Accepting Thanksgiving

This time the dream started earlier, when everything was good. He was in Marine Captain Buzz Thompson’s office at Camp Leatherneck in Afghanistan’s Helmand Province. The captain looked around to see if anyone else was in view, and, when he saw no one else was there, he pulled Marty into a supply room, pushed the young Marine to the floor, opened his fly, and presented his cock for sucking. Marty’s dream of that day didn’t usually start this early—when it was still all good. Buzz was a hunk and a half and took care of Marty. Marty took care of the captain too, giving him blow jobs on the fly and lying down and opening his legs for the officer when they had the opportunity.

Floating through Marty’s mind as he dozed in the train steaming its way from Chicago toward Libertyville—toward home—was that it was the guy on the platform at the Chicago train station who must have made Marty horny and thus able to start this consuming dream earlier than usual. Marty and the guy on the platform had exchanged knowing looks.

It was all good still in the dream. Buzz, in full erection induced by Marty’s attentions, was pulling Marty up, unbuckling his belt, pulling his fatigues down and turning him, belly over boxes. Marty was panting as Buzz knelt behind him, burying his face between Marty’s butt cheeks. Marty moaned, the sound resonating through his brain, as the hulking Marine captain rose, bent over Marty’s back, mounted and penetrated him, and began the stretch of the thick cock. There was no sensation of feel in the dream, but Marty could remember how it had felt. He gasped, panted, and groaned . . . and came awake to the feel of the train clipping along on the uneven rails and the slight lurching in the train car.

But that wasn’t the only feeling he awakened too. Hands were gripping his knees as he sat in the sparsely occupied coach car. The hands had spread his legs. He looked down at his crotch, seeing and feeling that the dream had made him hard. He could see the line of his erection inside the stretched material of his denim jeans. A wet spot evidenced that he’d been having a wet dream—much better than the dream he’d been having for weeks—the one that went further than this one of Buzz and him at Camp Leatherneck that day.

Sitting across from Marty, in the facing seat of the dimly lit coach, and leaning into him, his hands gripping and separating Marty’s knees, was the cowboy from the train platform at the Chicago train station. They’d only shared a look then, but it was amazing how little it took to establish that guys were players—and that one of them was dominant and the other a submissive. Later, as they’d passed each other between cars, they’d rubbed bodies together in passing, the cowboy had smiled and sent Marty an air kiss, while his hand brushed across Marty’s crotch, and Marty, caught by surprise and with defenses down, had smiled back at the cowboy. In the field, he’d responded this way to soldiers who knew what he was willing to do, and he’d just reacted naturally to the cowboy’s overture. This revealed all to the other man, though.

The cowboy was a dominant. It’s surprising how quickly and completely the control can be attained when one man grips the knees of another, sitting, man and spreads his legs. If the other man is a submissive, he can be easily dominated this way. Marty was a submissive.

The man wasn’t young, like twenty-two-year-old Marty Parsons was. He was probably in his forties—tall, gaunt, with a weather-beaten craggy-featured face and strong, heavily callused hands, now gripping and separating Marty’s legs. The cowboy impression was conveyed by the faded-checked chambray shirt covered by a brown-leather fringed vest, on top of faded jeans and fancy-tooled cowboy boots. It was all topped by a ten-gallon hat. He was a real cowboy—the real McCoy rancher. He was directly out of central casting as the steely foreman backing up a rough and greedy ranch owner in a Western movie.

Giving Marty a piercing sneery sort of smile, the cowboy reached over with one of his hands and traced Marty’s erection through the taut material on his jeans.

“You gave me the look in Chicago,” he said. “The look of want. I knowed what you wanted. You gonna be easy? I’m not gonna work for it. Yes or no?”

“Yes,” Marty whispered.

“Yes what?”

“I’m going to be easy.”

The man’s thumb paused at the wet spot. The thumb went from there to Marty’s mouth, which involuntarily opened to it, and Marty gave the thumb suck. The cowboy’s other hand took one of Marty’s hands and moved it to the man’s crotch. Marty found the cowboy was hard under the material of his jeans as well. Marty traced the thickness and length of the cowboy’s cock. He moaned, the ache and need in him extending from the dream into reality. The cowboy had sensed the younger man’s ache and need—probably from the moment their eyes at met on the Chicago train station platform.

“You just back from fightin’,” he asked.

“Back from Afghanistan, yes.”

“You gave it up to a lot of soldiers out there, didn’t you? You have that pretty boy look to you.”

“Some, yes.”

“You’ll give it to me. You miss it from out there. You ain’t had it good since Afghanistan, have you? You want it bad. You want a man’s man to lay down for.”

“Yes.” The bald talk was arousing. Marty had had even this much since Afghanistan.

The cowboy rose, looked down at Marty for a long minute, capturing the younger man’s eyes, conveying where this was headed. “You want it, come and get it,” he growled in a gravelly voice.

He turned and walked to the end of the coach, where the door to the bathroom was. He paused there for a moment, looking back at Marty. Then he opened the bathroom compartment door and went in. After a moment Marty stood; looked around to ensure no one was watching in the dimly lit, sparsely occupied coach; went, hobbling a bit, to the end of the train car; and, looking around again, opened the bathroom compartment door and went in. The compartment was small, not really big enough for two men to stand in unless they were being intimate.

Marty and the cowboy became intimate. There was a brief few moments of being in the clutch, kissing and hands frantically unbuckling and unzipping the other, unleashing and stroking each other’s cocks. The cowboy dominated, controlling it all. At length, he pushed Marty down to sitting on the toilet, forced his cock into Marty’s mouth, and leaned over him, palming the wall behind the toilet, as he swayed back and forth, coordinated with the swaying of the moving train, fucking the younger man’s face. Marty went with it, conjuring up Captain Buzz and the storage room in his mind, weaving the present in with the pleasant part of that fateful day.

“Stand up. Turn around. Gonna fuck you. Gonna fuck you good, pretty-boy bitch,” the cowboy growled in a commanding tone. “Platoon’s punch is gonna be my bitch now. You like talking like that, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Spread ’em and take my dick.”

Fighting to stay in his dream, Marty stood and leaned over the toilet, palming the wall, as the cowboy had done while Marty was giving him head. There wasn’t much possible in terms of spreading his legs, but he knew it had just been dirty talk.

Marty felt his jeans and briefs being jerked down to puddle around his ankles. He moaned as he heard the crinkle of the condom being rolled onto the cock, and then gave a little cry, gasped, and began to pant as the cock head worried his hole.

“Gimme that hole. Open up, you fucker,” the cowboy barked, and then he grunted and Marty groaned as the cowboy worked hard to get inside. Once in, one of the cowboy’s callused hands palmed Marty’s lower belly and the other cupped the young man’s chin, pulling his head back into the cowboy’s hard chest, and the rhythmic pumping gauged to harmonize with the movement of the train over the rough tracks, settled into the cadence of the fuck.

“You like it like this. You done this a lot, ain’t you?”

“Yes.”

Marty’s mind went back to the supply room at Camp Leatherneck and Captain Buzz holding him in the same position and fucking him. The cowboy’s hand moved from Marty’s belly to grasping and stroking the young man’s cock. Marty came first; the cowboy several strokes later. The grip on Marty’s body was released, and he was allowed to collapse onto the toilet, the spent condom landing on the floor next to him, as the cowboy jerked up his briefs and jeans, zipped and buckled up, and, without so much as a “Thank you, ma-am,” was gone from the bathroom compartment.

Marty lingered, collapsed over the toilet, his half-dozed dream free now to move into the later stages, to the nightmare Marty had been reliving for weeks—to the horror of what happened later that day—at the camp, in Afghanistan.

He didn’t see the cowboy again for the remainder of the journey. He didn’t really want to see him again. He was embarrassed that he’d needed it so badly—that he’d been so easy. But he couldn’t forget it, going over the encounter in his mind again and again, letting it force his dreams of Captain Buzz and the supply room out of his mind. Before the journey was over, he was back in the small bathroom again where they’d done it, pulling his cock out, stroking it, and reliving what the cowboy had done to him.

* * * *

Marty spied his parents, standing in four inches of mid-November snow, on the depot platform at Fairfield, Iowa, as the train stopped there. It wouldn’t linger long here. Fairfield, a farming town of some ten-thousand inhabitants, barely rated a train stop. Conveniently for the Parsons family, though, it was just four miles to the northeast from their farm near the much smaller town of Libertyville, where the family grew corn and soybeans and raised hogs. Marty hadn’t told his parents, Muriel and Walt, who had farmed their land, as did two generations before them all of their lives, that when he’d joined the Marines, he hadn’t intended to come back here ever again.

And yet here he was, the only slightly hobbling wounded, most of his wounds being where they couldn’t be seen. The two of them looked so hopeful standing on the platform, though, that he wanted to cry. Marine or not, there had been considerable times in the last four months that he’d cried. Those still back at Camp Leatherneck doubtless were happy to see him go. He’d served out his eighteen months, but he didn’t reup, which he’d fully expected to do before that day Buzz died.

Muriel took a step toward him and opened her arms when she saw him step down from the train. His father stood back, but Marty saw that he was trembling. He had to take about ten steps to get to them and he saw his mother look down to see how well he could walk, but the worry lines melted when she saw that there wasn’t much of a shuffle in his steps at all. The worst part had been coming down metal steps from the train carriage.

“It’s good to have you home again,” his father said as they stood on the platform briefly, embracing. Muriel didn’t seem to be able to form words. She just kept touching her boy to assure herself that he was there and in one piece. They had, of course, known that Marty had been in a gate guard shack at his Afghanistan base when the Taliban launched a small attack on the gate and that his captain, who Marty had written about, had died in the attack and Marty was slightly wounded, but they had no idea how badly Marty had been affected by the experience. There had been a change in his letters after that and he hadn’t signed on for another tour as he’d told them he was going to do—and that they done everything they could to dissuade him from doing without getting pushy about it. Their dream was for him to return and take over the farm.

Now it seemed like he might be doing that—but how broken was he? Would it be their son who was coming back—and how long would he stay? He’d been on edge and antsy for the two years after high school that he was farming with them.

All of them were tiptoeing around all of the primary topics they needed to discuss as they drove back to the farm, each of them grateful that it was only a fifteen-minute drive. What Marty needed was a good night’s sleep. The questions could wait for the morning, and they could work into them gradually. Nothing had been put on a schedule beyond coming home on the train through Chicago. He’d been honorably discharged from the Marine Corps. No blame had been assigned to him in the Taliban attack. Buzz had died a hero. Nothing Marty had done that day had been brought into question. He hadn’t rebounded mentally as they’d like a Marine to do and there had been rumors about the nature of him, but there was nothing to be openly said or done about that. They’d been careful not to speculate about Buzz. Buzz was a documented hero. Marty had served his time and his superiors hadn’t pressed him to reup.

Marty did ask one question, though, as they pulled into the snow-swept farm yard.

“Who is that at the old house?” he asked.

“That’s Frank Munoz. I’m sure your dad wrote you about him,” Muriel answered. “Your dad’s gotten to where the farm is too much for him to handle alone, even with my help. When you left, we needed help. Frank is Hablo and Susan’s son. He needed work and a place to stay too. He’s been with us—staying in the old homestead—for nearly a year now. He’s a lot of help around the farm.”

The old homestead building was the original two-bedroom bungalow on the farm that was across the farm yard from the three-bedroom brick rambler Marty’s father and mother had built when they took over the farm. Having the old homestead had been handy for itinerant help that went through, and they’d offered it for Marty to live in on his own when he finished school. Before he’d gotten around to moving in, though, he’d enlisted in the Marines and taken off.

Ah, yes, they’d told him about taking Frank on, and he’d seen that as a godsend. He hadn’t wanted to come back to farm but he’d felt guilty about that. And he knew about Frank and why he needed someplace to land with not too many people in the community willing to help him. It had been quite a fall for the sports hero four years ahead of Marty in school from the pedestal the community had put Frank on and then jerked out from underneath him when they found out what his preferences were—what his nature was. It was knowing how Frank had been treated that had decided Marty that he had to get away from here and not come back. Marty hadn’t been the hometown idol Frank had been. Of course, that meant Frank had farther to fall from that pedestal.

But here Marty was, back. But for how long? And what else was there out there for Marty? When would his nerves quiet down—and that dream go away?

The dream was back that night, and it started where it had left off, with Captain Buzz fucking Marty in the supply room off his office. It had been a rough fuck, though. The captain had been angry. Marty only found out why after they left the supply closet.

“You’ve been giving it out to others,” Buzz had growled. From there the dream that was as much reality as a dream had picked up again, with the captain yelling at Marty in a haze where there was no sound but somehow the words came through. Buzz would show Marty. He’d punish him so Marty wouldn’t go under anyone but the captain. Marty would stand dangerous duty for a while so he’d appreciate how the captain coddled him. Marty was hustled out to the main gate, where he jolly well could stand guard for a shift and see how dangerous it was for some guys. And dangerous it was. Marty tried to stop the dream or change it—or wake up—but he was forced to relive it in a nightmare all over again. The captain thrusting a rifle in Marty’s hands, but still so angry that he punched Marty in the face when they were just outside the guard shack, and Marty went down at the precise moment that all hell broke out and the firing began. Captain Buzz landed on top of Marty and, mercifully, the dream let loose its grip on Marty again and he woke in a sweat and heavy panting.

The citation said that Buzz had covered Marty—one of his guys—on purpose. And maybe he did. But up to that point he’d been mad at Marty and showing it. And there was no time, really, between Buzz not being aware of any danger and Buzz being hit and falling on Marty.

Marty got out of bed and went over to the window. He never could go right back to sleep after that dream, which wasn’t really a dream. He rustled around in the dark and pulled out a pack of cigarettes—another bad habit he knew he had to build up the courage to drop—and leaned into the window frame and looked out onto the snow-covered fields of his family farm under the moonlight. It all looked so pristine now. He knew how messy farming could get, though, in the Iowa mud. Sitting on the wide sill inside the frame of the window, he bent the leg toward the window and pressed his knee to the glass.

He looked over at the homestead house. Lights were still on there, and he saw the silhouette figure of a man at the bungalow window, leaning into the window frame, and looking out. The moving dot of red told Marty that Frank was smoking a cigarette too. Marty could almost make out the man’s muscular backlit body. If he was wearing anything, it certainly didn’t show. Marty wasn’t wearing anything either. It seemed impolite that he could see Frank framed in the window and maybe Frank couldn’t see him. He left briefly to turn on the overhead light and then settled back into the window frame, took a puff on his cigarette, arched his head back, and exhaled the smoke toward the ceiling.

Frank Munoz, the Hispanic half breed, a Mexican father and a mother who was a local white girl he’d knocked up and married when he’d been in the area as a seasonal harvester. The community had let them stay but it was only families like the Parsons who had been social with them and had given them help in the hard times. It wasn’t until their son, Frank, handsome as the devil, excelled in all sports in high school that the family was accepted in the community. And then Frank had gone bent, and it had all crashed down again.

Frank. Beautiful Frank. Mart had idolized him just as the rest of the community had done—but for different reasons then they did. When Frank crashed, Marty knew it was time to get out—not because they’d done anything; they’d barely known each other—but Marty knew if Frank would get that response from the community, Marty didn’t have a chance to come out here.

So, he’d joined the Marines. And he’d made a dead hero out of the Marine officer who had been fucking him.

He sat in the window frame, smoking and looking at the old homestead, for a good twenty minutes. Across the farmyard, Frank remained at the old homestead window, smoking and looking at the newer, brick farmhouse for even longer than that. Halfway through his vigil, he took his cock in hand and masturbated. Looking over at the old homestead, he thought he could see Frank doing the same—and that they came at nearly the same time.

* * * *

“So, this Captain Thompson saved your life?” Marty’s mother said. The two of them—mother and son—were sitting at the bay window in the dining room of the brick rambler farmhouse, where Muriel had served her boy a big breakfast at what was well past lunchtime on a farm, even in the winter. They had let Marty sleep in as long as he needed to on his first night home from his Afghanistan deployment. They weren’t going to make any demands at all of him. They were just happy he was alive and here. He only now was beginning to open up and address the questions that had been building.

As he ate and began to respond to the questions, Marty looked out of the window, which faced the farmyard bordered by the barn, the equipment shed, the old homestead house, and, on this side, the newer brick farmhouse. His father and the hired hand, Frank Munoz, were already out—indeed, had been out, working, for hours—in the farmyard. Marty’s eyes followed Frank’s movements more than his fathers. As Marty remembered him, Frank was a hunk, having inherited all of the attractive aspects of his Mexican father and Scandinavian-origin mother and none of the bad, as far as appearances held. Once having established his nature, Frank hadn’t had any trouble at all finding willing sex partners in the community. He wouldn’t have had any more trouble finding women to cover as he did young men. As Marty’s own self-awareness was developing, he’d had designs on going under the sports hero four years ahead of him in school, but nothing had come of that.

As he watched the two men work, just like one imagined a father and son doing but in a way Marty and his father never had, the two men now at the hog pen, slopping the hogs, an onerous, but necessary twice daily chore, Marty tried to imagine whether Frank had kept his beautiful, muscular body fit. Surely he had if he was working the farm; it was hard not to keep fit in working the farm. That was something that Marty had had reason to be proud of when he went into the Marines. He’d already been whipped into shape. He and his father hadn’t worked in a comfortable synchronization that his father and Frank were doing, but Marty had always done his share of the work on the farm. His father never had complained otherwise.

It was mid-November. Thanksgiving was approaching. Snow covered the ground, although not nearly to the depth that there’d be in December. Frank and Walt were well bundled up. Marty could only imagine what physical shape Frank was in now, although he fancied he’d been assured of that the previous night, as he sat in the frame of his bedroom window and watched Frank do the same across the farmyard in the old homestead house. Seeing Frank’s silhouetted body in the window frame and knowing Frank’s preferences had aroused Marty to taking hold of himself and masturbating. As far as he could discern, Frank had done the same, watching him.

Marty hadn’t gotten nearly the sleep the previous night that his mother thought he had. The questioning of himself after that incident at the gate guardhouse and the military review board’s clear intention of painting Buzz as a hero kept coming up in Marty’s mind when he finally went to bed.

“Yes, when the firing started—and it and the attack lasted for only a couple of minutes; it was really typical of the Taliban harassment of the camp—Captain Thompson pushed me to the ground and came down on top of me. He sacrificed himself for me. He took several bullets, any of which would have killed him, and I came out with only one in my thigh and a messed-up face.”

“You were shot in the face?”

“No, I bloodied my face when I went to the ground.” That was just one of several lies, of course. It had been the blows to his face—an angry captain punching him because he’d found that Marty was giving it to other Marines, not just to him. It had been Thompson’s anger and his wish to punish Marty that had had them there at the gate, standing outside the guard shack, to begin with. And the captain hadn’t heroically pushed Marty to the ground and covered him out of any sort of heroic act. He’d beaten Marty to the ground to begin with and then just collapsed when the raiders’ bullets hit him.

That, of course, was not the way Marty played it, though. Captain Buzz Thompson became a hero based on the way Marty told the story—and the reason they were out there at the gate and the captain’s role in Marty’s military life was hidden for all time, behind the citation for bravery that had been appended to the captain’s military record and sent home to his wife and kids upon Marty’s say so. To this day Marty didn’t know if he spun this version of the story to honor the captain and the relationship the two of them had had at Camp Leatherneck or if it had been to cover Marty’s own tracks there. The “relationship” had been mostly of Thompson’s beating Marty into sexual submission. And not knowing which it was that was eating him up.

He looked out the window and saw now that Frank had stopped work, come out into the center of the farmyard, and was standing there, looking at Marty through the window. Embarrassed at the naked stare he interpreted as what Frank was giving him—with Muriel sitting right there, her back to the window, though—Marty mumbled something about needing to find something useful to do and stood and withdrew into the opposite side of the house.

He realized that Frank had clearly seen him in the window frame the previous night and what he had done—what they’d both done, together, even at a distance. And the look Frank now gave Marty told him that Frank was claiming him—that Frank would be coming for him.

He kept track of Frank’s movements from the various windows in the brick house, though. When he saw Frank drive out in the farm truck, he bundled up and went out into the cold to give his father any assistance in the continuous farm chores that he could.

Over the next few days leading up to Thanksgiving, the two men, Frank and Marty, played a dance of hide and seek like this, keeping visual track on each other, but never coming together, avoiding contact—not yet even acknowledging the existence of each other or any shared work on the farm.

That didn’t mean that Marty didn’t think of Frank, though. At night now, his perpetual dream, whether or not it got to the bad part, started off with Captain Thompson’s office and the supply room. When it moved Marty into the supply room and on his knees, though, the other man in the dream now had become Frank—a handsome, muscular, well-endowed Frank—not Captain Buzz Thompson.

And it became a ritual for Marty to go to the window at night, finding Frank at the window of the old homestead. Both of them would be naked. Both of them would masturbate to an ejaculation, watching each other.

Marty was afraid, though. This was too close to home. How long would it be before one or both of his parents discovered this wasn’t the perfect solution to the farm’s needs that they thought it was?

* * * *

Darius was big and black, which was unusual for the central farm area of Iowa, which had made him a standout at Alexander’s Tavern off Highway 1 running south of Fairfield beyond the east-west Highway 34. This had been about the only place gay guys could go, other than the area parks, for hookups before Marty had left to join the Marines. It still was nearly the only place, the parks being covered with snow this time of year. Darius had been attracted to Marty as soon as the young man had come into the tavern. Marty was something new, having been gone long enough to no longer be suspected as a submissive here. And he’d come home Marine fit. Even his slight limp was intriguing. He’d only been in the tavern a couple of times before. He was here on his third night back in the area, because he was driven here by frustration.

As soon as he’d bellied up to the bar, there was the big black bull, Darius, at his elbow, offering him a drink. Marty had barely had time to see, in shock, that Frank Munoz was leaning into the bar as well. They still hadn’t come together on the farm. The frustration of wanting to but avoiding the risk of starting up with another man right under his parents’ noses had been what had sent Marty to this tavern.

Frank saw him and, after a bit of hesitancy, indicated he was going to move down the bar to him, but Darius, an electrician at the Iowa Army Ammunition Plant to the east, near Burlington, on the Mississippi River, was there first and obviously interested in establishing possession of this new, handsome, and very fit blond.

“Buy you a drink?” he asked. Saying yes in the tavern to a drink from a guy, was saying yes to more than that. Accepting a second drink and you were leaving with the guy.

Marty said “Yes.” He said yes to the second drink too, at which time Darius had felt him up and had him under control. It wasn’t really that hard for a dominating top to get Marty under control. Frank was talking to another young guy at the other end of the bar, young guys being a premium at the tavern that night. But he was spending as much time watching Darius hovering over Marty and getting ever closer as he did talking to his guy. The four of them were the most attracting men there that night, Darius an exotic black giant; Frank a dark and sultry hunk; the cute, somewhat effeminate young man Frank was talking to; and Marty, the young former Marine, with handsome blond features and the intriguing slight limp. There were only a half dozen other men other than the quite obvious punk bartender, and all of them looked like farmers at least in their middle age.

After the second drink, Darius was guiding Marty to a beaded curtain-covered doorway at the back of the room, and Marty was willingly following Darius’s lead, although when they passed the other end of the bar, Marty and Frank shared a questioning look.

In the dimly lit corridor beyond the beaded curtain, still within hearing of the music from the juke box in the barroom, Darius pushed Marty down on his knees in front of him—somewhat forcefully, just as Captain Buzz had done at Camp Leatherneck—and Marty, knowing what the dominating man wanted of him and being of a submissive slave mentality, unbuckled the black giant’s belt, unzipped and flared his fly, and pulled his shaft out. He was hung, as Marty knew he’d be—and he was in magnificent erection. Darius might be unusual here in rural Iowa, but there had been Marines of color like him at Camp Leatherneck. Marty called upon his military experience and managed to deep throat the shaft.

After a few minutes of oral servicing, Darius took a condom packet out of his pocket and handed it down to Marty. The inference was clear. He wanted more than a blow job. Marty complied, slitting the packet open, extracting the disk, letting the foil envelope fall to the floor to mingle with other foil packets and spent rubbers there, and rolling the condom on the jet-black shaft.

Darius pulled Marty up and pushed him toward a doorway farther down the hallway. The door led to a small, windowless room, which contained a single bed and a straight chair. There was not much in the way of seduction or preparation. Marty’s frustration since leaving Afghanistan eleven days previously had built him up to having just the need for release and the decision that he wasn’t going to radically change his lifestyle. He was tired of being at a crossroads of his life—what he was going to do with his life, where he was going to go, whether he was going to continue to go under men.

Darius made one of those decisions for him. He put Marty on all fours on the bed, mounted him from on top and behind, penetrated him, and fucked the stuffing out of him. Marty held steady, strangely relieved that this decision had been made for him. He pressed his cheek to the bed as Darius stretched and pumped him with his thick, black cock. Marty realized that the door to the corridor was open and someone was there, leaning against the door frame, watching them fuck. It was Frank Munoz. He remained there for a few minutes, watching, before withdrawing.

When Marty came out from the back of the bar, he walked directly to the exit from the building and entered the parking lot. He looked neither left nor right in leaving the bar, afraid of seeing Frank there and not knowing what to do. He had come here to avoid anything happening with Frank on the farm, in the presence of Muriel and Walt, but from the moment he’d seen Frank in the doorway, like in the dream, it was Frank on top of him, fucking him, not Darius.

He’d driven his mother’s car to the tavern. As he approached it, he saw their farm truck. He was surprised he hadn’t noticed it when he’d arrived at the tavern. Frank was sitting in the front seat of the truck, with the motor running. Marty tried to act like he didn’t see Frank there. He got in his mother’s car, started it, and pulled out onto Highway 1. He had to drive back into the southern outskirts of Fairfield to get on the Libertyville Road. Frank followed him all the way back to the farm. They parked next to each other in the farmyard. The lights in the main house were out.

Frank was out of the truck before Marty turned the ignition off in the car, and he opened the door and held a hand out to the young man.

“You best come into the cottage before going into the main house,” he said. “We can’t do it in your parents’ house.”

The tone of his voice was low and a bit hoarse. Marty looked into the older man’s eyes and knew what Frank wanted. He wanted it too, but he looked plaintively over at the darkened main house. His folks didn’t know about him. They must know about Frank, because there’d been all of that scandal and yet they still offered him a job. But they didn’t know about him, their son. It would break their hearts to know, Marty was sure. He couldn’t do this here. He couldn’t do it at all if he didn’t want to ruin everything on the farm.

“Should we go back to the tavern?” he asked in a weak voice. He wasn’t saying no. He was too weak to say no to Frank. But not here. They couldn’t do it here.

Frank was holding his hand in a strong grip, though, and pulled him up from the driver’s seat and out of the car. “We’ll go into the cottage,” he said, as he pulled Marty in that direction.

Frank fucked him in the larger of the two bedrooms in the old homestead—the room Frank was using. The older man took his time, getting them both naked, making Marty service his cock as he no doubt watched Marty service Darius’s cock. Then he put Marty in the same position on the bed that Darius had done—on knees and elbows, Marty’s chest and cheek to the mattress, and Marty moaned as Frank pressed his face between the younger man’s butt cheeks and ate him out until Marty was begging for it. Then Frank mounted Marty from above and behind as Darius had done, worked a cock inside him that rivaled Darius’s in length and thickness, and fucked him hard and long.

Marty held there, mewing, under Frank, who, gripping the younger man’s waist as he worked his cock inside, stretching Marty’s walls, making the young man his until he was fully saddled, and, when he was, moving his hands to cover Marty’s pecs, thumbing the nubs and nuzzling his face into the hollow of Marty’s throat, as he thrust and thrust and thrust, fulfilling a dream of congress with each other that both men had carried for years.

“Yes, fuck yes. Give it to me. Breed me!” Marty cried out as Frank went deep, held, throbbing, tensing, jerking slightly, and then gave up his seed. No condom here; just raw, primeval sex. Marty had been vocal in the coupling. He had dreamed for years of the sultry mixed breed’s shaft being deep inside him, its seed flowing like this. He was mighty glad, though, that they were doing it in the old cottage rather than nearer to the brick house where his parents could hear them.

He knew now too that he’d let Frank do it again—whenever the stud wanted to and they could manage it. He knew he’d be here on the farm, with Frank, as long as Frank was here and wanted him.

Later in the night, when Marty entered the main house as silently as he was able, he fancied he heard a bedroom door shut in the back hallway before he entered it to reach his room.

* * * *

He got up late the next morning, dithering in his room, afraid to go out and face his parents, sure that they now knew and that the world would come crashing down on him even before he’d had a chance to figure out what he wanted to do with his life now. But this morning was no different from the three previous ones since he’d come home. Muriel had made him a substantial breakfast and she sat, drinking coffee, and pushing food at him at the table by the bay window, as Marty watched his father and Frank doing their morning chores out in the farmyard. This morning she chose to ask him about his trip home from Afghanistan, and, with a great relief at not discerning a change in her demeanor with him, Marty spun a story for her—one that didn’t include his encounter with the cowboy on the train between Chicago and Fairfield.

Despite his consternation of the complication of whatever Frank and he did on the farm now, he felt strangely relieved that he’d been covered both by Darius and Frank and that the decision of whether he would continue to lay down for men as he had done for Captain Buzz and other Marines at Camp Leatherneck had now been settled.

But now there were his parents to worry about. He knew they never could accept what he was.

* * * *

On Thanksgiving afternoon, Marty drifted by the dining room table on his way to the kitchen to see what he could pilfer from the fruits of Muriel’s full day of preparations. He paused briefly at seeing the already-set dining room table, all of the best china, crystal, and silverware out and a centerpiece of fresh holly taken off one of the farm’s trees, with yellow and red candles set in it.

At the kitchen door, he asked, “There are four places set at the table. Are we having company for Thanksgiving dinner?”

“Not company,” Muriel answered. “One of us. Frank will be sitting with us tonight. I probably should have asked him to come in to eat with the family before now—to take his place with the family.”

“Take his place with the family?” Marty asked, confused. “I don’t take your meaning.” Were his parents adopting Frank because they thought Marty would never pull his weight on the farm? That would actually be fine with Marty. He didn’t want to inherit this place and try to keep it going on his own.

“I think you do know what I mean, son,” she said, turning and looking at him pointedly. “I don’t think we need pretend that what is doesn’t exist anymore.”

Marty was stunned. She knew. Did his father know too? He and Frank had made an effort to be circumspect. They’d fucked like bunnies the last three days, whenever they got the chance, and Marty had been going over to the old homestead cottage at night when he figured his parents had gone to sleep and had slipped back into his room before he thought they had awakened, but he’d clearly been wrong about that. But was it only his mother who had cottoned on to them? Was his father still in the dark about it? What would happen with Frank if they, indeed, knew? Or would it be Marty who was thrown off the farm—just when he was beginning to want to be there? Frank was more useful at the farm than Marty ever would be. Frank lived for farming; Marty couldn’t manage that level of interest in it. And his parents had known about Frank’s bent all along.

Did his father, at least, not know?

The voice called from the living room. “Come in here and let’s talk, son,” Walt had called out. His voice sounded tired, but he’d worked a full day already on the farm, less work to do in the winter snow than during the other three seasons, but more than enough work for one man. When Marty entered the living room, his father was sitting in his favorite recliner, the daily newspaper open on his lap, a serious expression on his face. “Sit here beside me, son,” he said, gesturing to the smaller recliner beside him, both chairs pointed at the TV set. It was the chair that Marty’s mother usually sat in. They hadn’t established one in front of the TV for Marty yet.

“Did you think we didn’t know Frank was gay when we offered him the job here?” Walt asked.

“I don’t know. I wasn’t here then,” Marty said, trying to distract from what he knew the topic was, as he sat in his mother’s chair. He was just dissembling, though, and they both knew it. He’d been here when the scandal about Frank had blossomed in the community. He could see now that his parents probably thought Marty was tied up in the Frank scandal, although he wasn’t. He would have been if Frank had come for him then; he idolized Frank and it was Frank who helped propel Marty to accepting his feelings. But the backlash had scared Marty. It was a primary reason he joined and left. Now he knew that his parents probably understood all of that.

His dad just looked at him until Marty broke the painful silence. “Yes, I guess you did know,” he admitted. “It was all over the community. I thought it was because you had always given the Munoz’s a good shake. You didn’t hold them being a mixed-race couple and poor against them like others around here did until Frank became the local sports hero in high school, bringing all those trophies back to Fairfield and Libertyville. And then when the community turned on them when Frank was outed as gay and wants giving them winning teams anymore, I just thought you and Mom were being the good people that you are.”

“Thanks for that, son. And I’d like to think that that was part of it. But mostly it was because of you.”

“Because of me?”

“Yes. I think it is likely your mother and I realized you turned that way—that you were gay too—even before you did. I don’t think you fully knew it before you joined the Marines and went off to Afghanistan. Your mother and I hoped you went off because you were confused about yourself and not because you were afraid what we’d think. Sure, we would have liked for you to marry and continue the generations of Parsons on this farm, but nature is nature. We can’t live on a farm like this and not understand that feelings like that can’t just be a matter of personal choice. We saw it in the letters you sent back. That captain of yours was more than just your boss. We could tell that from your letters. So, we knew you’d be broken when you came home to us. We just wanted you to come home to us. But back to Frank. We offered him a job and a home mainly because we thought what if it had been you? What if it were our son who had these feelings and it became known he did? Would we want to ostracize him or have him accepted here? The answer was pretty obvious to us. We just give thanks you’re still alive—that you survived Afghanistan when your captain didn’t—and that you’ve come home. If coming home and being happy here includes Frank, that will be OK with us.”

“I don’t know what to say,” Marty whispered after a brief pause. “I don’t know where it goes from here.”

“Well, I think it goes one step at a time for us—first by making the most of Thanksgiving by setting a place for Frank at the table tonight. Next, I guess, is that if you want to move your room from the house out to the old homestead building, with Frank, that will keep your mother and me from waking up at night hearing you trying to get into the house without waking us.”