A Riding Reunion

“When the Ecuadoran minister of tourism interviewed me, he said that no one ever gets attacked by a shark in the Galapagos Islands. He asked me if it couldn’t have been a giant turtle. And I told him I knew a fuckin’ turtle from a shark. He wasn’t pleased with my attitude, but then he wasn’t the one sitting there, dripping blood on a departure lounge floor while waiting to get on a delayed flight to a fuckin’ substandard third world hospital.”

“But you didn’t get a good look at the shark, you said,” Cousin David, Uncle Jim’s son said. “You don’t know what kind of shark it was?”

“It was a shark with big teeth,” Cousin Jack Riding, Uncle John and Aunt Betty’s son, retorted. “It took a bite out of my arm, just here. See? It was a fuckin’ big-toothed shark with a chunk of my arm in its maw.”

“Oo, gross,” Candace, David’s twenty-three-year-old daughter said. It was her younger, hunky husband, Steve, an auto mechanic from right here in Rochester, Indiana, who Cousin Jack was talking directly too. That didn’t surprise me a bit, but Candace didn’t seem to mind. Jack had been paying a lot of attention to Steve today. I guess Candace’s grandfather, Jim, hadn’t told her about Jack, assuming he remembered after all these years or that he ever had known or had wanted to know. I didn’t go around then asking who knew what. I didn’t want any of them to know. Jack had been off in Los Angeles working as a TV producer for so long that those left behind in Indiana probably had forgotten all about his early life--at least I could hope they had.

I certainly hadn’t. But then, I had better reason than any of the others not to forget about Jack’s early life. I certainly didn’t forget those summers we’d spent here at the Riding family home on the shores of Lake Manitou when Jack was twenty-three and I was eighteen. A five-year age gap at that age made my worship of him and complete trust in him and acquiescence to his interests and guidance easy at the time. I was a pushover. Of course, I was already inclined in that direction.

I tried not to look at Jack while we were all sitting around in a semicircle of multicolored Adirondack chairs on the lawn above the dock behind the family home and Jack was telling us about his harrowing encounter with a shark. It had happened while snorkeling in the Galapagos Islands the previous fall and had included a three-day ordeal in being transported back to the States from one primitive medical clinic to the next little-less-primitive Ecuadoran hospital until his studio could get him airlifted back to California for a professional surgeon and plastic surgeon. Once there, they’d had to redo all of the work on him.

I wasn’t the only one who was not pleased that Jack was talking directly to Candace’s husband. Johnny, probably even younger than Steve, maybe nineteen, was looking a little irritated at Jack’s behavior--that’s when Johnny wasn’t looking at me and smiling. He was a gorgeous young man who Jack had brought here unannounced. I think I’d heard in the confusing round of rolling introductions at the Riding family reunion at the old family home on Lake Manitou, on the edge of Rochester, Indiana, that Johnny was a male model in LA. I admit that I was surprised as hell that Jack would have a son--that he must have been a father when he was teaching me in sexual relations between men. But I wasn’t surprised that he had a beautiful young man. Jack had always been a hunk himself. I did understand there had been a few wives--Jack worked in Hollywood, after all--but I couldn’t imagine that the marriages had been for more than show.

I know I had been smitten by Jack those two summers we were both here a dozen years previously--the summers that I ripened sexually; the summers I pined for Jack until long after I realized that we both wanted the same thing. Of course, there was still a lot we could do, being attracted to each other, even if not in a yin-yang way that would have completely fulfilled satisfaction.

“We decided that the shark must have mistaken me for a sea lion. I’d seen one that was wounded, a gaping hole in its side, just before I fell a nudge on my arm. It didn’t even hurt initially--not until the initial confusion and surprise wore off.”

Jack was back to describing his snorkeling ordeal. He was looking directly at Steve, who looked back, mesmerized. I doubted that Steve had ever been out of Indiana, let alone to the Galapagos Islands. And he seemed to be going under the spell of Jack, which I well knew was easy to do. Candace was a sexy little thing, though. I hoped she’d be able to hold Steve back from the brink. We were a pretty well-educated crew here at the Riding family reunion. Steve was out of his element here. Very impressionable was Steve. If Candace weren’t here--and maybe Jack’s parents, John and Betty, who knew what was what and were ever vigilant, I’d despair that Steve would be crossing the divide sometime this weekend.

But then, who was I to talk? I had been just as mesmerized by Jack and I’d fallen for him hard. There had just been limitations on how far we could go.

“That was what satisfied the minister of tourism when he was at me before we flew out of Quito--that there was an accident involved, maybe. That maybe the shark didn’t know he was attacking a human in a black wetsuit, easily mistaken for a sea lion. But there I was in pain, holding my arm up to ease the blood flow from a big bite, and trying to make the Ecuadoran minister of tourism feel good about the safety of tourists to his country so he’d stop talking and let me get on the fuckin’ plane. As it was, we’d missed the first one and had to wait for the next one.”

Jack was holding court. The rest of us--thirteen of us other than Jack--were listening to his story with a wide range of interest, from Steve, who was leaning forward in his orange Adirondack chair, almost with his tongue hanging out, to the family matriarch, Marie, who was still living in this huge Victorian manse on the shore of Manitou Lake. Grandmother Marie Riding was sitting in a purple Adirondack chair, glassy eyed, in her own world, with a slight smile on her face. We were just a swirl of blobs to her, but she was able to grasp that we were her family. She was with it enough to know we’d all come home to visit her in a rare family reunion, probably the last one she’d be alive for. I don’t know what would happen to the family home and whether that meant there would be no more extended family reunions because there would be no family-related location for us to return to. But then, maybe Jim and Avis, David’s parents, Candace’s grandparents, would move into the house. That was the branch that had never left Rochester. Jim was the one who had taken over the family GMC auto dealership in Rochester.

There had been three brothers and two sisters in the generation ahead of me. The oldest of the siblings had been Virginia, but she died young. She drowned here in Lake Manitou. I always wondered why the family stayed here after that, but they did--Granddad John and Grandmother Marie clung to the lake and this big house, with its Victorian tower and gingerbread trim, ever after.

John, Junior, husband of Betty and father of Jack, was the oldest of the sons. John, who was sixty-seven, was an architect in New York still. Betty was an English professor at NYU. They were remote from the rest of the family and always seemed to have been too busy to interact with the rest of us. Or maybe it was because they wanted to seem above having come from Indiana. John had left Rochester as soon as he could and had never come back for longer than a few days at a time. I was surprised they’d come back now, but John was being extra solicitous of his mother, Marie, today, so I assumed his being here was some sort of guilt trip for not paying much attention to her before this end-of-life phase.

I was even more surprise that their son, Jack, had come. I understood that he wasn’t coming, which is why I did, but he changed his mind at the last possible moment. Somehow, as the first day of the reunion wore on, I got the impression that Betty, at least, had come to the reunion to keep a check on Jack, as if she was afraid her son was going to disrupt the weekend and the equilibrium in the extended family.

That Jack lived on the West Coast and his parents were on the East Coast was no accident. Jack had been quite a disappointment and trial to his parents, who hadn’t really had time for their son and didn’t approval of what little they knew of Jack’s interests and preferences. I didn’t think they were aware of what Jack and I had done those two summers. They barely remembered who I was, and they asked no questions about me or the rare book shop I owned in the quaint Bucks County village of New Hope, in Pennsylvania. They didn’t ask whether I had family when we were introduced the previous--and I don’t. There’s Noel, but I didn’t bring him up at this reunion. He’s a vet in New Hope. He probably would be very interested in Jack’s shark story and Jack probably would be intuitive enough to have as much interest in Noel--and more success with Noel--than in and with Steve. Noel would not have to be seduced; he’d have been a pushover for Jack’s charm and technique.

The third child, and second son, Jim, had been the one to stay here in Rochester, and, of course, his branch was represented by the most attendees at the reunion. His wife, Avis, who was the de facto mover and shaker in the family now that Marie’s mental facilities and health were failing her, had made all of the arrangements for the reunion. She was the one who stepped in to take the sting out of relatives clashing from years of having happily avoided each other.

Their son, David, forty-five, was the assistant manager at the GMC dealership and would move up when Jim decided to retire. David’s wife, Karen, was a schoolteacher in Rochester. Their daughter, Candace, was a dental hygienist, but she would, no doubt, move into place at the GMC dealership when it was her generation’s turn there. Her husband, Steve, worked in the service bays at the dealership. He might make service manager one day, but even in that position he would be above his ability level. He obviously had been acquired by Candace for his hunkiness and performance in bed rather than his intellectual prowess. Having watched him watching Jack; Johnny; another cousin, Ward Samuelson; and me, though, I wondered just what his interests were. There were no other young women here, to be sure, and the Riding family men were hunky, but Steve’s roving eye made his interests pretty clear. 

But with Jack, who most knew about, even if they were trying not to remember, and me, which I hoped only Jack knew about, the family had enough of such alternate preferences. Jack’s history certainly had been there bubbling just under the surface for a dozen years.

My father, Jerry, who had been in publishing in Philadelphia, was the third, youngest brother. He had died young but not before inspiring me to go into researching, collecting, and selling rare books. My mother, Carol, an art critic, was still alive, but had stayed in Philadelphia for the weekend. She had never attuned herself to the Riding family. When Jack’s issues bubbled up from the surface after he couldn’t keep his hands off one of the family’s landscapers, the family had withdrawn into itself to the point of treating the in-laws as “other,” probably for fear of having the family’s “queerness” thrown in its face. My mother was never catty about Jack, though. She knew where my interests had gone and didn’t fight them. I don’t think she ever realized that Jack and I had had a relationship of sorts, though. But just for two summers. I had just gone on from there on my own.

The youngest of the siblings was Georgia Samuelson, who was at the reunion and who, apparently, was working on moving her medical practice from Pittsburgh to Rochester because, as the youngest sibling and a woman, she was being fingered to move in and take care of Grandmother so that she could live out her life in the home she’d lived in for over seventy years in the town where she had been town clerk for several decades.

Rochester had been Marie’s hometown. She’d brought Granddad John here after they’d married. They met at Indiana State University in Terre Haute. Georgia, a widow, had brought her son, Ward, to the reunion with her. Her daughter, Heidi, hadn't had a smidgen of interest in attending the reunion and was rebelling at the notion that Georgia was made to feel obligated to move to Rochester to care for her mother. Georgia was a general practitioner in Pittsburgh and Ward was a medical student at the University of Pittsburgh. He was an agreeable young man, but he had taken after his father in looks rather than the very photogenic Ridings and was a little pudgy. At least, I thought, that with Steve here this weekend, Ward should be safe from Jack.

Jack had moved to the medical issues of his encounter with the shark--the long-time and varied transportation modes required to get him from a rubber dingy to a tourist boat to a larger research vessel with a helipad, but, unfortunately, no functioning helicopter in the region, and, eventually, to a small airport and a plane ride to Quito and, after wrangling there, back to California eventually.

“You can see the incision here and the loss of muscle mass,” he was saying. Georgia and Ward were very attentive to this part of the story. Steve was still hooked. Johnny, obviously having heard this hundreds of times before, was looking at me with a little smile on his face. Grandmother Marie was snoring in her purple Adirondack chair. The others were talking recipes from the lunch Avis had served two hours earlier.

“The first doctor didn’t even know how to put in an IV,” Jack was saying. “Muriel, who’d worked in vet office before coming to me had to scrounge around in his office for one and put it in herself. And I had to keep my arm pointed up. There had been on tourniquet and the sea guide had used his belt.”

“Muriel?” Betty suddenly boomed out between what had become two different discussion groups. I could feel the tension rise in the air between Jack and his mother. It was like she had been on guard from something from the moment that Jack and Johnny had arrived.

Johnny smiled and said, “Muriel is Jack’s assistant. He was doing some business in Ecuador and took her with him. I think everything would have fallen apart there if she hadn’t been along.”

“Oh,” Betty said and returned to the recipe discussion, apparently content that there hadn’t been yet another wife for Jack she hadn’t heard about before the divorce--not that she was that interested. Basically, she’d said at lunch in an aside to him that she didn’t know why he bothered with them at all.

“No relevant equipment for shark bites in that first clinic,” Jack said. “They had to hang the IV cord on a curtain ring. And the place was filthy. It’s no wonder the wound got infected.”

“Infected?” Georgia said. “Oh my. What did they do to clean it out?”

I’d heard enough at that point. His arm didn’t look so bad now. He was still a hunk and no one would have known he’d been bitten if he didn’t tell them. I stood and said, to no one in particular, “As long as the lake is right here, I’m going for a swim.”

Somehow Grandmother Marie heard that and came out of her reverie long enough to say, “We don’t . . . not anymore, Mike. If you must, please be careful.” I could see from the panicked look in her face that she was still thinking of Virginia drowning in the lake after all these years.

“It’s fine, Grandmother,” I said,wanting to shoot myself for causing her to remember. “I’m a strong swimmer. I’m just going out to the island. It’s not far.” I didn’t bother to correct her notknowing my name. My name wasn’t Mike. It was Mark. Mike was her husband’s brother who hadn’t returned from Vietnam. Family legend was that it was Mike who Marie really wanted of the Riding brothers, but had settled on John when Mike didn’t reappear. But I guess she was close enough on the names for her eighty-nine years and her condition. What was important was that she was worried about me. We were family. I wouldn’t do anything that would upset her at this time of her life that I could avoid being part of.

Reaching where the dock met the yard, I stripped off my T-shirt, shorts, and sandals. I had a Speedo on under them. Jack wasn’t so unaware of me that he didn’t give me a wolf whistle. All talk in the yard stopped, if ever so briefly, and I could see mixed expressions on various family members’ faces. I just kept on keeping on, though. I’m happy to say that, at thirty-two, I had kept in tip-top shape. Of course, at thirty-seven, so had Jack. If nothing else, the Ridings all had very good genes and a sense of keeping themselves in shape. Even Grandmother was still movie-actress gorgeous--well, for an eighty-nine-year-old.

I strode down the dock and executed a beautiful dive into the water, even if I do say so myself, and started stroking toward the island a third of the way into the lake in a strong Australian crawl. Looking back, I could see that most eyes were on me, which suited me just fine. In particular, I was pleased for Jack to admire how well I had aged.

As I swam, my mind went back to those summers at the grandparents' house when I was eighteen--and Jack was twenty-three. Both of us had come out to help with the auto dealership while Jim was doing summer reserve duty and Granddad John was busy unsuccessfully trying not to die from cancer.

* * * *

It had started out there, out on the island where I was now headed. The night before, Jack and I had gone out on the town to a tavern, where we’d picked up a couple of local girls. They’d both wanted it. We were men of the world to them, were Riding family handsome, and were connected to one of the most profitable businesses in town. The kind of tavern we went to featured unaccompanied girls who would lay down and open their legs easily for men like Jack and me. Getting and spiking the girls wasn’t our dilemma that night.

We drove down to the lake--Jack was driving a brand-new red 2006 Pontiac G6 convertible from the showroom--and we parked in the lot of a picnic area, where the locals came to fuck and where this was deemed the place to be allowed to do it. Jack fucked his girl in the front seat and I fucked mine in the back. The girls both declared that they’d had a ball being balled. In the debrief at home afterward, Jack and I, still half looped from the tavern visit, had revealed to each other that neither of us had been as enthusiastic about the coupling as the girls had been. In a moment of drunken candor, we both acknowledged that we were more interested in men than in women. Jack had revealed first. Jack was always the one who took the initiative.

The next day, after a half day of work at the dealership, we came back to the house and, all keyed up, we swam out to the small island, where privacy was at a premium, where there were a few trees to hide behind, and where you could see anyone else coming out to the island from a great enough distance to readjust any position you happened to be in.

At the island, with Jack showing the way, we got naked and kissed and fondled and stroked each other erect. Jack was gorgeous and totally confident in his ability to seduce. He’d had no trouble with me at least in establishing my willingness. At the strategic moment, Jack moved to roll on top of me as I was contemplating how and when I was going to go on top of him, and, in a flash of realization, we both rolled away from each other and gave the circumstance a hearty laugh. We were both horny but we were both interested in the same thing. We were both exclusively tops. Neither wanted to bottom for the other or for anyone else. But we were in high heat, so we stroked each other off with our hands and came at nearly the same time, me before Jack, of course. He was the experienced one--the teacher.

As the summer wore on, we swam out to the island several more times, and we became fully comfortable with having sex with each other minus the penile penetration up the ass. We found we could satisfy each other with mutual masturbation and oral sex--blow jobs.

The second summer we progressed to threesomes. The grounds around the house were pretty extensive and required the attention of a father-son Hispanic gardener team. Juan Gonzalez was a cute little trick. He was barely eighteen, but already he was interested in men. Jack seduced him, encouraging me to watch. Days later, after Jack had done Juan under the trees on the island and the brown lad was lying on his back, legs open, spread, and bent; hole gaping open and dribbling Jack’s cum; and Juan sighing and whimpering, Jack pulled me over, settled me down on my knees between the Hispanic youth’s spread thighs as I hovered over the junior gardener, and guided me inside Juan. I was longer and thicker than Jack was. Juan cried out when I entered him, clutched my buttocks with his hands, and writhed under me as I fucked my first man. I fucked him slower than Jack did, asking him what he wanted and what he wanted more, and the two of us moving as one. I was impressed and gratified that Miguel responded more passionately to me than he had to Jack, who I’d accepted as the master.

Two weeks later, both Jack and I were fucking Juan together, and, with both of our cocks inside the young man simultaneously, Jack’s and my hard cocks rubbing together inside the brown lad’s channel, Jack and I were having anal sex with each other for the first time. My cum mingled with Jack’s inside Juan’s channel. We never used rubbers in those days. Sex was never quite the same once we’d wised up to knowing they were needed.

Two weeks later than that, Juan’s father was visiting Granddad John and letting him know that Juan wouldn’t be coming back to work at the house. Juan apparently only fingered Jack, because it wasonly Jack who got sent away. Granddad’s health went downhill from there.

I wasn’t as embarrassed or riddled with guilt about it as I should have been. Neither was Juan. I found out why he hadn’t said I was as involved with him as Jack was. He continued to find opportunities to meet up with me, he lay under me and cried out passionately while sheathing my cock and the two of us moving as one, and by the end of that second summer I was an expert in topping willing men.

For the next couple of years, Jack and I somehow avoided being in the same place together. Then I started up my business in Pennsylvania and Jack went out to the West Coast, and that was that. Over the years, we just drifted apart in our correspondence into our own separate lives. If I’d known Jack was going to be here this weekend, I would not have come. I would have come to see Grandmother on some other weekend soon and told her I couldn’t get away for the family reunion and didn’t want to share her fo ra weekend with others anyway.

* * * *

I reached the island and, somewhat winded to my surprise--I had managed the distance a lot easier a dozen years earlier--I flopped over onto my back in the small bowl of grass inside the copse of trees in the center of the island. I closed my eyes but opened them again with a jerk when I felt a wet hand on my upper thigh.

“What?” I exclaimed, focusing on the figure of the young man who had hauled himself out of the water and was now kneeling beside me. “Johnny? What--?”

“Shush,” he whispered, as his hand pushed under one of the leg openings in my Speedo and wrapped itself around my cock, which started to engorge immediately. “I’m sure you knew what I was interested in when we were exchanging looks back there while Jack was pontificating yet again with his shark story. I certainly was trying to convey to you what I wanted.”

“Johnny, no, we shouldn’t. We’re related. I don’t want--”

“Yes, you do want,” the young man said, with a laugh. My hard, throbbing cock that he was stroking assured him of what I wanted. “And we’re not related as far as I know. Besides, I know that you fool around with cousins. Don’t try to deny it. I felt the vibes between you and Jack.”

“Oh, shit. Oh, fuck,” I whimpered, exhaling. He was rolling the Speedo down to my knees and had taken a firmer grip on my dick. “I was too young then to know better. Jack, your father, is my cousin. That makes you and me--” I raised my torso up, propped on my elbows and looked down the line of my six pack to see that he had me fully erect and was steadily stroking me off.

Johnny gave a snort. “You haven’t actually heard Jack say he was my father, have you? He’s toying with that, springing that one on people unexpectedly. He’s not my father. He brought me out here to warm his bed and be a prop in him rubbing it in to his family what he is. He’s a source for me in getting modeling jobs. He gets me the jobs because I let him fuck me. I like being fucked by him, so it isn’t really an issue of prostituting myself.”

“You’re his lover--his partner?”

“I’m his boy toy of the month. Shit, you’re thicker and longer than he is.”

“Yes, I am,” I answered, with no small pride.

“And you want me.”

“Yes, I do,” I admitted.

“Well, lie back and enjoy,” he said, taking his hand off my cock long enough to pull my Speedo the rest of the way off my legs and to strip off his swimsuit as well. He had a beautiful, perfectly formed body, the body of a slim, but well-trimmed, nineteen-year-old. He fully justified being a male model. “Jack told me about you, about you and him. About what you like. I know you’ll like this.”

He was absolutely right about that. His head was in my lap, he opened his mouth over my cock, and he took me to heaven with his soft lips, the teeth scraping along the sides of my throbbing cock, and his ability to deep-throat me. I lay back with a groan, ran my fingers through his blond curls, and helped guide the bobbing of his head on my shaft.

“God, you’re good,” I murmured, with a groan.

He took his mouth off long enough to say, “Yes, I am,” and to give a low laugh.

At length, his mouth came off my cock; he straddled me, facing me; and, as he leaned down to take my lips with his, he positioned his hole on the head of my cock and began descending on the shaft. Grabbing and spreading his buttocks to give me widest access to him, I squeezed his butt cheeks and guided them in raising and lowering themselves on my cock, going deeper up inside him, deep into his core, as we fucked.

“Isn’t this better than listening to Jack’s shark story?” he muttered.

“Yes,” I answered, lifting him high off the cock and then slamming him down. Up, down, taking him deeper. Pulling him up, slamming him down.

“Oh, fuck! Split me, daddy,” he cried out. “Flood me, breed me! Fuck the hell out of me!”

I did, pulling him up and slamming his channel down on the throbbing shaft. Pulling him up and slamming him down. With a little cry and a groan, he shot his load up my flat belly. Wanting to come as close to him doing so as I could, I lifted him up one more time, until my bulb was just inside his opening. I pumped him with cum and then slowly pulled him down the pole, the cock sliding through the lubricant of my cum. At depth, I released twice more in his core, as he moaned deeply and collapsed on top of me.

“Shit, that was fuckin’ heaven,” he murmured.

I hadn’t fucked raw since I’d last been with Jack. It was exhilarating to be barebacking.

He lay on top of me, within my embrace, for several minutes, as we both cooled down.

“I saw the way Jack was looking at David’s son-in-law on the back lawn--and the dirty looks you were giving him,” I said. “Was this a revenge fuck? Did you ride my cock to stick it to Jack?”

“I rode your cock because you’re a hunk and because Jack told me about you and because you’re bigger and thicker than he is . . . and, yes, a bit to get back at him. It isn’t just that Steve guy. I figure Jack will spike him and the big lug will let him. It’s also because he dragged me along here for the shock value. He’s been saying how he wants to stick it the family, to rub their noses in his active homosexuality. I don’t mind being used, but I don’t like to be used that way, if you know what I mean.”

“I understand. So, now you’ve had your revenge we can pull our suits on and swim back to the house? Separately, of course,” I said. “I don’t really want the family to know that Jack isn’t the only black sheep amid the white.”

“The next one can be just for us--because we enjoy each other’s bodies,” he said. He reached down and was stroking me erect again.

“Now? You want it again now?” I asked.

“What do you think?”

I laughed, rolled over on top of him, nudged his knees apart, and positioned the bulb of my reengorged cock. He arched his back and cried out, “Shit, yes. Fuck me. Fuck me hard!” as I slid inside him again, through the lubrication of the cum I’d deposited before, snaked an arm under the small of his back to lift and tilt him, pushed in deep, and fucked him and fucked him and fucked him.

When we got back to the lake house, Johnny a good fifteen minutes before I appeared, Jack was discussing the rehabilitation he’d had to do on his arm after the operation for the shark bite. Steve, Georgia, and Ward were still paying rapt attention to his story, Marie was still snoring away in her purple Adirondack chair, and the others were into a “remember when?” typical family reunion discussion. None seemed to have realized--or cared--that both Johnny and I had taken a swim and were now back, although I may have caught a flicker in Jack’s eye and a slight smile on his face as he watched me pulling my T-shirt and shorts back on.

I was wrong about Jack bypassing Ward. Late in the evening, after dinner and after the family had dispersed, tired of “togetherness” for a few hours, I went out of the back of the house and down and onto the dock to watch the effect of the reflected light from the moon on the rippling water of Lake Manitou. As I was returning to the house, I heard grunting and moaning and peeked around the side of the house into the shadows to see where the sound was coming from. Both Jack and Ward had their shirts off and Ward’s shorts were down around his ankles. Ward’s chest was pressed into the wooden wall at the side of the house and Jack was covering him from behind. Jack’s shorts were up, but his fly was open, and I could see the root of his cock appearing and disappearing from the crevice of Ward’s buttocks. The combined panicked and impassioned expression on Ward’s face assured me that he was being fucked well and with his acquiescence. But I could also see that he hadn’t done this much, if at all, before.

I withdrew quickly and went back into the house. I didn’t want to be anywhere nearby when David found out that his cousin was fucking his son.

We had been carefully arranged in the house’s eight bedrooms. Marie was in the first-floor bedroom that had been carved out of the house when she and John Senior had grown weary of mounting stairs in the high-ceilinged house. Georgia was on daybed in Marie’s room. The brothers, John Junior and Jim, and their spouses were in two of the bedrooms on the second floor. David, with Karen, and Candace, with Steve, were in the other two bedrooms on that level. The three smaller bedrooms in the attic were doled out to the unattached men, Jack and Johnny in the larger of the three rooms, with twin beds, and Ward and me in the other two, smaller bedrooms, each with just a single twin bed.

In the middle of the night Johnny visited me and we fucked again, this time doggie style, on the braided rug on the floor for fear that our rhythms would cause the headboard of the bed to bang against the wall and wake either Jack or Ward up.

We needn’t have worried about the danger of waking Jack up and being discovered. When Johnny and I were in the throes ofpassion, when we’d be unable to stop marching to ejaculation even if we wanted to, Jack slid into the room, sat on the bed with a slight smile on his face, and watched us complete the fuck. For a brief moment I thought maybe he’d ask to join in and share Johnny with me, but he didn’t. Before I climaxed, he rose and drifted out of the room again. I think he just wanted me to know that he knew I was fucking the young man he’d brought to the reunion. Just by that, he no doubt thought he’d reasserted his domination over me--and I couldn’t claim he was wrong.

* * * *

By late Saturday morning, the chattering of “remember when?” was grinding to a halt and all were in the need of a breather. The women were off, taking Marie with them, in Avis’s new GMC Acadia SUV to shop in the nearest town of any size, Fort Wayne. As the owners of a GMC dealership, all of the Ridings who wanted one, had a new GMC car to drive every year. They didn’t come free, but with the deep family discounts and very favorable trade-in, they came very cheap. The brothers John and Jim and Jim’s son, David, had gone golfing. Georgia’s son, Ward, had gone on lakeshore walk, packing his own lunch. So, he wasn’t expected back for some time. Ward had been moping around in the morning in a sullen, withdrawn mood. Georgia had wanted him to go on the shopping spree to carry packages, but she finally gave up on lifting his mood. She obviously had no idea why the young man was off kilter this morning, but I did. I’d seen Jack topping him the previous evening, and I was sure the young man was confused and needing to do some thinking. I'd been there before. Making that last step into the men-on-men world wasn't an easy one to take.

Steve had been expected to go golfing, but he’d begged off the previous evening, saying he didn’t feel up to par. His subpar feelings would clear up as soon, I discovered, as the cars for the two family outings departed.

I had gotten up late and sat at the huge dining room table, eating my cornflakes and monitoring everyone running around like chickens pulling together the two by-car outings. Johnny had taken an early dip in the lake. As far as I knew both Jack and Steve were in their beds.

At some point, after everything had died down in the wake of the family-member departures, Jack and Steve found themselves in the same bed, in Jack and Johnny’s attic room. I, along with Johnny, only discovered that when he and I were in my room in the attic. We were sitting in a rocking chair in my room, using the motion of the chair to establish the rhythm of our fuck. We were both naked. I was sitting in the chair and Johnny was sitting in my lap, facing me, his arms around my neck, his legs propped up on the arms and streaming behind the back of the chair, as I grasped, squeezed, and spread his buttocks with my hand, creating the maximum “give” for my cock to get deep up inside him. We were kissing and murmuring what we liked and what we liked better as the rocking motion of the chair slid my cock in, out, in deeper in his channel.

I was expecting Jack to awaken and join us at any moment. Johnny himself had brought up the prospect of double penetration with Jack when we were on the island the previous afternoon.

“Jack tells me that when you were both younger--you not much older than I am--you shared a Hispanic gardener when you were both here at the house during a summer.”

“Yes, that’s right,” I answered.

“You fucked him together--both of your cocks inside him at once?”

“Yes.”

“And he let you? The Hispanic guy. He let you fuck him together?”

“Yes.”

“More than once?”

“Yes.”

“And how was that? How did it feel? For the guy you were fucking and for you?”

“It felt incredible for me, making love to two guys at once. Juan did a lot of groaning and panting and a bit of sobbing as we worked both of our cocks inside him, but he let us do it several times and he claimed to like have two men inside him even better than just one.”

“You’re both big, you and Jack.”

“Yes, but Juan said he managed to adjust. He said he could naturally open up to what was needed, given time to adjust.”

“So, I should be able to open up enough, as well,” Johnny whispered. I said nothing to disabuse him of that idea. I ached to fuck him with Jack.

Johnny had been pensive for a few moments. “I think I want to try it too.”

“We’ll see,” I replied. I wasn’t sure about getting into this in the middle of a family reunion, regardless of how much I wanted it.

We didn’t, ultimately, see, though. I’m sure that both Johnny and I anticipated having an opportunity to try it while most of the family were off for the afternoon, but family issues came to a head and intervened before the opportunity arose.

Johnny and I were rocking and fucking when we heard the thumping on the wall start. The chair we were in had been making a creaking noise, but it was on a thick braided-rag rug and wasn’t making any thumping noise. The noise was coming from the wall the headboard of my bed abutted. But it was coming from the other side of that wall, from the room Jack and Johnny occupied.

We finished our business--we had been close to climax when the wall banging started, and we were too close to ejaculations to stop--pulled on briefs, and trotted to the room next door. The door was a jar. Jack was fucking Steve on Jack’s bed. Steve certainly didn’t look like he was under the weather now. He was quite a flexible guy for how muscular he was. He was gripping the rungs of the headboard of Jack’s bed. It was the top of that headboard that was rhythmically banging against our shared wall, moving with the rhythm of the thrusts of Jack’s cock in Steve’s ass.

Jack was kneeling on the bed, facing the headboard. Steve’s chest was flat on the mattress, but his legs were streaming back and hooked on Jack’s shoulders. Steve’s back was sharply arched. Jack had his arms wrapped around Steve’s thighs and his cock was up Steve’s ass, driving hard.

Steve wasn’t being shy; he obviously had been with a man before. I had no idea how much about this that his wife, Candace, Jack’s first cousin once removed, knew of her husband’s lifestyle. I don’t even know what she knew about Jack’s preferences. I just knew that the shit would hit the fan at this reunion if what Jack and Steve were doing were to come out.

I started to push Johnny back out of the room. Jack saw that we were there and motioned for us to stay--to get into what else, I could only imagine. And Johnny had already indicated he was interested in a threesome. But a foursome that included a cousin-once-removed’s husband? I’d had sex with my cousin, Jack, but this broadening out within the family threatened to get out of hand.

I continued guiding Johnny out of the room and back to my bedroom.

“What a surprise that was,” Johnny said when we got back to my room, showing in his expression that it wasn’t any surprise at all.

“We can’t let this get out--to the restof the family,” I said.

“But that’s what Jack wants,” Johnny said. “He told me he would blast the family apart this weekend. That’s why he brought me. That’s why, he said, that he was interested in knowing if you’d be here too. I’m sure that’s why he’s fucking Steve next door. He said he wanted to rub it all in everyone’s face.”

“Well, I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to be any part of that. I’m packing and clearing out before the rest of the family gets back and Jack forces fireworks over this.”

“I want to leave too. Can you take me too?” Johnny asked.

“Go pack.” When we were packed, I left a note for Avis, the coordinator of this potential disaster, none of which would be her fault, letting her know that I had to leave early--that I’d been called about some knotty problem at my bookstore that I needed to attend to before it became worse. I added that Johnny had remembered a modeling job he needed to be back in LA for and I was taking him to an airport.

I decided to let Jack worry about what the real story there was and if Johnny and I were together somewhere.

Later, when in my car heading east, I said, “Where do you want to go? Where can I let you off?”

“Can I come with you--back to Pennsylvania, to where you said you have a bookstore?”

He was a sweet piece, but I already had one of those waiting for me back in New Hope--the vet, Noel. And taking in Johnny wouldn’t release me from being entangled with Jack. I was sure of that.

I parked behind a deserted gas station on a country road, highway 31, near Kokomo, south of Rochester, fucked Johnny in the backseat of my new Camaro, which wasn’t easy to do in a car that size, but we managed. Then I explained how, for both of us not to have Jack on our backs, that he had to go back to California for a while--and give it some time to think about where he wanted to go from there.

Johnny saw the wisdom of that, and I dropped him off at the airport in Indianapolis en route back home--and to Noel.

I can’t hope that that has gotten Jack out of my hair and extracted me from whatever bombshells he wanted to drop at the family reunion--at least I never heard of any having exploded from the weekend--but I couldn’t really get Jack out of my mind. And, in particular, I couldn’t get out of my mind Jack and me sharing the luscious Johnny.

Maybe I’ll take a trip out to California one of these days. But not to go to a reunion with family other than Jack.