If he’d said no, I’d have let it go at that. I was already scared at my audacity to even suggest it. He was always the one that thought up new stuff for us to do. But he thought about it for a minute and then he said simply, “Okay.”
Neither one of us knew how to go about it, and it took a while to figure out the right positions even. The two of us laughed a little, from nervousness and from our ignorance. But we got it figured out soon enough, and after a couple of bad tries, I got it started.
“Ouch,” he said. He had been holding his breath, and he let it out loudly and jerked away from me.
“Hurt?” I asked, pausing. I knew it had, as tight as he had felt. Half of me wanted to stop, but the other half wanted badly to go on.
“No,” he lied, and pushed back toward me. He wasn’t likely to admit that he couldn’t take it after he had agreed to it, and if I tried to stop now, he would have thought I considered him a baby.
I went on with it, taking it slow, trying to be gentle even though I was pretty clumsy at it. After a little, I could tell his reactions. I could feel him tense up each time I went a little deeper into him, and I would stop where I was, letting him get used to it. And when I felt him relax a little, I’d go on.
I had never been so excited over anything before, or so happy. It was more than just the physical pleasure of being in someone, although that was certainly thrilling enough. Kenny was giving himself to me, and I knew then, suddenly and beyond any question, that I loved him—loved the soft little cheeks brushing against my thighs as I pushed into him, loved the dark hair of his head that my face was buried in, loved the feel of my hand on his cock, hard still so that I knew what I was doing had not turned him off.
I think the little devil learned to like it. He started pushing it back to me after a while, and wriggling around. He kept getting harder and harder in my hand and then suddenly he stiffened and came, shooting over my hand and his belly and wetting the bedclothes. His body shook and convulsed the way it did when he came, and I made it a minute behind him, emptying myself far up inside him, hugging the breath from him. He took it all without a complaint and afterward he laughed and called me “Big Swede,” but he didn’t mean it the way he had before.
It never happened again. When my desire went, it was replaced by a river of guilt that suddenly separated me from him. I was ashamed of what we had done—of what I had done. It was wrong, I was sure of it, and crazy. We weren’t kids anymore, we were men, and men didn’t do things like this.
Kenny was puzzled at first, and later angry. He never did understand why I was upset. “What’s wrong with it?” he wanted to know, arguing with me in tense whispers. “We both liked it, didn’t we? I liked it better than with girls, Mar, I really did. It’s not like it was anybody else, it’s you and me. Hell, I’d do it again. Right now, if you want to.
“No.” I jerked away from him when he tried to reach for me. He would have done it again right then, I knew. He was like that. One time just made him hungrier for the next. “Let me alone.”
I said it sharper than I meant to, and in a tone I had never used with him before, and it hit home. Even without looking at him, I knew I had hurt him. He didn’t say anything after that.
“Go to bed,” I said finally. I was tired all of a sudden, and mixed up. And the worst of it was, I wanted it too, again, but not badly enough.
Kenny didn’t have any guilt of his own, I’m sure of it, but some of mine rubbed off on him. The next day, it was all different between us. He didn’t look straight at me when we were around each other, and we didn’t say anything more to each other than we had to. When I went to bed that night, I saw him give me a funny looked. He wanted a sign, I know, or some word that told him everything was okay, but I didn’t give him any. He came to bed later and stopped at my room, opening the door and sticking his head inside.
“Mar,” he said in a whisper, “You asleep?”
I wasn’t, but a pretended I was. I never was a good liar. He knew I was pretending, and that must have hurt most of all. He waited a minute or two and then he went on to his own room, and I spent the whole night staring up at the ceiling and wishing he were in bed with me, curled up in my arms.
* * * * * * *
That was the last time he ever came down to my room at night. I came to hate myself for what I had done—not for screwing around like we had, but for hurting him the way I had, and shutting him out. I prayed for weeks that he would try again and I knew if he did that I would say, “yes” without any hesitation.
Right or wrong, good or bad, he had tormented my every dream at night, and through the whole day I couldn’t think of anything but Kenny—loving him, wanting him. I was nearly crazy from it all. I tried everything I could think of to show him how I felt, that it was all right now. A hundred times I suggested we go for a hike in the woods, or go into town together, or wrestle in the barn. He wasn’t having any, though. I had refused him once, something nobody had ever done before, and I wasn’t to have a second chance.
The worst of it was that he wanted it too. He hadn’t lied about liking what we had done. This was a whole new game for him and he wanted to play it to the hilt. But he was stubborn as an ox, and when he played again, it wasn’t with me.
I suppose, in a sense, I was the one who drove him to Dexter Holloman. From that standpoint, I was the cause of the storm that brewed during those following months. When it broke finally, it was sudden and furious, and in the end it swept Kenny away from us.
Strange to say, though, I probably suffered the least when Kenny left, disappearing one day to remain gone for five long years. Not that I didn’t miss him, in a way that none of the others could share, or even imagine; but for me, he had gone earlier.
He had left me after that night in my room. He had come back to Hanover, to the farm, but he had never come back to me.
CHAPTER THREE
It seemed that I had barely closed my eyes when Olsen tapped at my door to wake me. Homecoming or no homecoming, there was work to be done on a farm, even in October, and I had that to see to.
Usually we had the house to ourselves in the morning. There was always the aroma of fresh coffee from below as I cleaned up. It coaxed me along, hurrying me on my way. By the time I finally came down to the kitchen, Olsen would have our breakfast almost ready. There would be just time for me to wake up over the coffee before she set plates of ham and eggs and fresh bread in front of me, a small dish for herself; and then we would eat and talk, never anything too lengthy or serious. She kept up on how the farm was going, and I will give her credit, she knew as well as I did how much hay we would bring in this year, what prices it would fetch, which of the hands was earning his pay with good work and which ones wouldn’t likely be kept on another year.
Sometimes, too, I would hear of how things were going in the house: Mrs. Baker’s health, problems with the plumbing, whatever mattered in her world. It was a pleasant time of day. As mother and son, I suppose Olsen and I weren’t any outstanding success, but I often thought that as partners we worked fine.
I had forgotten though that before he had gone, Kenny had always been there with us during these early morning visits. If anything, he woke earlier than the two of us. It seemed almost as if he resented the time spent on sleeping, although I have never known a man who could fall asleep as quickly as he did, sleep as innocently untroubled, or wake as quickly.
He
