm and damp tunnels of neighboring girls – Shane’s own sister, older than me, was my first such experience and I’ll get to that story in a moment.

But the summer I’m writing about, the summer of my fifteenth year when my sister Claire and I stayed with our Aunt Mary and Uncle James and our cousins Ben and Becky, was the summer when whole new worlds were opened to me, when new ways of looking at men and women and myself, and performing were revealed in manners I never would have expected. I came away from that summer with views of my cousins and sister forever altered – in ways I never would have believed, but now appreciated and encouraged amongst my own friends. The experience with Becky and watching my sister being screwed by my cousin was just the beginning of what was to be a summer full of such experiences and delights.

But first I should tell you of Hazel and myself. Hazel, Shane’s older sister and my first sexual experience. Hazel, the girl whom I will not forget, nor ever meet again for reasons I shall tell soon. I was in love with her from the moment I saw her, and even though she was just eighteen and already a women, and I a brazen and hungry fourteen year old, I could already tell that I wanted her and that she, in a way I couldn’t quite place, wanted me as well.

There were plenty of times to talk with her and hang around, for Shane and I had been friends for more than ten years. In fact, I can dimly remember Hazel bathing both of us a few times when we were still little scraps. She wouldn’t have been more than seven or eight, but I remember her soaping us down in the tin washtub near the creek after we had played in the pigpen too long. I remember batting at her long braids as they dangled among us. Since this less than auspicious memory, Hazel and I had grown up close to each other, with her event s preceding my own analogous ones by three or four years.

There was a time when she was my current age and I was ten or eleven, when we would walk and play in the woods near our houses. She was delightfully imaginative then, and we would make up whole kingdoms and histories in which we would be king and queen, or the prince and princess. These times were wholly innocent and we left off playing these games a year or so later when she was sent off to high school and I started growing hair around my balls and waking up with my thighs and cock still wet with the remains of a wonderful and dimming dream.

Both Clare and Shane rarely played with us during that time. They seemed to see our games and make-believes as queer and light-hearted and more often than not would leave us alone. Clare, however, accompanied Hazel to high school, and I only saw them during holidays and during the summer, when they would return and all of us would greet them at the train station. After a while, Hazel and I grew apart; older boys in town started to court her, and she responded to my urges to play with reproofs that we were too old for that sort of thing. By the time I was eighteen, Hazel was seeing John Dandridge almost every weekend evening and I realized she had inevitably left me behind. I had thought that she and I might never speak with one another again, and had set about forgetting her as best as I could, when a June evening by the creek changed my life.

I had finished with afternoon chores and had run off to the river as quickly as possible to swim and look for crawdads. After jumping in the creek and paddling around and washing the sweat of the day off my body, I pulled myself up on the grassy bank and flopped down with my hat over my eyes with nothing more planned except a light doze until I heard mother ring the evening dinner bell. The creek was fairly close to the house, yet the swimming hole was a secluded and cool spot in the summer, with the overhanging boughs of box elders and sycamores shading the water from the sun, and the surrounding undergrowth forming a thin canopy of sorts over a grassy clearing. I loved to come here best on summer evenings, when the wind would have picked up just enough to clear away the midges and mosquitoes, and the birds would be calling each other up to roost. It was shadowed and mysterious and all my own.

That particular evening I was lying naked on the grass, my hat over my eyes, my clothes in a dirty and sweat-stiffened pile nearby. My skin cooled in the light breeze drew the water away, and I was on the verge of dozing away when an unusual noise made me open my eyes under my hat. Outside of the rustling leaves and lapping water and birds and undergrowth noises was another sound: someone or something was approaching along the secret path Shane and I had made and that only we knew about.

I thought about reaching for my clothes, but then subsided: it was only Shane and nakedness was nothing new between us. Sometimes, after swimming, we would compare the lengths of our cocks, as boys will do, both limp and erect. We were about equal; my own cock was slightly thicker than his, but his was half an inch or so longer and we accepted this as equal. It was hard to get hard after the creek’s cool water, but Shane would only have to tell the story of him sniffing Jenny Crow’s thighs in the barn after school, and how she had let him (or so he said) stick his cock in her mouth for a few minutes, before both of us would be rock-hard.

“She told her Dad that she stayed after to help clean the classroom,” Shane would say as a preamble to his story. “Then she snuck across Fitzgerald’s field to our barn and I was waiting for her there. I took her up to the loft where there was a little loose hay and she let me lay her own there and look under her petticoats.” Shane would be stroking himself by now (I would be, too; every time he told this story, I imagined more and more) and warming up to the task. “She wasn’t wearing no bloomers, either, and I could see her white thighs and her hairy crotch. So I’m moving closer and closer with my hands and my head and she smelled like she was in heat and so I moved up to give her a poke, but she wouldn’t let me. So I says to her, ‘Either you let me give you a poke, or I’ll tell your dad you was messing in the barn with another boy.’

“Well, she didn’t want me to poke her, but she didn’t want her dad to know anything, so she turns around and grabs my cock through my trousers.

‘You can’t poke me, Shane. But I’ll lick it for you if you want.’ she says to me and she’s smiling when she says this. So I take it out and gives it to her and she takes all of it, every inch and drop.” And Shane would go on to describe how Jenny Crow licked his shaft up and down and took his balls one by one and then together in her warm mouth, and then took his cock all the way into her mouth and down her throat. “Her nose was rootin’ in my curlies,” Shane would say with a big grin, and I could see Jenny’s face there, her eyes closed, her mouth moving back and forth slightly.

By this time, Shane and I would be fully stroking off, and I would usually come first, especially when he breathlessly described how he had pulled Jenny’s head to his crotch and unloaded down her throat. The pleasure would wash through me and my semen would jet out and arc through the air into the green water, landing with small splashes and ripples, like small golf balls on a green. Shane’s would do the same and then we would lie back, panting, catching our breath, and inevitably Shane would turn and ask, “What about you and Molly?”

What about me and Molly? There wasn’t that much to tell. At least, nothing to compare with Shane’s story. Molly McCormick was a tall, thin, bucktoothed, red haired girl, the daughter of the town butcher, and was absolutely in love with me and had been since the fourth grade. She pursued me; I resisted. Sometimes she would get me alone – at school, in town after a dance – and steal a quick kiss and I hated to stop her; it would have been rude and though I didn’t like her, I didn’t dislike her. I mean, she was nice and all, but I wasn’t really interested in courting her.

Apparently, she had other ideas about us, though, and I think she knew that sooner than later, she would catch me at a time when I couldn’t get away. And so it happened on top of the Ferris wheel at the county fair early that summer – Molly found her time and place and I guess you could say I took advantage of it. She had found me at the fair (its not hard when there’s not that many people in the county), and asked me to buy her some cotton candy (her girlfriends all giggled at this) and so I had agreed and then she said, “Well, Bran, I have to pay you back somehow. Would you like to escort me on the Ferris wheel? I need a strong man to protect me.”

More giggling, and I sheepishly took her arm and led her to the waiting line of kids and adults, mostly couples, in front of the wheel. I couldn’t say no, or else I’d be admitting I wasn’t a strong man – which I wasn’t, but that’s besides the point. We waited and chitchatted about friends and chores and parents and the line crept forward and after a while even I began to get excited thinking about the wheel. It wasn’t as big as wheels are nowadays, nor was it lit up, but it was plenty big for us. The wheel stretched above us and the cars at the top seemed tiny from down here, like black dots against the blue sky. I had been up there the previous summer and knew you could see straight to the county line and beyond that you could even make out a small red smudge of MacPherson’s barn, way out past the river.

Molly clutched my arm as we drew closer to the man collecting tickets. “I’m scared, Bran,” she breathed in my ear, exuding cloying scents of cotton candy, parched corn, and sarsaparilla. “I hope you can stop me from falling when…” Luckily the ticket man reached for our tickets and ushered us into the wooden car and closed the small door behind us (after I had helped Molly sit down on her bench, of course; she carefully tucked her skirts beneath her when she sat down), cutting Molly off mid sentence. She probably forgot what she was in the middle of saying because she spent the next few minutes peering over the sides in all directions, her long, red hair swishing across her face, and uttering little gasps whenever the wheel lurched forward to let more passengers onto empty cars.

Finally the wheel was filled and we began to slow move up, counterclockwise, and Molly hurriedly patted the empty bench next to her. “Please, Bran,” she whined, batting her eyes at me, “Please sit next to me so I can hold on to you so I won’t fall.”

I figured it was more trouble to refuse than to do it, so I shifted around the car until I was sitting alongside her and she immediately took my hand and held it in hers. “Please?” she said, seeing the look I gave her. “Just for now. It’s so romantic.” Before I could answer, she sighed and laid her head on my shoulder, ignoring my shrug of indifference. We were at the top of the wheel, now, and together we gazed out at the countryside: the corn and wheat fields stretching away in soft ripples of land, the rows of trees and the dense greenness of the forest beyond that. Molly sighed again and the wheel spun and I was too busy trying to extricate myself from Molly’s be-redded head to notice any further details. So when the wheel started to slow, it was Molly who jerked up and said, “Seth, what’s happening? Why is the wheel stopping?”

Indeed, the wheel had begun to slow and now had stopped, with us marooned at the very top. Molly’s weight was blessedly gone from my shoulder and I breathed an inward sigh of relief and started to inch away, but she kept my hand firmly gripped my hand in hers. She knew exactly what she was doing and the only way I could think of getting out of this was to not let her know that I knew that she knew what was going on. I pretended indifference. “Um, I think they do this so all the couples – I mean, people – can get a chance to see the view.” I said, hopefully.

Molly leaned over me, craning her neck over the side of the small, wooden car we were in. I could smell her neck and all of a sudden she smelled sweet and soft, and I almost reached up to stroke her thick hair. “Then why are people yelling at each other down there?” she asked.

I peered over. Sure enough there was some sort of commotion down below. The ticket man and some other men were shouting at each other and gesturing at the wheel’s frozen machinery, the big gears and belts and pulleys all motionless. The ticket man abruptly turned away and stalked off across the grass towards the midway, his miniature figure disappearing in the crowd. Presumably, he was either ridding himself of the whole situation, or, hopefully, setting off to find some tools to repair the wheel’s mechanism. Meanwhile, passengers in the other cars had joined our restlessness and we could hear anxious murmurs from the women and soothing, albeit exasperated, tones from the men.

As Molly and I looked out over the fairgrounds, a crowd started to gather below us: Ticket-holders, anxious companions of family of those on board, idly curious. Scores of tiny faces peered up and we could make out a knot of Molly’s friends pointing up to us and, presumably, giggling. Molly abruptly pulled back into the car and clutched at me. She whispered, “Bran, I’m afraid of heights. I’ve always been afraid of heights. That’s why I never help out in the barn during haying time.” She gazed wide-eyed, up at me, and I could feel her body tremble slightly. If she wasn’t truly afraid, she was certainly putting on a good show. And I felt my heart stir: something about this girl next to me, this unfortunate, bucktoothed, lonely girl who seemed to have nothing to do except chase me around. Like I was God’s gift to women, right?

So I put my arm around her and held her to me and let her rest her head on my shoulder as we looked out at the fields and forest spread below us, and then I noticed the tear in her blue calico dress. It was a large tear, about seven inches or so, but unnoticeable and hidden in the folds, unless she was sitting down. Which she was, and when I leaned forward, I could see that her petticoat beneath was torn, too, in exactly the same fashion.