Crossing the Stream

I had laughed when Oliver said he’d had a thermal earth house built, but then I may have overdone it in the other direction when he took me there, because he left it to me in his will. It wasn’t just that it was dug into the side of a hill that had made me laugh. It also was because it was in the middle of nowhere—practically surrounded by the Rocky Mountains in rural Nowhere, Colorado—and we were city boys, Oliver and I.

The ice hockey season had been so intense, though, that I was happy to have the hillside house nudged up to the Gunnison National Forrest between Montrose and Gunnison to retreat to for the summer. For a while the Denver Avalanche was in contention and then it wasn’t, just limping toward the end of the season. And on top of that Denver’s assistant coach—and my mentor and lover—Oliver Lamont keeled over unexpectedly and died of a massive heart attack. Who would have known? I told myself that I could always try to unload the place at the end of summer before going back for the ice hockey season in Denver, where I, Pete Flint, played right wing for the Avalanche.

When I went down there to my newly acquired dug-in house it was with the intent to dig myself into the dirt as well and stay there until I could come to grips with Oliver’s passing. The house’s setting was so remote that I could hide out, scream when I wanted as loud as I wanted, and hit the walls with my fists, if I wanted, knowing that all that was beyond the paneling was dirt. Mourning wasn’t something I could stay and do in Denver. Oliver and I had been very careful to hide our relationship. It was believable that he would bring me with him from the Detroit Red Wings. I was a damn good right wing and Denver needed one at the time. We’d kept our living arrangements separate, and Oliver hadn’t given me any more attention on the rink than he gave any of the other guys. There may have been some in the club that sensed we were close, but it wasn’t something that hockey guys thought about. It was known that he had trained me from university days.

The summer—that was what I needed to get my head straight again. Then I’d go back to Denver and put this place on the market. Surely there was someone who would want a house that cost practically nothing to run summer or winter other than the electricity and cable brought up from the nearest town, Cimarron, on Route 50 between Montrose, to the west, and Gunnison, to the east. Although Cimarron couldn’t really be called a town. It was a hub for electricity and cable, though, which was a godsend for those few of us up in these hills.

The house went right through the top of a hill, near its summit, and there was enough of glass coverage on both sides of the hill and in skylights so that, when you were inside, you didn’t have the feeling of being in a fox den. The entry was on the east side of the hill, where the road and power lines came up. A semicircle was cut out of the side of the hill here. The foyer had full-length windows on each side. Stretching out north from there was the kitchen and then master bedroom and a bath, and to the south in a curve were located two bedrooms, with a bath between them. The living room and dining room opened out onto a shallow terrace on the west side of the hill. All of the rooms had skylights going up to the top of the hill, so there was plenty of light coming in. The cutouts into the hill were deep enough so that if you were in the valleys to either side of the hill, you wouldn’t really be aware there was a house there until and unless it was lit up at night.

This is what the house offered to me—a hideaway with no other habitation or indication of life to see. At least that was true on the east side. It proved not so true this summer on the west side. On the west, the hill sloped down to a mountain stream. Across the stream was a meadow rising up to a hill that wasn’t as high as mine was. Half way up that hill was a derelict wood log cabin. Or at least it had been derelict when Oliver had first brought me here. That was not so much the case this summer when I retreated here to nurse my grief alone.

It took me a while to notice that the cabin was being renovated, and the first clue I had that it was was the sound of hammering that echoed across the stream. Until then, I hadn’t been coming out on the west side much. I’d set one of the bedrooms up as an exercise room and I was working myself into exhaustion. It wasn’t just because when I was counting reps I wasn’t thinking about Oliver—and that I wasn’t getting any. It also was because I had to use the off season to be in shape for the season. Pro ice hockey was not something the out-of-shape should try. And I stayed in shape. So, I worked out to exhaustion during the day, and sat out on the living room terrace and drank beer and watched the sunset at night—and put on weight I’d have to take off the next day. I’d drag to bed half crocked, which helped having to go to bed alone, and woke up to start the exercise regime all over again.

The afternoon I heard the hammering, though, I went to the west terrace to check out the noise. That’s when I realized that the cabin across the stream was being renovated. A man—stripped to the waist—was on the roof, patching shingles. A beat-up old Ford 150 pickup was parked next to the cabin. A service truck was there, as well, and a couple of guys on the ground were stringing cable. The cabin was going to have electricity and cable.

I couldn’t see the men working over there very well, so I went back into the house and searched for binoculars. I knew Oliver had a pair here; he’d taken them out when I was here before for us to watch deer at the stream at dusk. By the time I found them, though, the stripped-down guy was off the roof. I realized I hadn’t found the binoculars to watch the fully dressed service technicians, though.

The next day the hammering had resumed and I went out on the terrace with the binoculars. The guy on the roof was young and well-built, although more in a slim, willowy way than the bulked-up muscular way of pro ice hockey players like me. He was blond and maybe twenty-five or so, about three years younger than I was. He also was very good looking. Watching him made me go hard. I hadn’t been with a guy since Oliver had died and that was part of what had me tensed up and pounding the bag hanging from the ceiling in the exercise room so hard. Of course I didn’t put the binoculars down. The guy was moving in fluid motions, like a dancer. As I watched, I imagined doing things with and to him and my hand went to my crotch. I was in an athletic T and gym shorts so there was little impediment to handing myself, and before I realized it, I had shot a load into the shorts. I only then pulled away.

But the orientation of my life changed from that point. I moved the punching bag and some of the other equipment out to the terrace, which was covered in steel, with the grass-covered earth on top of it. I worked out there for many of my routines, taking more breaks that I had been doing before, to use the binoculars and stroke myself off as I watched the blond guy across the stream work on his house.

That only lasted a couple of weeks, as he finished on the exterior and moved to the interior. That left me bereft of a routine I’d fallen into and a roamed around for a few days out of sorts and without a routine that helped me get through the days and nights. I contemplated moving the exercise equipment back to the bedroom and resuming the former routine, but that had no attraction for me anymore. What I needed now was to get laid—to fuck someone.

Oliver and I hadn’t been possessive with sex, and we’d both been versatile, enjoying flip-flop fucking, each of us taking a turn on top and bottom. I was more highly sexed than he was. He was some twenty-five years older than I was. I wouldn’t go with anyone else in the town where I was on the ice hockey squad, but he would take me on trips—to Europe and the Caribbean and Thailand, and he’d help me go on binges of fucking other guys. He liked to help set the guys up and then watch.

The point here is that there was no impediment in remembering Oliver to not fuck a guy. He would have approved. I hadn’t thought about that when I’d retreated here. But as I watched the guy across the stream, it came more and more in my mind that Oliver would want me to be having sex. But here I was in Nowhere, Colorado, with no prospects other than a pair of binoculars, my own hand, and a cute-looking guy working on his house a half a mile away.

I sulked and probably would continue to sulk if the guy across the stream hadn’t upped the ante—without realizing he’d done so.

It wasn’t long before the blond guy had gotten his cabin fixed up to how he wanted it. It wasn’t very large and it wasn’t ever going to be a model home, so it didn’t take him long to settle down to the routine of his life. He almost never was away from the cabin that I could tell the times I checked. I hadn’t taken the exercise equipment in, so I was out on the western terrace much of the day. I knew when he was gone because the Ford pickup would be gone too—and it almost never was.

What was scintillating and drove me crazy, though, was to discover that, once the guy had settled into a routine and assumed he was alone in the world, he proved to be a nudist. Whenever he was outside the cabin, which was often, he was naked, wearing just sneakers. My binoculars—and my hand—went into overtime, and I found I spent most of my time on my terrace. And not only did he do his outdoor chores naked, but he had a Tai Chi type exercise routine he did for an hour a day outside the cabin in full view of the binoculars.

Nude, he was a Michelangelo statue god. He wasn’t bulked up, but his body was perfectly formed and his equipment, while not hung, went perfectly with the rest of the package. He was smooth bodied except of a trimmed bush, which was blond and curly like the hair on his head. Even from here I could see that his eyes were a milky blue and that there was a halo about him and screamed “Ain’t I just the finest you’ve ever seen?” He moved gracefully, like a dancer. And I had frequent sex with him even if he didn’t know it.

Just being a voyeur wasn’t enough, of course. I had stuck to the house when I wasn’t shopping down in Gunnison for a full month. I was getting a lot of exercise, of course, but it occurred to me that I was being derelict in running and pumping iron. I started running on paths that Oliver had established around the hillside and over the top of the earth house. And I did so when I saw that the guy across the stream was out and about. I couldn’t bring myself to strip down entirely, so I ran in sneakers and gym shorts, but I knew that I still looked damn good stripped to the waist. He couldn’t help but see me running. I watched, and the day he stopped his Tai Chi routine to watch me, I wanted to cheer.

For all that, though, there were two hill slopes and a stream between us, and taking good looks of each other was all that was happening. He wasn’t outside all that much. I had no idea what he did in the cabin, but that’s where he was most of the time.

And that’s the way it was until midsummer.

* * * *

I can credit a laundry room light fixture for my first much-needed hookup of the summer.

When I went out on the west terrace one morning to do my run, I first checked with the binoculars on whether the blond cutie across the streams was out at his regular time in the altogether doing his Tai Chi exercises. He wasn’t. And his old pickup truck was gone. So, running the hill in the nearly altogether didn’t seem like it would have much of a payoff. My run increasingly was appearing to interrupt his exercises. We were two voyeurs, each watching the other, with a half mile and a mountain stream before us. He didn’t seem to stroke himself off at the sight of me, as I did watching him naked and tying his body in knots, but I fancied that he went hard while watching me run. Could I hope that he was gay?

Well, since he wasn’t there this morning, there wasn’t of a reason for me to exercise out here, and there were thunderclouds overhead. The light fixture over the washer and dryer in the laundry room had gone bad and needed to be replaced. This seemed like a good time to get that done.

I drove down to Cimarron on route 50 and then east to Gunnison, where I did my shopping.

“We sometimes have those,” the guy at the hardware store in Gunnison told me, “but we’re out of stock. I can order you one or I can check with our store in Montrose to see if they have it in stock.”

“Could you do that, please?” I asked. I really didn’t want to put off the chore longer if I didn’t have to.

He went off and called and came back. “Yes, they have them in stock.”

Thanking him, I drove west, past Cimarron and the cutoff up to my place, and on to Montrose. It turned out to be the best decision I’d made in some time.

I recognized the beat-up, rusting Ford 150 pickup parked outside the Montrose hardware store at S. Townsend Avenue, the main north-south street of the town, and South 1st Street. I parked my nice, new, shiny Dodge Ram beside it. It didn’t escape me that the two trucks beside each other like that were like me and the guy from across the stream—in size. My big muscle truck dwarfed his small pickup.

“Now, don’t you top that pickup while I’m in the store,” I murmured as I patted the Dodge Ram on the dashboard and climbed down from it.

I saw him almost immediately when I entered the store. Surprisingly, I had no trouble identifying him with clothes on. I’d been studying him for weeks—every square inch of him. He was as cute and alluring up close as he was through binoculars a half mile off. He looked at me as I passed him in the aisle on my way back to the back counter, and I was happy to see that his eyes paused on me and he gave me a little smile and a nod. But I don’t think he recognized me as the hunk from across the stream.

I did my business in finding and picking out the fluorescent bulb light fixture and came to the register. There was someone else between me and the blond as he was checking out. My guy was buying a sack of birdseed, I saw. He had several bird feeders hanging from the trees around his cabin and attracted a lot of feathered customers, so I wasn’t surprised.

He was putting the sack of birdseed in the bed of his pickup as I was coming to the exit and I hung back, just inside the door. He looked around and smiled, but I didn’t think he’d seen me there. Instead of getting in the pickup, though, he set off walking north on S. Townsend. I put the light fixture in the backseat of the double-cab Dodge Ram and set off in his wake, holding back three-quarters of a block.

He didn’t go far. At North 1st Street, he turned east and a couple of blocks in, stopped at a bungalow that now was a bar, with a weathered sign saying Crazy Horse Saloon out in the yard, and one repeating the name over the steps up to the front porch. I’d been in Colorado long enough to know there was a Crazy Horse Saloon in every town in the West. They weren’t all bars like this, though.

I entered a couple of minutes after the cute blond did and it was obvious from outset that this was a gay bar. Not only were the customers all men, but most of the men were paired off and were leaning intimately into toward each other over the small tables they sat at. Also, the artwork on the wall was of naked muscular male torsos. I felt at home because there wasn’t anything on the wall that I couldn’t compete with. The men in the room seemed to know and appreciate that, because they all turned and looked at me, took their breath in, and smiled as I entered the bar.

The cute blond was bellied up to a long bar running the width of the room to the right. He was leaning into the bar with a boot raised to the rail, and when I entered, he turned and gave me a smile—just like he’d known I’d followed him here from the hardware store—and maybe he did. I still didn’t think he knew I was his neighbor with the binoculars, though.

I bellied up to the bar about five feet from him, with no one between us. I saw no reason to waste time, though.

“Hey,” I said.

“Hey back,” he answered. Again the smile.

“Haven’t seen you around before,” I said. It was a nonsense line, as I didn’t come into Montrose. I did my shopping in Gunnison. But it was something to say and it was true.

“Saw you in the hardware store,” he answered.

“Buying a new light fixture,” I answered. It was all nonsense, but it was sustained conversation. He didn’t have anything more brilliant to say, but he seemed as happy to be talking to me as I was to him.

“Setting up house?” he asked. “New to Montrose?” I gave him a quizzical look. “If you’re buying a light fixture,” he explained.

“I have a place up in the hills,” I answered. “Light fixtures sometimes go bad. But it’s just a summer place. I work in Denver three quarters of the year. You? Are you new here? Can I buy you a drink?” I added, as the bartender had shown up.

“That would be nice,” he readily said, turning on that shy smile again.

That was more meaningful in a bar like this than it would seem on the surface. When you’re cruising, as we both obviously were—and obviously were interested in each other, as our eyes and body stances gave us away—letting a guy buy your drink was a declaration of one or two things. In most instances you were taking a submissive role, in which case the guy offering to buy you a drink was making a declaration of domination you were agreeing to if you took the drink. In a few instances when you let another guy, usually a much older submissive man, buy you a drink, you were saying yes to him renting your cock to him. I don’t think there was any danger in this instance of me being taken to be a submissive.

We had started negotiations and declared the relationship we were dancing around. As part of the hookup dance, he move a foot toward me down the bar and I moved a foot and a half toward him. There wasn’t room for anyone to belly up to the bar between us now. Ours was a standard dance, which the bartender saw constantly in play. He put both Bud Lites down in front of me and I put twice of what they went for on the bar for him to pick up. I handed the bottle toward the blond, making him slide another half foot toward me to take it. The bartender was helping me declare as dominant. The cutie wasn’t objecting in any way.

“Pete. Pete Flint,” I said, with a smile, as I handed him the beer. I took a few seconds longer than necessary letting loose of the bottle when he’d grasped it. Both of us understood why.

“I’m Collen Dergenwald,” he answered. “Thanks for the beer, Pete. This’ll hit the spot. It’s a hot day.”

“Yes, it is,” I said, my thoughts going to him glistening in the sun, nude, as he went through his Tai Chi routine. I ached to have him. “Dergenwald. That sounds seriously German.”

“Yes, that’s me. Second generation German. And it’s what I do. I’m a freelance book editor—mostly German literature studies for academic presses.”

So, that’s what went on in that cabin. And that’s why the electric and cable lines had gone in, even though it must have been expensive to bring them into that cabin from Cimarron. He did his editing remotely by computer, and he had to have good, reliable service for that.

“Sounds serious,” I said. What it sounded like was a submissive’s job. I could probably break him in two in sex, if I wanted to. If he wanted me to.

“You? You said you worked in Denver three quarters of the year.”

“Sports. I’m into professional sports. During the colder months.”

“Denver Broncos?” he asked “You do look like a football player.”

“Hockey. Ice hockey. The Avalanche.”

“Ah, interesting,” he said.

Interesting inviting or interesting maybe overwhelming, I wondered. There was no secret that I had him by a good five inches and forty pounds—and who knows how many cock inches. Was I scaring him off? “Another beer?” I asked. “My treat.”

“Sure, why not?” Collen answered—without hesitation.

If he was in on the code, that was the sealing of a deal. You didn’t accept a second drink if you were thinking of backing off. And he’d picked the venue, so I felt safe that I had him.

“German isn’t exactly a Colorado thing. Are you from here?” I asked.

“No. Michigan. I went to the University of Michigan. Ann Arbor. And then to Germany for specialized studies—Augsburg University. Most of my work is with the university press at Ann Arbor.”

We couldn’t be more different in interests, I realized. But now, for today, with my balls aching to fuck him and him signaling willingness, we needed to jell on some level.

“That’s a coincidence,” I said. “I came here from Michigan myself. Meeting here seems to be fate. I landed in Colorado in a team trade. What brought you here?”

“I came here for the isolation—for the solitude of the mountains. Editing academic material is pretty intensive. I do it better without a lot of distraction.”

“But you don’t avoid all distractions, do you?” I asked. “You don’t always want to be alone.”

“No, I don’t always want to be alone,” he said, looking up into my face and giving me that shy smile. “Sometimes I want to be with someone else.”

“With a man?”

“Yes,” he said.

“I’m a man,” I said, with a smile.

“Yes, you most certainly are,” he answered.

I fucked him in a motel west on East Main Street, route 50, at the edge of town. The motel consisted of individual log cabins set back from the road and obviously catered to gay male hookups. There was practically a beaten path from the Crazy Horse to the motel and the motel had an ad up on the bulletin board at the bar. Can’t get any more obvious than that.

He didn’t question why I wanted him to totally undress for me and let me turn him around and glide my hands over his naked body. He had no idea that I had been dreaming of doing this for weeks. He wasn’t a novice. When I sat at the foot of the bed, pulled him toward me, and coaxed him down to his knees between my thighs, he moved there willingly and in the same fluid motion I watched him in doing his exercises. Without prompting, he undid my belt, unzipped and flared my jeans, pulled the waistband of my briefs under my erection and balls—gasping at the size of me—slid his lips down the side of my cock, and gave me expert head.

I didn’t have to worry about whether or not this guy was a novice at this.

When I couldn’t take any more without blowing, I pulled him off my cock and raised him to his feet. Rising myself and turning him to the bed, I eased him down on his back.

“Open your legs and roll up your ass,” I commanded. “I’m gonna eat you out and then do you.” Last chance for him to say “just kidding.”

He complied without hesitation. He gasped and writhed under me, as, holding his hands captive with mine, I sucked his cock and balls and ate his ass out until he begged me for the cock. Rising over him then and capturing his eyes with mine, as I rolled a condom on, I then slowly fed my cock into him, as he arched his back, opened his mouth in a silent scream, and started to pant heavily. And then I fucked him and fucked him and fucked him.

We rested on the bed, and then I moved him on all fours, mounted him, and fucked him again, at last emptying out the months’ long accumulation of cum in my balls and luxuriating in his whimpering of how big I was and how totally and gloriously I was possessing him.

When I woke up from a doze after that, I was alone in the motel room. But I in no way thought that this was the last time we would fuck. In fact, he’d gone out of his way to say he usually came in to Montrose on Tuesday afternoons. I got the distinct impression that he said that so I would take note of it.

On the way out of town, I saw a book store and stopped and went in. A prim schoolmarmy woman stood behind the desk.

“Do you have any literature books in translation by German authors?” I asked.

She looked surprised. “You read German literature?”

“I am going to read it now,” I answered.

“Well, there are some famous German authors we should have in translation—Goethe, Kafka, Hermann Hesse, and Thomas Mann, for instance. Which of those—?”

“I’ll take one of each,” I said. “You choose what would be best.”

* * * *

The next week was much like the previous several weeks—adjusting my schedule to when the young man I now knew as Collen Dergenwald, the German literature academic press editor, was out of his cabin, in the buff, and moving around for exercising—with two exceptions. First, I was doing a lot of catch-up reading of German authors, which was eye-opening and mind expanding. Much of this was done at night under a reading lamp in a comfortable wing chair. And, second, when I was outside—and much of the time when I was inside, as well—I too was in the buff. I found that going nudist, save for sneakers on my feet, was freeing. I exercised on the west terrace naked, and I even did my running on the hillside—usually gauged for when Collen would be outside—in the nude as well. Also, with memories of the afternoon with the sexy little blond, I was in erection much of the time.

I must admit that I didn’t mind that a bit. I did, though, pine to be inside Collen again.

The chance for that came on the next Tuesday afternoon when I saw him leave the cabin, my attention arrested because he was dressed in jeans and a plaid shirt, get into his pickup, and leave the cabin. Throwing on clothes, I went out to the Dodge Ram and drove down to Montrose.

I was in luck. I saw his beat-up old Ford 150 parked outside the Crazy Horse Saloon. I parked there as well. When I went inside, I saw him sitting at a table, facing the door, alone, as if he was expecting me. I bought two Bud Lites at the bar and took them over to his table.

“Do you mind if I join you?” I asked, standing there with the two bottles in my hands.

“You can do whatever you please,” he answered with that special smile of his. “I would have thought you’d have known that now. We sorted that out last Tuesday. I’ll blow you and then lay there with my legs open and let you do whatever you want.”

With a little laugh, I sat at the table and handed him one of the bottles. “You don’t mince words, do you?” I said.

He put the beer bottle up his mouth and let his lips go down the sides of the neck and back up and then repeated it so there’s no way I wouldn’t get the idea. As he gave the beer bottle head, his hooded eyes captured mine. I nearly shot my load right there.

“God, you are sexy,” I murmured.

“God, you have a big cock,” he countered with. We both laughed.

We sat there, staring at each other and swigging our beers for a long moment, both, I’m sure, knowing we’d soon be fucking.

He broke the silence, with a surprise. “Your preseason will start in mid-September. When does that mean you have to return to Denver?”

“The last week in August.”

“So, three more weeks.”

“Yes, that’s right,” I said. I almost said, so let’s get it on; we don’t have much time left. But then he continued to surprise me.

“The first exhibition game is with the Detroit Red Wings, isn’t it? So, you’ll be playing your old team. Deter Nielsen is right wing for them now. That’s the position you played, isn’t it? He’s good, but your stats were better than his are when you left.”

“Yes, that’s right,” I said, showing the surprise in my voice. “You’ve been doing your homework, haven’t you?”

“Yes, I wanted to move in your direction. We didn’t have much to talk about last time. Two different worlds.”

“Talking wasn’t what we did best,” I said.

“No, it wasn’t.” He blushed and laughed. “God, you’ve got a big cock,” he repeated in the unlikely event I hadn’t heard him the first time he said it.

“I’ve been doing my homework too,” I admitted. “I thought what you do—work with German literature—would be dull. But it turns out to be fascinating. I’ve been reading. Goethe, Kafka, Hermann Hesse, Thomas Mann. They all wrote homosexual themes and might all have been gay themselves. Quite a bunch.”

“Yes,” Collen said, laughing again. “Editing critiques of their works has its rewards and pleasant little surprises—Goethe’s poem, ‘To the Moon’; Kafka’s Gregor Samsa; Hesse’s examination of himself in Steppenwolf; even the ache of a man’s desire for a boy in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice. All of them struggled with undercurrents of homosexuality at a time when it was taboo to discuss it openly.”

“For some, it’s still a problem,” I said. I didn’t mean to say that, but it was what was running through my mind all of the time I made discoveries of what the German authors were hinting at and struggling with in their writings.

“I understand,” Collen said, nudging my knee with his under the surface of the table. “Nothing needs to be revealed publicly about it. I certainly haven’t done so in the last years.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, giving him a sharp look.

“I told you I went to the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor the other day. You didn’t tell me that you did too.”

“You knew I went there?” I asked, surprised.

“Yes. I was a freshman when you were a senior, a standout on the university ice hockey team. I knew of you then and started aching for you soon after. I followed you when Coach Lamont took you on to the Detroit Red Wings and then when he brought you to Denver. I knew you were lovers. I knew I wanted you too.”

“How did you know? We were so careful. Did others know too?”

“You probably won’t remember, but Coach Lamont took you to Mackinac Island that summer before you went with Detroit. I think he took you away often to keep people from knowing and so you could let loose. You stayed at a small gay-friendly hotel. My roommate from Ann Arbor worked there that summer. Coach Lamont and you fucked the stuffing out of him while you were there. He told me how big you were, and, if anything, I think he underestimated you. Later, knowing my inclinations and that I had a crush on you, he told me about that. I’ve been following you close—trying to get close. Learning of the house up in the hills here that Lamont left you, gave me my chance to get close.”

“You came here because of me? You knew I was in the hill house across the stream from the cabin you fixed up?”

“Yes. Does that make me sound crazy—like a stalker? Have I blown it by admitting all to you?”

He was giving me a naughty puppy dog look. He was trembling. I could tell how crucial this moment was for him. I contemplated what he said. He wasn’t voicing my worst fear—that “everyone” knew I was gay and had partnered with Oliver. What he was doing in saying he’d gone to the length of tracking me down here was flattering me. He was confirming that, from the beginning, he was willing to lie down, open his legs to me, and let me do whatever I wanted with him. He wasn’t outing me to anyone else.

I gave him a smile. “Do you want another beer, or do you want to go to that motel on the edge of town now and find out all of the ways I can fuck you?”

“What do you think?” he said, and I watched the relief flood through his body. I had thought I had to do a lot of scheming to be with him, but it had been nothing compared with what he had done to be with me.

* * * *

I was on my back on the bed in the same motel cabin we’d done it in the previous week. This time, won over to Collen’s “let it all hang out” I’d fallen in to in the hills, I had stripped down while he was doing so, and we’d gone into a standing clutch at the foot of the bed. We’d used hands and lips to explore each other’s naked bodies in a slow-motion standing wrestling match. We’d eventually settled on the bed, with Collen suspended over me, in reverse stance, and he was sucking me off while I was doing the same for him.

I was in full-erection high heat and reaching over to the top of the nightstand for a condom packet when he rolled off of me and bounded off the bed and to the bathroom room with the comment, “Hold that thought; gotta piss first.”

He didn’t close the door to the bathroom and, as I rolled over and sat on the side of the bed, stroking my cock to keep it in fighting trim, I watched him standing in profile in front of the toilet, dick in hand, and waiting for it to soften up enough to allow him to piss.

He should have closed the bathroom door if he didn’t want what he then got. I slit open a condom packet, crowned myself, and, taking another packet with me, sauntered into the bathroom.

“I’ll be just a minute now and then you can—”

“I can right now,” I said, coming in behind him and crouching down. I wrapped one arm around his belly and cupped his balls and dick deck with the other hand. I held his cock there while he pissed an arc into the toilet. “God, Pete. What are you doing. I’ve never—”

Again I didn’t let him finish his sentence. He transitioned into a groaned, “Oh fuck, oh shit,” As I lifted his feet off the floor with the strength of my arm encasing his belly and pitched his torso forward so that the palms of his hands and his cheek pressed into the mirrored wall. Then he was crying out, “Shit, Fuck. You’re gonna split me. You’re too big,” as, proving that I wasn’t too big—that I was just right—I lifted him ass and set it down on my erection and entered and entered and entered and entered him. He was writhing around, which only helped me get saddled.

I growled, “Settle down on and come for me.” This reduced him to moans and heavy panting as I stroked inside him with my cock and stroked him off with my hand pulling on his shaft as it hung over the toilet bowl. I held him there, stroking him until he shot his load into the toilet. I was still fucking him, but not far from jacking. “Arch back to me, grabbing the back of my neck, and watch me finishing you with me in the mirror,” I commanded. He complied, arching his back toward me and reaching around with one hand to grasp the back of my neck, bringing us cheek to cheek. We could see it all in the mirrored wall behind the toilet and sink.

He was panting hard and moaning, hardening up again at the view of me fucking him, and he reached down with his other hand and stroked his cock, arcing another load of cum into the toilet bowl before I shuddered, tensed, and then filled out the bulb of the condom inside him.

We held there, both trembling and panting hard. “That . . . was . . . incredible,” he whispered. “I’ve never done anything like that before.”

“We’ll do a lot of things you’re probably never done before,” I murmured.

And we did. I fucked him in the shower, backed against the slimy tiles, his knees hooked on my hips and his arms slung around my neck, as I pounded up into him with a fresh condom, moving his back up and down on the wall, under the stream of water, with the strength of my cock thrusts. And I fucked him while I sat on the side of the bed, legs spread, and held his ass into my crotch, with him bent over, grasping his ankles with his hands, and me pulling him on and off my shaft. And when I tired, he rode me, with me lying on my back on the bed and him doing a revolving cowboy on my cock, using my shaft as his private gear shift to rev his engine, while I held his slim waist between my hands to keep his gyrations from putting him into orbit toward the ceiling. I fucked him so much that he was reamed to my requirements and never complained again about me being too big.

Afterward we lay there on the mussed-up sheets of the bed, stretched out against each other, touching each other intimately, each hoping that we would recover for another go at it before we had to leave.

“I don’t know the next time . . . you weren’t shitting me that you come into Montrose every Tuesday?”

“There’s just a stream between us,” he responded. “It’s shallow. You can just cross the stream anytime you want. Any time you want, I’ll want it.”

“Yeah, I guess that’s right,” I said. “But I sort of enjoyed the voyeuristic aspect to it. Were you just teasing me with always being nude and doing your exercises outside in the nude? Was that just part of your tease?”

“No. I didn’t give you a full explanation when you asked why I settled out in the wilds like this to live my life and to do my job. It was, certainly, because I wanted to get close to you. But I would have come to someplace remote like this anyway. I like moving around in the nude. I’m a nudist when I can manage it. I can be free to move at the cabin. You’ve been doing it for the last week too. Don’t you feel freer?”

“Yeah, I guess. I certainly feel sexier. And I certainly like watching you do it. So, you’re going to stay at the cabin.”

“Yes, I’m staying. It suits me.” We were quiet for a while except for the increasing heaviness of our breathing. We both knew I was recovering. We both were hard as a rock under the touch of the other. We both knew that I would roll over on top of him at any moment and take him again. “And you?” he whispered. “Two or three weeks and then it’s back to Denver.”

“Yes, I’m afraid so. But it isn’t that far down here from Denver. I’d thought of selling the place at the end of the summer, but now I think I’ll keep it—and find time to slip down here in more than just the off season.”

I didn’t wait for him to respond. I rolled over on top of him and listened for the gasp and intake of breath as I thrust inside.