Date: Thu, 14 Feb 2002 00:09:59 EST
From: Tommyhawk1@aol.com
Subject: For a Starry Night

			    FOR A STARRY NIGHT
			   By Tommyhawk1@AOL.COM
		      WWW.TOMMYHAWKSFANTASYWORLD.COM

     I saw Brent "Bull" Chadwick in the hallway as I exited algebra class
just two weeks before the end of our senior year. He was with some of his
football friends, and when he glanced my way, I gave him the signal,
outstretched hand over my head, then the hand-signal for seven. He nodded
and turned away again. I gave a longing glance at those buttocks of his,
wide, horizontally oval lumps jammed into his blue jeans, wide but firm as
bowling balls. He moved and his letterman jacket, yellow with green trim,
the school colors, dove down to cover his butt again and I shook myself and
went on to my physics class. Bull took off with his friends to Bonehead
English and that was the last time I saw him that day.
     But when I made it out the back door of my house that evening just at
seven o'clock, a thick blanket draped over one arm, he was waiting in the
alley with his car. An older model faded-blue Chevrolet sedan, it was a
rather sedate-looking vehicle, but hell, owning any kind of car is cool
when you're in high school. His dad had bought a new car and turned this
one over to him and his friends in the auto shop class kept it in top
running order.
     I tossed the blanket into the back, slid into the passenger seat and
he turned his head to me, his blonde hair the color of sand in the dim
light of the back alley. His face was solid and a little pugnacious
looking, his eyes clear blue. I ran my own hands through my black mop and
cleared my throat. "Ready to see what we have for tonight?"
     "You bet, buddy." he grinned, and gunned it for our special place.
     This wasn't what you're thinking. Bull and I were going out to look at
the stars again. It had all started when I found him in the library one
Sunday morning, back in a little-used corner. He had out a book on
astronomy and was looking over it. I walked over and he didn't notice me,
poring over a picture of the North American nebula. I looked closer to see
just what he was reading, and my shadow moved on the book and he looked up.
     "Oh, hi, Theo." he said to me, closing the book with a slam and
shoving it under his jacket lying on the table.
     "Hi, Bull." I said. "Reading about the stars?"
     He had the baffled look of a man debating with himself, then said,
"Yeah. I was. So what?"
     "Well, Bull, that's nothing to be ashamed of." I said. "I like reading
about the stars too."
     "Yeah, but you're..." he ended the sentence there.
     "...a brainiac?" I finished for him.
     "The guys would think it was weird." he declared.
     "Well, I'm not going to tell them." I said positively. I had no
friends on the football team, no surprise given the typical
jock-versus-geek pecking order any school has.
     "You'd better not." he warned me. Silence, and I started to turn away
and he said, "Uh, Theo?"
     "Yeah, Bull?" I turned back.
     "You know about this junk, don't you?"
     "Yes." I said.
     "I...I was wondering how the Earth got started. I mean, I'd read that
stars are just hydrogen and helium, those tiny, really light gases, right?"
     "Yes." I said.
     "But the book said that the Earth is made up of old stars that died a
long time ago. But how can that be if they're just those light gases? And
the book doesn't tell me, not that I can understand."
     It was hardly the kind of question you expect from a not-too-bright
football jock. I sat down and said, "I can explain it, but it'll take some
time."
     "Okay." he said. "But I got to meet the guys in an hour."
     "It won't take that long." I assured him. "Now, let's go back to that
picture you have of the North American nebula...."
     And that's how our odd, clandestine friendship began. I was surprised
to find myself learning from Bull, he had the knack for asking the kind of
question you don't think much about when you study a subject. Like his
question about the Earth. They sort of announce it in the astronomy books
like it's obvious, and then pass on. To answer him, I had to go into just
what happens inside a star, how the helium becomes heavier elements that
press down into even heavier, until a star is a core of iron and heavier
metals at its core, which then explodes out to float around in chunks and
even independent particles that are caught up once again in coalescing
whirlpools.... It was funny, but telling him about it made it clearer to
me!
     We started meeting every Sunday morning in the library, that same,
out-of-the-way corner. I'd get there and he'd always be waiting for me, and
his face would light up when he saw me. It was almost like...well, okay, my
crush on him started pretty early on. Not that I had the courage to do
anything about it.
     We kept it up during our sophomore and junior years, and by then, we
had taken to going out and watching the stars at night. I'd pick some
astronomical event and tell Bull (that was when we came up with the
hand-signs I described) and he'd come pick me up in that old car (his dad
had given it to him on his sixteenth birthday and he'd passed his driving
test the same day) and we'd go out to a spot outside of town where the
lights were all way off the horizon and park on a little hill there and get
out and sit on the hood of his car and look up and your entire vision was
of the stars. Again I learned the stars by talking to Bull, changing those
lines and dots in the astronomy book to actual lights in the sky.
     This night, not too long before our graduation, we were there to watch
a conjunction of Mars and Jupiter. Mars was a bright red light in the sky,
being just before its full phase and at its closet approach to Earth, a
mere fifty million miles away, and Jupiter was just above it, also nearly
full phase, making a light big enough that, had it been a star, it would
have had a name like Arcturus or Canopus. Orion was over in the western
half of the sky, nearby, so Sirius and Procyon, Orion's hunting dogs, were
also not too far away, with Orion's own Betelgeuse and Rigel were there
with the three stars that made up Orion's belt. The moon was just two days
past the full moon, and gave the world its ghostly light in the eastern
sky. I pointed out Saturn in the line-up as well, though dim and all by
itself not far from the recently-set sun. All in all, a most satisfying
stellar sight to see.
     "I brought some Cokes." Bull said after we'd sat a while. He reached
into his jacket and brought out a Coke and handed it to me. I popped the
red-and-white can and gulped. "Thanks, Bull."
     "I'm going to miss these nights." he said, leaning back on the car's
windshield and lying there, his body washed in silver by the moon. "Going
to miss having someone I can talk to about stuff like this."
     "You'll find lots of people at your college, Bull." I said. "Any
university as large as Alabama State has to have an astronomy
department. Why don't you take some classes in it?"
     "Aw, I can't handle that stuff." he said. "They'd all laugh at me, the
jock straining at a telescope or whatever. You got it better, going off to
UCLA."
     I didn't deny it, but Bull reminded me that we were going to be three
thousand miles apart from now on. "I'll call you sometimes." I said.
     "Sure." Bull said, like he knew I didn't really mean it. I'd be busy,
and money would be tight. High school friends go away and you might meet
them at the 10-year reunion and you might not.
     "We'll make another time like this before we graduate."
     "Maybe." Bull said. "Theo, I just...."
     "What is it, Bull?" I asked him. "Come on, you can tell me. I don't
tell anybody anything, you know that by now."
     "I just want to say, thank you for being my friend."
     "Your secret friend." I reminded him. "Thank you for being my secret
friend, too."
     He grinned at me again. "Yeah." he said.
     He turned up his Coke and drained it with audible gulps and tossed the
can at the row of bushes to our left. His hand came back down carelessly
and landed upside my leg. The back of his hand lay there in contact with my
thigh, and the feel of that was a course of electricity through my body.
     Bull and I had never touched each other before this time. Oh, casual
contacts that life brings on, maybe, but nothing deliberate, not even the
friendly arm around the shoulders. We'd had a friendship of the mind, me
enlightening his small world and finding my own brighter and cleaner in the
process.
     It was as natural as it could be, that moment. Our world, the world of
high school, was coming to an end, and nothing much that could happen in
that world was important any more.
     I put down my own hand and took his in mine. We interlaced our fingers
and clutched tightly. I looked over at Bull, and he was looking at me.
     I had the world's biggest lump in my throat right then, and I choked
getting it down. I'd never wanted Bull more than I wanted him right
then. His hand was in mine, warm and real, firmly gripping my own.
     Bull reached over with his other hand and rested it on my chest. I put
my own over it, squeezed and released it, and my hand, done with the task I
had assigned it, moved on its own mission, and touched Bull's cheek. Soft,
that line of angular jaw, for he hadn't shaved much up until then. The
white down his cheeks produced could be whisked away by a shave a few times
a year. Smooth, clean skin met my fingertips as they moved across that soft
cheek.
     My fingers moved next to Bull's lips and he moved, caught my index
finger and sucked-kissed it as it went by. His hand on my chest arced up to
cross over my breast, cupped it and gave it the barest squeeze, before it
traveled down my ribs and side of my stomach to find my leg, and over onto
my crotch.
     It was all as natural as it could be, as I leaned over Bull to reach
down with my face to meet his, to let our lips find each other and taste
each other. My hand tightened on the back of Bull's neck and pulled him to
me, and suddenly the world became unreal.
     I don't know if I can make you see that night, the moonlight painting
everything with white softness, the clear night of white stars on
blackness, the trees and bushes more blackness around us stroked with white
light here and there. The utter silence of the darkness, the only sounds
those of our breaths as they quickened, the loudest noise was the roaring
in my ears as my blood pounded.
     Bull was so much stronger than me, so much bigger than my rather
slender frame. Why, then, was it me climbing on top of him, reaching down
to take him to me. I only know that my little knee fit between his thick
thighs like it belonged there, and that thick prong in his pants was a
poker of heat pressing against the side of my abdomen, burning me through
the layers of denim and chinos. My hands, my puny, inadequate hands, were
stroking that huge body of his, feeling the massive rib-cage sheathed in
muscle while our lips tried to force us together, into and around each
other all at once.
     His hands (hands, such wonderful hands, strong, warm, yet ineffably
gentle and tender in their motions) encircled my body easily, for I was
lost inside that huge form of his and yet still, he was offering himself to
me in all of this.
     I had to touch that hair of his, which was short and yet always in
disarray, my fingers had to take that task on, to stroke into his tousled
mass and touch him there, feel the silken strands as they danced between my
fingers to lie in orderly ranks at my gentle urgings, only to reform as I
lifted and returned to stroke them again, their soft, thin oil caressing my
palm and marking me with his scent.
     He broke the kiss at last and sighed, "Oh, God, Theo." His hands came
down to clutch my buttocks one in each massive paw, and still, here I was
in charge though he held me pinned utterly in his grasp.
     "Bull...." I said, turning that single word into an elocution of
worship. "Bull...."
     "Nobody ever has to know." he sighed to me. "I won't tell them. You
won't tell them. And I want to. Please."
     Again, his simple words had drawn the situation into crystal
clarity. "You're exactly right." I assured him. "Nobody will ever
know. Tonight...tonight is ours."
     "Yeah." He panted and his lips reached for me again.
     The old car creaked beneath us as we kissed, our bodies locked in the
old struggle. Before we had sought out each other, now we struggled to free
each other of the clothes, of the terrible, confining clothes in that warm
late-spring night, while the stars, our benefactors and source of our
being, shone benevolently down on us.
     Something in me prevented me undressing myself, it was Bull's fingers
who fumbled over my shirt while I tugged at his t-shirt beneath that school
jacket, fighting it upwards while he bared my chest, my thin, inadequate
chest. He got the shirt undone and pushed it off from me, almost angrily
shoving at the recalcitrant cloth, to let the gentle winds of spring touch
my skin at last. I had his shirt up to his neck now, his chest was now
exposed to me and I leaned over to taste that broad expanse of male muscle
while his fingers stroked my back, urging me on, then down to fight the
battle of my chinos. The clasp there was easily undone, the zipper was a
problem but gave way before his intent assault, and his hands reached in
and stroked my warmth, gripping the sliminess and cylinder of heat, and it
wasn't until his grip was firm, when he pulled on it with a regular stroke,
that all these essences resolved themselves into a fact, my cock was in his
hand.
     I rose up, and while he tucked my underwear under my balls, I tugged
those blue jeans of his open by my meager brute force, the thick golden
buttons releasing gladly their hold. No jockstrap impeded the grandeur of
his majesty from rising up and declaring itself to me.
     I gripped that turgid regality in both hands and pulled upwards, and
now the moment reduced itself to a commoner standard, and we were two high
school seniors lying on the hood of a car, our pricks in each other's grip,
and we were yanking each other's puds.
     Just like in summer camp so long ago! I chuckled at the ludicrous
memory, the realization of how juvenile we were acting in that moment, but
it was a warm chuckle and Bull joined me in it easily.
     "Mmm, push them together." he suggested. "Put yours right up against
mine."
     I did and he groaned. "Now yank them both like that. Please!"
     I got a good grip on our combined prongs and I pumped them. He
groaned, threw his head back and held his eyes and mouth wide open. Looking
up at the stars.
     I was looking down at him. He was the stuff of stars, I knew that
intellectually, but now I knew it in my very soul. Once, beyond doubt, the
same molecules in our two bodies had been pressed together in the heart of
an old Population II star, to be thrust together out into the cosmos,
spending milennia side-by-side, and then coming together into this small
world. It was only a short gasp of time ago, a few thousand years at most,
that our bodies had separated and the molecules had wound up in these two
separate bodies. He was more than my brother. Our very bodies belonged
together. He and I were...one!
     The thought of our galactic kinship was too much for me, I groaned and
my hands became a fury on our entwined pricks, and he felt my ecstasy, he
matched me in it, for that was his destiny, to match me forever, and his
cock heated up along with mine, degree for degree, a faint whisper of the
intense heat in which we had been born, and we had our own nova, as our
sperm shot out of our cocks together, at one time, rocketing for the
stratosphere, to be captured and pulled down into the warm morass of his
body beneath mine!
     In the fuzzy world of our orgasm, I was again one with the cosmos, and
he was right there with me, our differences an unimportant thing alongside
the multitude of our similarities, and I watched as the sperm that spurted
from his cock and mine fell together in miniature pearly galaxies on the
universe of his broad chest and rippled stomach.
     Done, I lowered myself down to combine with him again, as the rocks of
the whirlpool had formed the eddies that made the planets, and we were one,
the oceans of our sweat mingled and all was right and proper in the
universe again.
     I don't know how long I lay there atop him, our bodies heaving slower
and slower, until they relaxed into comfortable waves once again, then I
rose up and looked into his eyes, into the group soul that was myself, my
other self, inside of him.
     There were no words to say and I didn't say anything. I could have
lain like that forever, but he, always a little more practical than me,
pushed me up at last. "We'd better get home." he said.
     "Okay." I said.
     On the way home, he said to me, "Theo?"
     "Huh?" I asked.
     "Nothing." he said. "I'm going to miss these nights."
     "Me, too." I said. "Now more than ever. Maybe I can get transferred to
Alabama, or you could come to UCLA."
     "Maybe." He said and didn't say any more.
     "Well, let's at least get together every night for the rest of the
school year, and this summer." I pressed him. "Okay?"
     "Whatever you say, Theo." he said, and I felt then the distance
growing between us. He was being pulled into a different eddy than mine. I
was bound for Mars, he for Venus, and he would whirl along on our
independent orbits.
     "We'll do it." I insisted, but he was silent. I kissed him when we
stopped at my house, secure in the darkness of the shade of the tree in our
yard blocking the streetlights, and he kissed me, and I could just see the
tears in his eyes. I wanted to say so many things, but while my heart was
full, my lips could not form the words. I finally gave a grunt, a shrug,
and said, "Talk to you tomorrow, okay?"
     "Okay." he said. I got out and he drove off.
     I looked for him the next few days, and didn't see him, not with his
friends, not in the classes we shared. Finally, I screwed up my courage and
approached the clump of football jocks that he always hung with. "Hey,
guys!" I said.
     "What is it, Peabody?" one of them sneered.
     "Where's Bull?"
     "Why do you care?" he retorted.
     I couldn't confess the truth. I had promised Bull. "Just wondering.
Haven't seen him for a while. Is he sick?"
     "He's off to Alabama." the guy said. "Got a summer job down there, and
summer football practice. They take the game seriously in that state."
     "He's already gone. But he didn't graduate yet?"
     "He's got enough points for his diploma." the guy said. "He don't need
no 4.0 to play football. Now buzz off, freak."
     I walked away. Bull had known he was leaving. And he hadn't told
me. Now I understood the hesitation on the ride home, and the tears at the
end. And I hadn't said anything.
     Yet Bull's way was best. We ended our friendship in a wonderful way,
without the awkward conversations, the increasing coldness of the times
apart pushing between us. Now, his place in my heart is secure, and it is a
warm place, indeed, that I often take out and look at, and hold close.
     I look at the stars at night still. One day, soon, a mere few billion
years, and our sun will be dead, it's hold on Earth weakening until it
releases it entirely. Then our bodies will once again dance together across
the galaxy, to be born anew.

				  THE END
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		      WWW.TOMMYHAWKSFANTASYWORLD.COM