Date: Fri, 20 Jul 2001 14:57:33 -0700
From: Hobbyboy <hobby391@att.net>
Subject: Boy From The High Country, Chapter 10

BOY FROM THE HIGH COUNTRY Chapter 10

by Hobbyboy

hobby391@att.net

DISCLAIMER: See the warning before Chapter 1.

MY PERFECTIONIST SIDE AGAIN: I am embarrassed by typos. It seems that no
matter how often I proofread, there are still errors when the story is
posted. This time it was that the boys "had not been raised without
television." Of course, it's either "had been raised without" or "had not
been raised with", and probably no one but me cares, but I still hate to
see these things. I also called Kelly "Cody" at one point. Maybe some day
I'll post a 100% error-free version.

CHAPTER 10: PERFECT LOVE

The morning sun caught the spray at the base of Yellowstone Falls and
shattered into a kaleidoscope of colors, rainbow hues shifting as the
clouds of spray changed shape with the changing breeze. I have a second
photo of the two of us at Artist Point, this one by a man I at first
assumed to be another Japanese tourist. It turned out that he was a middle
school teacher from Seattle whose grandparents had been the last in the
family to be able to speak Japanese.

Kelly's eyes lit up at the mention of Seattle. Freddie was on his way
there, had perhaps already arrived. He pumped poor Mr. Hyodo with so many
questions about the city that I was really grateful he was accustomed to
eighth graders. Finally, though, I had to come to his rescue. "Kelly, I
think Mr. Hyodo came to Yellowstone to get away from teaching for a
while. Let's give the man a break."

"Okay," he said, but the disappointment was obvious in his eyes. "'Bye,
Mr. Hyodo. Thanks for answering my questions. Maybe I'll see you in Seattle
some day."

"It was nice to meet you, Kelly. You too, Art." Yes, we had gotten a chance
to exchange first names. And we were on our way.

The brief exchange had pushed Kelly's buttons. For the first time since I
had met him, he began to annoy me. "Portland isn't very far from Seattle,
is it Uncle Art? Do you think we could go up there and visit Freddie? Oh,
wait, I don't even know his address. Do you think we could look them up on
the phone book?" And so endlessly on and on. After his unbroken line of
chatter had dragged on for half an hour -- on sober reflection, it was
probably five minutes at most -- it finally began to get on my nerves.

"Kelly, just put a sock in it for a while, will you?" I said with obvious
irritation. He drew in a short, sharp breath and his body twitched as it
might from a good jolt of static electricity. I knew I had over reacted,
but I was plain pissed off and too stubborn to admit that I had done
anything wrong. So much for the compassionate and empathetic
Mr. Lowell. When I was in college and would occasionally get like this, my
roommate Steve would warn people by saying, "Look out, Art's got a wild
hair up his ass today." It was a long time before I learned that a "wild
hair" was an old expression for an ingrown hair, which usually festered and
became painful. Only it was usually I who was the pain in the ass.

I pulled into the parking area for our first major stop, the series of
waterfalls known as the Virginia Cascade. I knew I was going to ruin this
day for both of us if I didn't stop acting like a middle school student
myself. Perhaps I really was getting too old to be a father to Kelly. Or
maybe -- no, not maybe. I grinned inwardly with the sudden realization. If
I grinned outwardly, Kelly would think I was laughing at him. I knew what
was wrong. I spent nine months of every year in the company of
teenagers. Summer was the time when I took a break from them. But not this
year. Kelly had broken my summer respite. Well, tough, Art. I hear things
are tough on the East coast too. Get a grip. Just as in math, you can't
solve a problem until you understand it.

Finally I took a deep breath, let it out, and turned to face Kelly. He was
huddled against the passenger side door, as if he were afraid of me. God, I
can be such an asshole sometimes. But before I could say anything, Kelly
spoke up. "I'm sorry, Uncle Art." This from a child who had always had to
take the blame for everything. I wanted to cry, but that would only
complicate things further.

"You don't have anything to apologize for, Kelly," I said. "Of course you
got excited when you thought about your friend Freddie and Seattle. You
were just showing how much you care about your friend. I'm the one who
messed up. Now I've already broken my promise to you, haven't I?"

"What promise?"

"I promised you that I would never turn you away. But I just did. I mean, I
didn't send you away, but I shut you out, and for no good reason." I
stopped and took another deep breath. "I am not a perfect person, Kelly. I
make mistakes, just like everybody else, sometimes even more. I screwed up
bad this time. You deserve better than that. I don't have any excuse. So I
can only ask, will you forgive me?"

I thought I had understood how fragile Kelly was when I saw him cowering
away from me. But now I saw it even more clearly. My anger did not bring
him to tears, but my request for forgiveness did. He threw himself into my
arms and hugged me more tightly than he ever had. Tears were coursing down
his cheeks, but there were none of the wrenching sobs of yesterday. I
realized that these were tears of happiness. I doubted that anyone had ever
apologized to him for anything.

I had never met a boy of fourteen for whom tears were so close to the
surface. His emotional growth had really been stunted by the abuse heaped
on him from the others in his house. He was in many ways still a little
boy. No, that was wrong. When it came to handling abuse and pain, Kelly was
more of a man that most of us. It was love that still threw him for a
loop. But he would learn. I would be damned before I would refuse to help
him learn to handle love.

The tears stopped as easily as they had begun. Kelly whispered, "I love
you, Uncle Art," and I murmured my love for him, and we set out, again hand
in hand, on the short hike to the Virginia Cascade. As we walked I
wondered, not for the first time, what Kelly saw in me. I could not
possibly be physically attractive to him. I was in my late middle age, I
was balding, I had gained too much weight -- although I did not hang over
my belt and when I looked down at myself in the shower my dick did not have
to be hard for me to see it. I would think that from Kelly's perspective, I
would look simply old and fat. But then it occurred to me that I was the
one placing the importance on physical appearance. I didn't have to look
good for Kelly to love me. If he were looking for physical attraction, for
romance, for pheromone-based arousal, he would look to boys his own age,
and perhaps girls too. After all, there was Freddie.

It was at that point that I came to fully appreciate how much I despised
the child molesters, who deliberately manipulated the tender feelings of a
youngster for their own gratification. Find an emotionally needy boy, and
instead of meeting his needs, convince him that he would be really special
if he would do special things, secret things. Always link acceptance and
affection with sexuality, tease him with touches you knew would be
pleasurable without unduly alarming him, maneuver him into asking for more
so that he would feel responsible, they get as much sexual pleasure as you
could from him before he grew too old or you tired of him and you abandoned
him, leaving him with nothing but guilt and shame, and with his need for
love still unmet. What could he do when you were through with him? Where
could he go? I knew in my heart that I would never touch another boy this
way. This was simply one of those singular things that sometimes happen, an
unlikely and implausible meeting of two people whose life experiences and a
large dose of blind chance had brought them together, brought them to the
point where they made a connection that was beyond reason, beyond
explanation.

I pulled Kelly slightly closer to me as we walked. I could not express my
feelings at that moment.

The trip smoothed out after that. We talked about everything, and
nothing. I told him about Portland, the green trees, the rain, the towering
presence of Mount Hood, the park that marked where Lewis and Clark had
camped at the end of their westward journey. I told him what I could about
Seattle from the few times I had been there. He told me about school and
the one or two teachers who had actually bothered to see him as a person
rather than as a teenager, and about Freddie, whom it seemed he did truly
love.

Somewhere in the recesses of my mind ideas were beginning to shape
themselves into a pattern. When I wrote papers in college, I always tried
to get all the research done at least a week before the paper was due. Then
I would simply ignore the paper for several days and work on other
things. When I came back to the topic, I was usually able to write the
paper in a single draft. It seemed that my best problem-solving went on
when I was not consciously aware of it. So I did not try very hard to get
hold of the threads of this elusive thought.

By late morning we were at Mammoth Hot Springs, just in time to watch a
herd of elk come wandering right through the center of the village. One cow
elk lay with her spindly-legged calf on a small grassy traffic island in
the middle of the street, contentedly chewing her cud. Kelly was enthralled
with the magnificent beasts. Suddenly he said, "Uncle Art, he's going to
get hurt!" He was pointing toward a boy about five years old whose father
was urging him to get closer to one of the animals. I was astonished at the
level of stupidity exhibited by this man. Fortunately, four park rangers in
their dark green uniforms began moving quickly around the outskirts of the
herd, ordering the tourists to keep their distance.

One of the rangers, undoubtedly a college student but looking even younger,
happened to catch my eye. She read my thoughts on my face. As she passed
close to me, she said quietly, "Some people don't have the sense God gave a
goose." A farm girl, I presumed. She would not have learned that expression
from contemporary culture.

I complimented Kelly on his good judgment. "I was about to tell you to go
rescue the kid," I said, and he beamed with pride. I did know a better and
safer way to possibly get close to the animals. Kelly and I simply sat down
on the grass, cross-legged, quietly talking, but I kept my camera at the
ready. The mob of tourists moved on at the urging of the rangers, but the
young lady I had seen earlier simply passed us by. Instead of pursuing the
animals, we waited to see if they would accept our presence.

There was no buck present, so we did not have to worry about antlers. In
less than five minutes, one of the cows was approaching us as she browsed
the already close-cropped grass. Kelly's eyes shone with excitement as he
watched her come ever closer. Seen from close up, there was something
magnificent and thrilling about an untamed animal. There seemed to be an
energy in her that was not found in a milk cow. She also seemed much larger
than she had from a distance. Soon her head was less than a foot from
Kelly's body, and then she did something extraordinary. She raised her head
and sniffed at Kelly's arm and shoulder, leaving a tiny damp spot behind
where her wet nose touched the sleeve of his T-shirt. Then the returned her
attention to the grass, and within two minutes she was grazing slowly away
from us along a path known only to her.

Kelly lay back on the grass and flung out his arms. "Oh, Uncle Art , that
was... that was... that was incredible! She was right beside me! She
touched my arm with her nose!"

"And you know what else?"

"What else?"

"I got pictures!" I said, waving the camera in front of his eyes. He had
been so intent on the elk that he had not noticed me snapping away. In my
condominium there still hangs an 8x10 enlargement of a bright-eyed Kelly
Grayson being checked out by a wild elk. Kelly had known instinctively that
these were not domestic animals, even though they were accustomed to human
presence. If that young boy we had seen earlier had gotten close to one of
the young, he would have been torn apart by the sharp hooves of a mother
elk defending her young.

We had salads for lunch, in spite of Kelly's protests about turning into a
rabbit. Strips of frozen turkey meat that had thawed overnight in the
refrigerator, lots of shredded cheddar, and a good thousand island dressing
made the rabbit food acceptable even to Kelly. While we were eating, Kelly
broached a question that surely was in the backs of both of our minds.

"What's going to happen to me?" he asked.

"What do you mean, Kelly?"

"I mean, where am I going to go? What I really mean, is..." He looked away,
then he actually blushed. Then he looked me squarely in the eyes. "Are you
going to be my dad now? Am I going to live with you?"

I had hoped this question would wait a while, but that was wishful
thinking. Kelly was still a runaway. Technically, I suppose, I was a
kidnapper. Sooner or later, we had to face this. It was going to have to be
sooner. Unfortunately, I had no real answer to give him.

"I'm going to give it to you straight, Kelly. I love you so much, and we
get along so well, that I think it would be great if you could live with
me. But he reality is," and I gave him all the reasons why no social
services agency would approve his living with me. "I have no idea what
we're going to do. You can stay with me until we figure something out. One
thing I know for sure, you're not going back to Casper, and I'm going to
try my damndest to keep you out of the foster care system. How I'm going to
do that I don't know. For right now, as long as we're together, we're going
to make the most of it. I'm going to ask you trust me, even though right
now I really don't know what the hell we're going to do."

His eyes said that he still had a hundred questions. But if there was one
thing at which Kelly had lots of practice, it was accepting his fate. And
speaking of which, at that moment, fate did intervene.

"You wanna play some Frisbee?" came a voice out of nowhere. A boy of about
twelve had wandered over from the picnic table next door, where his parents
sat enjoying the last of their lunch.

"Can I, Dad?" Kelly asked, once more adjusting the nature of our
relationship to the situation that presented itself.

While the boys occupied themselves on the grass, I cleaned up the remnants
of our lunch and headed back to the pickup to get my cell phone. The first
call I made was to the school district offices in Casper, where I
introduced myself as Reverend Foster.

Half an hour later we were in the visitor center, where I learned from the
displays that I had been wrong on our first day about the rim of the
caldera. That ran through Sedge Bay at the east end of Yellowstone Lake,
not across Sylvan Pass. Oh, well. Next it was off to the grocery store to
stock up on a few groceries. I asked Kelly what he wanted for dinner.

"Cheeseburgers."

"We had cheeseburgers last night."

"But I like cheeseburgers." How could I argue with that?

There weren't as many spectacular sights on the northern loop. We did take
another ride on rented bicycles, we drove the scenic one-way Blacktail
Plateau Drive, admired the huge petrified tree, and stopped a while at
Tower Falls. From there, we had to make a direct run back to Canyon for
dinner. As for the sights we bypassed, there was no reason why we couldn't
spend a third day in the park.

"Have you seen the ketchup?" I asked while the burgers were frying.

"The what?"

"The red ketchup dispenser from the refrigerator."

Kelly had an odd look that I couldn't interpret. He just shrugged his
shoulders. I didn't worry too much about it because there was a new bottle
in the cupboard, and the red squeeze bottle with the white dispenser top
shaped like a Monopoly game piece had been nearly empty. Still, it seemed
strange.

We were no sooner finished with our burgers than Kelly was off to the
bathroom with his back pack. I puttered around, washing the dishes and
straightening up the camper. Kelly was gone a long time. I wondered if he
was taking a shower, and contemplated for a moment what he might be doing
with the soap besides washing himself. Adjustments to a very private part
of my anatomy became necessary.

When Kelly returned, his hair was still damp, proving that he had indeed
showered. He wasted no time. "Aren't you going to take a shower, Uncle
Art?" he asked. "We need to go to bed."

Something was definitely up. In fact, I could see it at the front of the
sweats we had bought for him back at Old Faithful. I took him up on his
suggestion. I studiously avoided paying much attention to any particular
part of my body while I was in the shower, even though I had not had any
release since before I met Kelly.

By the time I returned to the camper, Kelly had already climbed into
bed. It was not yet dark. When I crawled in beside him, I discovered that
he was quite naked. The touch of his skin against mine produced a tingle
all over my body, like a mild electrical current, as every hair follicle on
my arms and legs became erect. Farther down, a much more noticeable
erection was soon in evidence.

The closest Kelly had come to being sexually aggressive was in the raft out
on Yellowstone Lake. But tonight, from the moment I lay down he was almost
desperate in the way he clung to me, pressing his lips against mine, and
now his tongue was alive, seeking, probing for an opening. This time I
responded fully and without reservation, my tongue seeking the inner
recesses of his mouth, still sweet with the minty aftertaste of
toothpaste. Our tongues entwined, slid over each other, then pulled back
again so that our lips could gain maximum contact. Our lips were not
passive but were moving, nibbling, pressing, rubbing, then opening again so
that our kisses were full, open-mouthed, passionate. The pleasure was so
exquisite that we sought even fuller contact. My hands were stroking down
his smooth back, cupping the firm roundness of his lower cheeks, then
sliding back up his sides where I could feel each rib, then beginning the
journey again from the top. His hands slid down my arms to the wrist as I
stretched downward, then back up the insides of my forearms, my elbows, my
upper arms, up to the pits where he twisted his fingers gently through the
hair that grew there. He had squirmed his way up on top of me and we lay
chest to chest, his legs circling around my hips. I felt his hard boyhood
moving against my abdomen. Then his body began to shift almost
imperceptibly downward until suddenly the tip of my raging erection pressed
into the juncture of his thighs and my body simply froze.

"No, Kelly, we can't," I gasped.

He raised his head and said, "Yes, we can." He reached one hand above my
head, then gave me a wicked grin and showed me his prize. In his hand was a
blue-green plastic bottle just about the size and shape of his erection and
mine. He pressed on the white cap and began to squeeze the thick liquid
Aqua Lube into his other hand.

"Where did you get that?" I asked in amazement.

"I found it in the drawer," he said. "I'll bet I know why you have it here,
you horny old man." Good guess, Kel. As he spoke his hands never
stopped. He was reaching down, down until I felt his hand slathering the
liquid over my penis, and my knees jerked as his touch nearly sent me
crashing over the edge into climax. But he moved his hand away from me,
drawing it up through crevice at his rear, then bringing it up to receive
yet another dollop of the lubricant.

"Kelly, you can't do this," I protested. "This is what Jason used to do to
you. I can't make you go through that again."

"Shut up, Uncle Art," he said, not unkindly. "What Jason did was awful
because he hated me, and I hated him. I hated myself when I started to like
it. I didn't want him in me, but I couldn't stop myself from liking it. I
used to go away to that other place then, too, so I wouldn't like it too
much. Don't you see? I liked it, but I never wanted it.. This is the first
time I've ever been able to do this because I wanted to."

"No, please, Kelly, don't..."

"Listen to me," he said, and it was if our roles had been reversed. He was
lecturing me, the way an adult might lecture a child, but his hand did not
pause in its path between my hardness and his rear opening. "You said
yourself you don't know what is going to happen. No matter what happens, I
want to know that I had at least one chance to do this for love. I want to
know what it's like to want it and love it at the same time. Please, Uncle
Art, let me do this."

And then he was pressing down and back again, relentlessly pressing his
puckered hole against my unyielding hardness. Then, like a flower opening
to the sun, his body began to open up to me and I could feel the warmth of
him forcing my foreskin back, and my sensitive glans began to slowly enter
him. Then like the shifting of a kaleidoscope, the pattern of my
understanding changed. It was if I could see it from his standpoint. Of
everything that was happening, nothing was new for him except the love we
shared. He had been violated so often that he had become expert at relaxing
himself against Jason's assaults in order to minimize the pain, but he had
never accepted the pleasure. Now, for the first time, he was allowing
himself to experience desire. I stopped resisting. I heard him grunt as the
head passed beyond his abused sphincter; then he continued to slide slowly
down until he could go no farther. He stopped and gave a great sigh
of... what? Contentment? Surely that, and even more.

"Oh, Uncle Art," he said, "I can't tell you how good it feels to have you
inside me. I want you there, more than anything."

"Oh God, Kelly, that's the best I've ever felt." I could find nothing to
compare this to except perhaps my first wedding night. Every square
millimeter of my now-throbbing member was touching the walls of his inner
passage. It was warm; no, more than just warm, it was hot, and even without
movement I could feel my excitement rising. Slowly, Kelly began to move his
body forward, then back again. I took a long, shuddering breath with each
forward stroke, then let it out again with a small groan when he pressed
back.

Gradually the speed of his strokes began to increase. I began lifting my
hips to meet him each time he moved toward me. My hands were frantic now,
wanting to touch the whole surface of his skin at one time. Kelly was
grunting again on each down stroke. I could feel the muscles of his abdomen
clench and release, clench and release as my hips did half the work. The
intensity of our feeling for one another was so strong that this was not
going to take long for either of us. The warm, burning sensation in my
groin began to grow, and suddenly orgasm was upon me. My body went rigid at
the top of an up stroke and I felt the exquisite pleasure begin in my groin
and raidate outward to the ends of my limbs with each pulse as I emptied
myself into his body. I jammed the back of my hand into my mouth and bit
down to keep from crying out and alarming the neighbors.

"Did you cum?" Kelly asked, pausing for only one stroke while my body
continued in the after-tremors of my release.

"Yes."

"Good," he groaned, and he at once began moving again, this time
concentrating on the pressure of his penis against my skin, again grunting
with each stroke, the sound becoming more rapid and intense, until all at
once he raised his upper body, stiff-arming his fists into the
mattress. His head was thrown back and his hips pushed almost savagely
against me. At the moment of his climax he cried out, "I love you!," and I
felt the warmth of his ejaculation pulsing out between our bodies. His body
was rigid, every muscle stretched to its extreme, as he continued to pump
out the copious fluids of his youthful orgasm. Then his elbows gave way and
he collapsed onto my chest, his head narrowly missing a collision with my
chin. We both were panting, sweating, stroking each other, prolonging the
contact and the pleasure. His strokes were firm, as if he understood that
my skin was now hypersensitive and a feathery touch would be too intense.

We began to kiss again, not as hungrily as before, touching and caressing
each other in the afterglow of what might well be the most powerful sexual
experience of my life. Slowly our strokes and our kisses grew lighter, more
tender, as our normal sensibilites began to return. My softening erection
pulled out of him, but Kelly was already there with a towel he had stashed
somewhere on the bed. He really had thought this through. At last we were
still, and now I began to notice the sticky wetness between us. Kelly
proceeded to gently wipe away the evidence of our lovemaking. I was
surprised to see that there was nothing to wipe away but our milky white
semen. I had thought it would be more, well, that it would be messier
somehow.

We decided to shower again. Neither of us was accustomed to this, and
besides both of us had read stories about people waking up stuck together
with dried cum, and whether the stories were true or not, we weren't taking
any chances. The showers were quick, quiet and separate, and by ten o'clock
we were both back in bad, languidly holding each other skin to skin and
communicating with each other with few words and many slow movements and
brief kisses.

Just before he drifted off to sleep, Kelly cleared up one small mystery for
me, though it took at least a full minute for his meaning to
register. "Don't use the ketchup thingy," he said. "You don't know where
it's been."

NEXT: Chapter 11, Flight