Date: Wed, 30 Apr 2014 21:01:15 -0400 (EDT)
From: DJAkeeba@aol.com
Subject: Rick & Taine at the Hop

This was originally going to be part of my recently-completed serial
"Tragedy in the Blood", which can be read here:
http://www.nifty.org/nifty/gay/highschool/tragedy-in-the-blood/

It may not exactly qualify as a stand-alone story, so just consider this
like the "deleted scenes" extras on a DVD.

As usual, this story is about male/male relationships and contains
descriptions of two teenage males in love... or something like it.  You
should not read this story if it is in any way illegal due to your age or
residence.

This is a work of pure fiction. This story is the sole property of its
author and may not be copied in whole or in part or posted on any website
without the permission of the author.

Questions and commentary can be sent to djakeeba@aol.com

Please consider donating to keep Nifty going.  Details at
http://donate.nifty.org/donate.html


------------------------

RICK & TAINE AT THE HOP by Steven H. Davis

We walked quickly down the street, huddling in our winter jackets against
the dry, cutting October wind.  It was crazy being out here in the early
morning frost, but we were hungry and our stomachs were growling more than
our teeth were chattering.  Besides, he had explained before we left, if we
didn't get there early, we'd have to wait for twenty minutes as endless
groups of Mexican families were seated before us.

"Dad told me we moved here because it was warm," he said, his slender arms
crossed against his chest.  "He didn't tell me that dry cold was worse."

I could only nod, my teeth clenched against the frigid gusts, my eyes
narrowed as if avoiding an incipient freeze.  I had lived up North for many
years myself, and there was something about Texas winter which just felt
colder, even though we hadn't seen a flake of snow in the four years since
I had moved to San Antonio.  The chill had set in early this year, however,
and it meant serious business.

"We're almost there," I said, reassuring myself as much as him.

He lowered his head, as did I, and we continued our march up Walzem Road.

My mind took me back to an hour before, when I had awakened with a start,
my sleep-hazy mind confused for a brief moment about finding myself in an
unfamiliar bed.  I was wrapped around him, and the comforting scent of
strawberry shampoo from his hair, the warmth of his body and the down
comforters surrounding us put me immediately at ease.

He was still deep in slumber, impossibly cute, dressed in matching black
fleece sweatshirt and sweatpants, and I wrapped my flannel-clad arms
tighter around him, nuzzling into his warm, sleepy neck.  He stirred a bit
at the contact, digging his face contentedly into the pillows and pressing
his back against me.

This has to be Heaven, I thought, drawing my knees up tighter as we curled
together in fetal positions, spooning close against the rising sun
streaming through the bedroom window.  I closed my eyes tightly to prolong
the moment, inhaling strawberry and his sweet, comforting scent.

It had been our first sleepover, and we had played video games and talked
long into the night before bedding down in happy contentment.  I think both
of us were asleep the moment our heads hit the pillows, and all I wanted
was to stay that way forever, hugging him close and hovering in the warm,
fuzzy pleasure of that place between waking and dreaming.

He yawned then, his mouth opening impossibly wide before closing into a
peaceful smile, and I suppressed a giggle before his yawn became
contagious, sneaking up on me before I knew it was coming.  I shook my head
slightly as the yawn traveled through me, then cuddled closer to my new
best friend as it left.  I was sure he was still asleep, but then I heard
him mumble something into the pillow.

"Mm-hpp," is what it sounded like.

I opened my eyes fully, puzzled but happy.  I softly kissed the back of his
neck and he emitted a contented sound into the pillow, then repeated his
previous mumble, slightly louder.

"Mm-hpp!"

"Hmmm?" I asked, moving my head over his so as to hear him better.

"I-HOP!"  he said, lifting his lips from the pillow.  "IHOP."

He rolled onto his back and opened his eyes, the sun's rays backlighting
the irises a brilliant emerald green.  Awake only a few seconds, he already
had that mischievous glint in his eyes and slight smirk which told me that
his insistent tone was playful rather than demanding.  Which is not to say
that it wasn't demanding, exactly, just that he was being playful about it.

I traced a finger lazily down the warm fleece covering his back as he
curled into me, his palms flat against my flannel-clad chest and his eyes
focused intently on mine.

"IHOP," he whispered.

I couldn't help but laugh, pulling him into a fierce hug.  I loved him so
much at that moment that I thought my heart would burst, and I knew then
that I would kill or die for this wonderful boy, that I would do anything
in my power to make him happy.  Yes, even if it meant pulling off the
covers and getting out of bed.

"Mm-hpp!" he said into my chest, the rumble from his lips traveling up
through my neck with a slight tickle.  Then his body relaxed for a moment
and he let himself be hugged, kissed and adored, wrapping his arms around
me and pulling me close.  I don't think I had ever been as comfortable or
happy in my life as I was at that exact moment, and as much as I wanted to
do anything I could to please the cuddly, fleece-covered angel in my arms,
I didn't want the moment to ever end.

"Just a few more minutes?" I pleaded with a pout.

He came fully awake then and pushed me onto my back, straddling me and
holding my arms above my head onto the mattress.  This sudden motion
disturbed the covers, breaking our sleep-seal of warmth, letting in the
cooler air of the room and bringing me fully into the new day.  He shook me
a few times, causing me to break out in giggles.

"Now!  Now!  NOW!" he chanted.  "If we don't go right NOW, we'll be stuck
behind Papa Chupacabra and his brood for twenty minutes!"

"Okay," I relented with a sleepy sigh, smiling up at him.  "Get off me, and
let me take a shower."

He pounced happily from the bed, and I followed, and before too long, well,
here we were, the bitter Texas wind whipping at our thin, inadequately
bundled bodies as we crossed the vast expanse of the IHOP parking lot
toward our destination.

Taine ran ahead, whipping open the door of the restaurant, and I hurried
inside after him, shivering as the super-heated air from inside hit my cold
body.  We were early enough that there were only a few tables of diners,
and my eyes settled on one Mexican family, five children staggered roughly
a year apart between the ages of four and nine.  There was a large Mamacita
in an ill-fitting pink frock, and the head of the family was even larger,
his knit striped shirt stretching obscenely over an enormous belly.

I nodded in their direction and whispered to Taine, "Papa Chupacabra?"

Taine grinned, then turned toward the approaching hostess.

"Can we have David's section?" he asked.  This request was
uncharacteristically bold for Taine, as his shyness usually let me handle
most interactions with retail and service personnel, but we had come here
enough that he felt comfortable, and I had learned that this was rare for
him in public places.  This place should be honored, I thought.

The hostess smiled and led us over to one of David's tables.  He was our
regular waiter, and treated us like gold.  I had a suspicion that the
young, handsome Hispanic kid was so nice to us because he had eyes for
Taine, but he was never anything other than polite and respectful, so I
held my natural jealousy in check.

We didn't have to wait long before David arrived, but it was long enough
for us to warm up a little and for me to study the menu and decide what to
order.  Taine didn't need to look, as he had a favorite item, the reason we
always came to IHOP rather than Denny's or Colco's.

Well, the reason we didn't go to Colco's had more to do with Taine's first
meal there, where he found a hair in his food and was so disgusted that he
refused to ever return.  I teased him about it once, staging a fake tantrum
because he didn't want to eat there, but I found that he took me seriously,
thinking me to be a big fan of the cruddy, soon-to-close greasy-spoon, so I
didn't do it again.

David showed up with a big smile on his face, an iced tea for me and an
orange juice for Taine already in his hands.  Usually, the hostess would
have taken our drink orders, but David knew us well by then, and insisted
on giving us full service.

"Good morning, guys, great to see you!"  he said enthusiastically, although
I noticed that he only glanced at me and let his gaze linger on Taine's
beautiful face.  I suppressed a snicker, knowing that David took inordinate
pride in remembering Taine's favorite dish.

"Chocolate-chip pancakes?"

Taine nodded, smiling, and David nodded back warmly before reluctantly
turning his attention to me, order pad at the ready.  My orders were
usually quite specific, but tended to vary, unlike Taine's.  That day I
chose three eggs, sunny-side up, with bacon, sausage, hash browns and an
order of sourdough toast.  David took it all down, gave Taine a last smile,
grabbed our menus and rushed to put in the order.  I could swear that he
was blushing as he left our table.

Taine looked over at the table set-up, a frown appearing as he saw the
syrup caddy.  There were two maples and a blueberry, and his eyes widened
in concern.

"Don't worry," I grinned.  "You won't even have to ask."

Sure enough, David came by our table a couple of minutes later with a fresh
dispenser full of strawberry syrup, which he semi-ostentatiously swapped
out for one of the maples before rushing off again.  This time, I was sure
he was blushing.

"He's really good," Taine said.

"Yeah, he likes us," I replied, although I was sure that I would still have
to ask for extra butter for my toast.  It was best not to bring this to
Taine's attention, I knew, because he still got weird about stuff like
that.  His youthful naivete was incredibly cute and charming, and I wanted
to protect it, for no other reason than that I found it so adorable.

Taine was staring over my shoulder, and then his eyes widened and he turned
his head inward, looking down at a spot on the seat toward the wall as if
he was trying to hide.  Indeed, he seemed to draw in on himself and visibly
shrink toward the inside of the booth across from me.

I was momentarily puzzled by his sudden withdrawal, and slowly turned to
look over my shoulder at what might have provoked this reaction.  I
couldn't see anything strange, but then the realization dawned on me.
There were three Mexican girls, who looked to be our age or a year or two
younger, walking with a hostess toward us.

They all wore identically tight shirts, and one of them -- wearing hot pink
-- had what Taine would call "a great rack," large, firm breasts straining
at the thin fabric.  As they passed our table, Taine slowly returned to a
normal position, although he still kept his eyes downward.

"The one in pink?" I asked softly.

Taine looked up at me with a bashful smirk.

"She had a great rack," he admitted, fidgeting with his fingers on the
table.

I smiled and shook my head.  Taine had a weakness for great racks, but was
intimidated by the sorts of girls who made those racks as obvious as the
local Mexican girls seemed to.  Open displays of sexuality in general
seemed to push him into a state of paralyzing shyness, and the young crop
of Latinas in our neighborhood were about nothing if not flaunting all of
their God-given assets at all times.

That thought reminded me of Carmelita, a girl at our school whose hot pants
and belly shirts pushed the Polk High dress code to its limits, despite the
fact that her particular belly bore all of the tell-tale stretch scars
which marked her as a teen mother.  I had asked my Mexican friend Dion
about it one day, and received an illuminating answer.

"That's not for you," Dion had told me.  "They do that for Mexican men.
We're all about babies and fertility and having a shitload of kids.  It's
gross to you, I know.  Me too, because I was born here.  But when real
Mexicans see those *tetas,* that belly, and those stretch-marks, they think
'That's the mother of my children,' and they gotta get with her."

I had nodded sagely, but was internally marveling about how two cultures,
smashed together side by side as they were in heavily Hispanic South Texas,
could have such different mindsets and such different attractions.  Then
again, I had different attractions myself, and Dion had picked up on that
as well, although he had no inclinations in that direction whatsoever.  It
didn't bother him at all, and we remained friends throughout our lives,
well into our forties, when he and I commisserated over our impending
divorces together by telephone after he had become a career military man
and I was running a nightclub in Washington, DC.

David arrived with our food, and I was amused to see that he had drawn a
whipped-cream smiley face on Taine's chocolate-chip pancakes.  I was
further amused -- and pleasantly surprised -- when he set down a ramekin
full of extra butter next to my toast.  He must have caught my surprise,
because he gave me a quick wink as he walked away.  He was a clever one,
I'd give him that.

"Do you ever wonder what we're doing?" Taine asked suddenly.

"What do you mean?  We're eating breakfast."

Taine drizzled the reddish syrup on his pancakes, and the whipped-cream
smiley face seemed to me to have just been in a horrible accident.  I
flashed on the boy in the truck that had T-boned us in Sly's car, then
pushed the image from my mind and concentrated on what Taine was trying to
say.

"That's not what I mean," he said, and I could feel the frustration in his
voice.  "I mean in general.  What is this?"

I looked at him across the table, thinking.  I knew this was an important
question, the most important question that Taine had ever asked me, and I
wanted to give him an honest answer, but I had to phrase it carefully.  As
much as I loved him, and thought I knew him, I also knew that there was a
potential minefield here.  I flashed on one of those 15th century
navigational maps of the oceans, with the carefully-lettered warning: Here
there be dragons.

"We're best friends," I said at last.  "We're two very different people
with different stories, different backgrounds and different lives who are
still somehow the same deep down, whose souls connected and found each
other past all those differences.  Like two puzzle pieces that fit
together, that work together.  That belong together."

Taine took this in, then locked eyes with me, and I could see something
unsettled there.

"But," he said with a sigh, "I'm not..."

"Taine, who cares?  I don't care what you call anything.  I really, really
don't.  Do you really think I do?  Why should we call this anything?  We're
best friends, and that's all anybody needs to know about us."

He looked pained.  "But what does that mean?"

"What that means to us stays between us," I replied.  "I can go see *Rocky
Horror* and you can stare at Mexican girls' racks, because that's who we
are.  Nothing between us changes that, and it doesn't mean that we need to
walk down the hallway at school holding hands and singing 'We Are
Family'... because we're not part of that family.  I'm not a part of that
any more than you are.  What we have together is special and unique to us,
and doesn't concern anyone else on this whole planet but us.  Okay?"

Taine chewed his pancake, took a small sip of orange juice, and nodded his
head slowly, but reticently.  I finally understood what had been bothering
him.  It wasn't me he was scared of, or even the way we felt about each
other.  It never had been.  He was scared of what he thought my
expectations of him might be.  That I might expect him to go public, to
embrace an entire lifestyle, to label himself in a way which he could never
reconcile.

And that wasn't even scaring him that much, I realized.  What scared him
was that I would be disappointed and would abandon him in anger and
resentment when he couldn't be what (he thought) I expected him to be.

"I am not interested in being a word," I said.  "I am not interested in
being a symbol, or a lifestyle, or a philosophy.  I am interested in
sharing myself -- my specific, individual self, Rick Spivey -- with you.
Your specific, individual self.  Taine Maxwell.  And my only want, the only
thing about this that I want, is for you, Taine Maxwell, to share your
specific, individual self with me.  That's all.  Good and bad, happy and
sad, fears and hopes and dreams and private secrets.  But just you and me.
And if we both do that, and just that, then neither one of us will be
disappointed or pressured or feel uncomfortable."

Taine was silent for some time, digesting all of this.

"You live too loud," he said.

"I know.  I'm very sociable and gregarious and open and loud, and you're
very shy and private and internal and quiet.  I get that, and I don't
expect you to change any of yourself unless you want to, and I know that
you don't expect me to change either.  And I'm not going to make you do
anything.  You can leave your hat on in public.  Just take it off with me.
And you know what?  I'll wear a hat in public too if you like.  I don't
care.  All I want is to be with you.  My best friend."

Taine gave an almost imperceptible nod and returned to his meal.  I
gestured to David to refill my iced tea, and proceeded to dump four packets
of sugar into it.  Taine watched this process and grinned.

"I don't know why you do that," he said.  "Most of it goes on the bottom
and doesn't even dissolve.  You know, one packet of sweetener is as good as
all four of those, and it doesn't sit at the bottom."

"I know," I smiled.  "You tell me that every time we come here.  I don't
like the taste of sweetener.  Besides, I like the sugar at the bottom when
I finish."

Taine shook his head, smirking.  "Yeah, I don't expect you to change
either.  My best friend."

We paid our bill and went back out into the cold, dry, slicing Texas wind,
which still howled through the streets like a frigid banshee.  But I think
we both felt a lot warmer inside.

---------------------------

Thank you for reading "Rick and Taine at the Hop."

Once again, I'm always happy to hear from readers at DJAkeeba@aol.com.  You
have all been so supportive and encouraging, and I really appreciate all
your e-mails.

If you have enjoyed this story and others on Nifty, please consider making
a donation to the site.  Details at http://donate.nifty.org/donate.html