Mike and Danny: Restless Hearts
by Rock Lane Cooper
This is
a work of homoerotic fiction. If you are offended by such material or if you
are not allowed access to it under the laws where you live, please exit now.
This work is copyrighted by the author and may not be copied or distributed in
any form without the written permission of the author, who may be contacted at:
rocklanecooper@yahoo.com
Note that these stories, including this
one, are not an endorsement of unsafe sex. They take place many years before
the appearance of AIDS and before it was standard practice to use condoms to
reduce the risk of infection from sexually transmitted diseases. Remember
always: that was then, this is now. Sex is precious, and so are life and
health.
Chapter 11
Oscar has some words for Baxter; Danny
has second thoughts; Ty takes to the road; Mike
enjoys his day off.
As Baxter drove from
His father had recognized him as soon as
he walked in the door of his room at the nursing home, and that made him feel
good. The man had become so forgetful in recent years, so easily confused. The
day his dad had looked at him and seemed unsure who he was, he’d felt a sudden
fear that he was losing his father forever.
But he had improved since his old friend
Oscar had returned and begun to look after him. The two of them carried on like
they once had, though Oscar now did almost all the talking. His father was much
too slow to keep up with him, and you had to read his expressions to gather
what he was thinking. But they seemed to say he understood more than he could
put into words.
“It’s a good day for him,” Oscar said
after Baxter had said goodbye and they stepped outside the room. “He talks
about you sometimes when you’re not here. And he wants me to tell him stories
about you—you know, the memories I have about you when you were young.”
“What memories?” Baxter wondered.
“Oh, you know,
that first horse of yours took you under a tree branch and drug you off. You
fell in all that cowshit and you got so darn mad.”
“Oscar, I think that was you you’re rememberin’.”
“We thought you broke a collarbone there
for sure, that time.”
“That was when I fell through the floor
of the hayloft.”
“Naw, you got
that wrong, Baxter.”
“Well, you’d think I’d be the one to
remember something like that.”
“Anyways, you shoulda
seen your dad when I told him that story. His face lit up like a Christmas
tree.”
“Oscar, you mix stuff up like that and
you’re just gonna confuse him.”
“And maybe your memory ain’t so good as you think it is
either.”
Baxter decided to shut up at that point.
What mattered was that Oscar was keeping his dad entertained and interested in
staying alert and alive. If they both wanted to remember it was him fell in cowshit, it probably didn’t matter how it really happened,
because one way or another he’d slipped, fallen, or been splattered in his
share of it and then some.
“I never told him about them ticks,
though,” Oscar said and elbowed him.
“What ticks?”
“You can thank me for keepin’
that foolery one of your secrets all these years.”
“What ticks?”
“Don’t tell me you went and forgot that
one, too.”
Baxter looked at Oscar and tried to
recall anything he wouldn’t have wanted his father to know about ticks.
“That time you came home with them
buggers all over your bare ass from sittin’ out in
the woods with your pants down—jerkin’ off, I reckon—I can’t think of any other
way it coulda happened.”
“Oh, that,” Baxter said and felt his face
flush.
“Now he remembers,” Oscar said, like he’d
scored a point. “I had you bend over and I took a lighted match to each one of
them little critters.”
The memory came back to him of each sharp
burn against his skin and Oscar’s glee, as one after another he scorched them
till they were dead.
“Never seen anything
like it.” Oscar was shaking his
head now, giving him a poker face as he tried to keep from smiling.
To get Oscar not to tell his father, he’d
agreed to muck out stalls in the horse barn for a month. He couldn’t remember
anymore why it was so important to keep it a secret.
“Hell, you can tell him that one. I don’t
care anymore,” Baxter said.
Oscar grinned at him now. “Your dad knew
what was goin’ on with you. He always kinda wondered what to tell you about what happens in a
boy’s britches as he grows and what to do about it.”
“Talk about secrets. He sure kept that
one to himself.”
“You two never had that talk?”
“Nope, we sure didn’t.”
“I told him a boy figures it out watching
the livestock.”
“Oh, yeah, that was a big help,” Baxter
said, remembering how little he’d understood about it all.
“But you turned out all right, didn’t
you?”
Baxter thought about this. It hadn’t
exactly been easy. But would his father have told him anything about sex that
would have made a difference?
“I kept telling him it was OK you never
got married,” Oscar said.
“You two talked about that?”
“We talked about you a lot,” Oscar said.
They had walked down the corridor to the
front desk and stepped outside, where Oscar pulled a cigarette from a pack in
his shirt pocket and struck a wooden match on the seat of his pants to light
it.
“How do you do that? I never could,”
Baxter said.
“Your butt’s probably still a little fire
shy.” Oscar sucked in the smoke from the cigarette and exhaled, serious now
instead of enjoying his little joke. “He wanted you to do a better job’n he did makin’ a wife
happy.”
“I don’t think he made my mom unhappy.”
“I kept tellin’
him, stop frettin’ about the boy,” Oscar said,
ignoring the remark. “He’s not the marryin’ kind.”
Baxter looked at him as he took another
drag on his cigarette. “What ever give you an idea like that?”
Oscar shrugged. “You get a hunch about
another man. What else is there to say?”
“I got close to gettin’
married once.”
“Got close and backed off?”
“You could say that.”
“I never even got close.”
“Those cigarettes are gonna
kill ya, you know?”
“Now you’re changin’
the subject.”
“I thought we were done. And I gotta get goin’.” Baxter turned and studied Oscar now, puzzled by the
tone of his voice. “So what’s your point?”
“There’s only one person in this life for
me.” Oscar gazed across the parking lot and tipped the ash from his cigarette
with a crooked finger. “And that’s your dad.”
“I can see that. And I thank you.”
“Nothin’
to thank me for. I always thought
more of your dad than anyone else—man or woman.”
“I guess that’s what I meant.”
“I left him that time ’cause it got me so
mad he wouldn’t see me the same way. It was your ma and then it was you always
come first.”
Baxter thought back now over the years.
“That’s why you left us?”
“Damnedest fool thing I ever done.”
“All I knew was you two had a fight over somethin’.”
“Funny thing, the way he is now? It’s
almost like I wasn’t gone. He don’t remember any of
it.” Oscar laughed and took another drag of the cigarette. “And I sure as hell ain’t gonna remind him.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“So you know.”
“Know what?”
“I love your dad and I’m gonna be here lovin’ him till the
day he’s gone.”
This time when Baxter looked at him,
Oscar was looking straight at him. It was a piercing look with something in it
like anger, determination, and sorrow that it had taken him so long to say what
he’d just said.
He dropped the cigarette to the ground
and stepped on it with the sole of his boot. “Go,” he said. “You gotta get goin’.” And he turned and walked back inside.
Baxter had just stood there, watching him
walk away, and then he went out to his pickup in the parking lot. He had never
really wondered about the friendship between Oscar and his father. Like men you
could find anywhere on ranches and small-town bars, they’d buddied
up once and just stayed that way.
He couldn’t imagine the two men any
closer than that. And it had never occurred to him that one of them might love
the other a whole lot more and in a different way. Maybe it could happen that
he’d get fed up and strike out on his own when that kind of love was never
returned. For that seemed to be Oscar’s story.
Driving now along the highway north into
the Sandhills, he glanced in the rear view mirror and
saw that the long river valley had disappeared behind a high ridge. The clock
in the dashboard was busted and he didn’t wear a watch, but he could tell from
the angle of light above and the shadows of the fence posts beside the road
that the morning was mostly gone.
He’d have to hurry if he was going to be
back at the ranch by
— § —
Danny had taught his Monday morning
class. The students were reading Shakespeare and trying to understand why
Hamlet can’t make up his mind what to do about his father’s murder. Besides one
or two opinions that sounded like they came straight from Cliff Notes, no one
seemed sure what to say. He was either asking them questions that required too
much thought to answer, or they hadn’t read the assignment. Some days were like
that.
When class was over, he found Brian
outside in the hallway. He was unshaven and looked as if he’d slept in his
clothes. When Danny asked him if everything was OK, he gave a quick, cheerful
reply that sounded—if you really listened to him—completely false.
“I’ve got an office hour now,” Danny
said. “Do you want to talk?”
Brian sighed and nodded, and the two of
them went along the corridor, then down two flights of stairs to Danny’s cubby
hole of an office.
“What’s up with you?” Danny said, when they got there.
“Can I close the door first?” Brian said.
“Sounds serious.”
“I dunno, sir,”
Brian said after he’d pushed the door shut. “I got a little problem.”
And he poured out to Danny a confused
story about being broke and not having a place to stay. He’d thought he could
room with Virgil, but that didn’t work out, and this was all mixed up with
something about his girlfriend Roxanne.
Danny had got to know Brian the year
before—a handsome kid, who was also bright enough to shine in any class—and
he’d liked him at first. There’d been a while when he’d been more than a little
aware of the shape of Brian’s ass in his jeans.
But, as often happened with students,
Danny felt that interest wear off as he came to realize how truly young and
inexperienced they were behind any appearance of maturity. They were flattered
by the attention you might give them, but they had little to give you in
return.
And they could behave like perfect fools
if you gave them half a chance. He knew, for instance, that Brian had walked
out on Virgil in the spring after some disagreement, ending a long friendship,
and that Virgil had taken it hard.
“So you’re telling me what?” Danny
finally asked him.
Brian gave him a helpless look.
“I’m supposed to guess?” Danny said.
“I’ve been sleeping in my car, sir, and
it’s gettin’ kinda cold
nights.”
“You need a place to sleep?”
“If it’s OK with you.”
“Well, I wasn’t offering, but if that
would help you out,” Danny said, then thought to add, “And only if it’s for a
couple nights.”
“Don’t worry, sir. I got money coming
from my uncle. Soon as I can put a deposit on a
apartment, I’ll be all set.”
And then he left, after shaking Danny’s
hand and thanking him, leaving him with an uncomfortable feeling that he really
should have wondered, as he did now, why Brian seemed to know no one else with
a couch where he could spend the night.
He closed his door again, picked up the
phone and called his friend Barry in the Psychology Department. Barry had
counseled Virgil last spring when this all happened with Brian. Maybe he’d have
something in the way of advice.
“Did I do the right thing, or have I just
been snookered?” he asked Barry.
“Snookered, I’d say,” Barry said,
laughing.
“Dammit, I
thought so.”
“I’m joking. Hey, maybe you’re too
generous, but what’s the worst that can happen?”
“The worst?” Danny hadn’t even thought of that.
“He’ll probably empty your refrigerator,
leave the bathroom in a mess, and run up your phone bill. You’ll learn a
lesson, and it won’t happen again.”
“What if word gets around?”
“What are you planning to do, fuck him?”
“Jesus, that’s not funny.”
“Well, I’m just trying to understand
what’s got you so worried.”
“Is he seeing you right now?”
“As a patient? You know I couldn’t give out that kind of
information.”
“Your professional ethics kind of come
and go, don’t they?”
“Stop giving me a hard time about that.
You try doing this job sometime.”
“The kid’s a student. I’m on the faculty
and bucking for a promotion. What’s it gonna look
like?”
“If it was a girl, you’d be in big
trouble. But it’s not.”
“Be honest, Barry. Who besides you knows
about me?”
“Well, my secretary does now, if she’s
listening in on the line, but besides that you have nothing to worry about.”
“You haven’t told anybody?”
“Give me some credit, will you?”
“I oughta known talking to you wouldn’t do any good.”
“Tell you what. Meet him at the door when
he gets there and loan him ten bucks to stay at the Motel 6. He’ll love you for
it.”
“Love has nothing to do with this.”
“Are you kidding? With
a free motel room? He’ll have his girlfriend there in a minute.”
“He’s got some problem with his
girlfriend.”
“No doubt. But these college jocks all have back ups.” Barry
laughed. “Anyway, he doesn’t really want to stay with an old geezer on the
faculty—how old are you anyway, thirty?—you gotta be an embarrassment to a
young stud like him.”
“Barry, you’re always such a big help.”
“Anytime,” he said and hung up.
— § —
As the clock in Danny’s apartment got to
“What’s that you’re readin’?”
he said, making conversation after he’d studied the menu on the wall and
ordered two submarine sandwiches—after asking what they were.
“Philosophy,” the guy said as he went to
work slicing open two long buns.
It interested Mike that people used their
spare time to read books. Danny was like that, too. “Are you a student at the
college?” he asked.
“Yup.”
“Studying to be a philosopher?”
The guy laughed. He had an easy grin and
hair long enough to tie back in a ponytail. “Tryin’.”
“What’s in a book about philosophy?”
The guy shook his head. “Everything,” he
said, deftly putting down layers of meat and cheese on the bread, like he was
dealing cards from a deck.
Mike was curious about the ponytail and
figured they’d talked enough for him to ask about it. “How long it take you to
grow your hair like that?”
“Year.”
“What made you do it?”
“Girls,” he said, dropping shredded
lettuce and thin slices of tomato over the sandwich.
“So girls go for a long-haired
philosopher?”
He shook his head. “Musician,” he said
and stepped back, dropping into a crouch and playing a few licks of air guitar.
“I get it,” Mike laughed. “It makes you
look like a rock star.”
“Bingo,” the guy said and slapped the
sandwiches together, wrapping them up in big sheets of butcher paper.
The conversation had gone on like that,
as more customers came in, and when Mike paid him and turned to go, the guy
said, “Chow.”
Mike laughed as he walked out the door
with the two sandwiches in a bag. He didn’t understand college kids, but they
cracked him up.
— § —
Ty had left a note on the kitchen table at Mike’s house
saying simply,
Plans changed. Came back
for my car. Going home to
Thanks for everything.
Ty
He didn’t try to explain about Rich. It
was too complicated. And he wanted to get on the road and be on his way. It
would be evening by the time he got there.
He was driving the broad, flat stretch of
interstate, past little towns just off the road, with their grain elevators and
water towers—all the way east to Omaha, where he’d cross the Missouri River and
be back in his home state. From there it was another 150 miles across rolling
hills of neat farms, cornfields, and pastures with dairy cows—what he always
thought of as the heart of the Midwest.
His feelings were a mixture of
anticipation and regret. Besides Rich, whose absence sometimes made him feel
like he was falling down a bottomless, dark pit, he was also leaving behind
friends who had accepted him as he was.
There was Mike, of course, who had first
embraced him and given him shelter from the storm of confusion that had
suddenly blown up around him. There was Danny, too, and then the men at the
ranch—all of them—Kirk, Baxter, Lonnie, and maybe most of all, Owen, who had
made him feel both strong and wanted.
Owen, the toughest of all of them, had
done what none of them had done. Though flat on his back in bed, he’d made Ty feel that, if he looked for it, he could find all the courage
a man needed to make his way in the world, exactly as he was, no apologies and
no excuses.
“Stick to your guns” was his advice, and
he’d said it more than once.
With Rich, though, he had come to see
that no amount of sticking to his guns would make a difference. Rich needed the
love of someone who could help him with his demons—someone not half-terrified
by his nightmares or unable to break through the silences and the bleak spells
of sadness that came over him like dark clouds out of nowhere.
Still, it hurt to think of him, because
he’d been the first man Ty had let himself love so
deeply and hopelessly. And the first to show him anything like that kind of
love in return.
But thank god for Owen—and yes, he still
said prayers of thanks to the Almighty. Owen not only gave no ground to
anybody; he had won himself the love and respect of an equal, and surely Kirk
was a perfect match for him.
“He’s a pisser that Kirk,” Owen had said
once. “Don’t know what I’d do without him.” Then he laughed, wiping his running
nose with the back of his hand. “Course sometimes he gets me so goddam mad I wouldn’t mind finding out.”
Ty had looked for Kleenex and ended up bringing him a
roll of toilet paper from the bathroom, and he’d handed it to Owen, who took
several feet of it and blew his nose hard.
“Aw, I’m just kiddin’,”
he said when he was done. “Kirk is all right. I was one royally fucked up sonofabitch when I found him.”
There it was again, one man coming along
to offer a helping hand to another who needed it, and expecting nothing in
return. Sometimes all you could do is try—and try your
best. The proof of the man was not in his success or failure. It was his
willingness to lend that helping hand.
He thought of Jesus, as he often did.
That loving man was still the one he looked up to. And he knew now that Jesus
would love Mike and all the men Ty had met since
leaving the church. Different as they all were, from sweet-tempered Lonnie to
hard-as-nails Owen, they were good men. Good men and true.
“You do the best you can with what you
got,” he said aloud, as he drove along.
And he wondered for a moment who had
always said that. Then he remembered. It was his father, the first who had
tried to make a man of Ty. Giving
him advice as he worked after school and weekends at the grocery, stocking
shelves, sweeping the floor, knocking down the empty boxes in the storeroom.
He understood those words now like he
never had before. He was doing that—using what he’d been given to do his best.
And he would go on doing that. No matter what his father said when he got home
again and walked through the door, Ty would know that
he could stand there, proud of himself.
He was becoming a man.
— § —
It was past
“You clean up real nice, bud,” he said.
“You’re darn handsome in a white shirt and tie.”
Danny set down his briefcase and put his
arms around Mike to give him a hug. “Hey, Mike,” he said and just held him for
a while.
For Mike, it was wonderful in the middle
of a Monday being together like this, and no reason to
hurry because work was waiting somewhere to be done.
“You wanna eat
first or later?” he asked Danny.
“Later.”
“How much time we got?”
“Till three.”
“I intend to make every minute count.”
“You won’t have to try hard,” Danny
sighed.
Mike laughed and pressed his hands to
Danny’s chest, feeling for his nipples through the shirt and then sliding his
fingers up and under the collar of his jacket to slip it from his shoulders.
Then, while he kissed him, he slowly loosened the tie and unbuttoned his shirt.
By the time he had Danny half undressed,
he was hard in his jeans. While he wanted to go slow and let himself enjoy this
moment by moment, the desire rising in him was already getting difficult to
resist. He took a deep breath, then pulled off his own
shirt and his tee shirt to feel their naked skin pressed together and his bare
arms around Danny’s body.
He felt between them now for Danny’s
zipper and pulled it down, slipping his hand inside to find his cock. It was a
thick bulge in his jockeys, firm and warm against his palm, and after a quick
search for the elastic waistband, he was able to get into his underwear and his
fingers around his erection.
After stroking it for a while, he pulled
Danny’s cock free from his pants with both hands. He felt a drop of slick
already collecting at the soft tip, and he thumbed it in little circles, then went down on one knee to touch his tongue to it.
Savoring the salty taste, he kept trying
to slow himself down, admiring the fierce beauty of Danny’s penis, hard as a
pump handle, and the way it jutted out from his fly, with its little curve
upward like it was straining to make itself even longer and harder.
The fingers of one hand were hooked over
the bottom of the zipper and the waistband of his jockeys, and he could brush
his knuckles against Danny’s balls, still buried in the warm darkness between
his legs. They nudged against each other under the hair and soft skin, heavy as
pullet eggs.
“Nice pair,” Mike had said at least a
hundred times by now. And he said it again, looking up at Danny, whose head was
bent back, eyes closed. A grin crossed his face but he didn’t open his eyes.
Unable to do anything but give in to the
urge, Mike opened his mouth and swallowed Danny’s cock as far as it would go.
Danny leaned against the wall behind him, sighing softly and pushing forward
with his hips. Then Mike reached around him and felt for his butt, as the
muscles there flexed under the loose fabric of his trousers.
He kept trying to concentrate on what he
was doing, evenly and steadily stroking Danny’s hard-on with his mouth, his
tongue curled tight as it would go around it. But in spite of his efforts to
resist, Mike’s thoughts raced ahead. All he could think of was
wanting the feel of Danny inside him. Whenever Danny made love to him,
he made sex into such sweet surrender.
In a moment he was kicking off his shoes
and pulling down his jeans and his boxers. Then he took Danny by the hand and
hurried in his stocking feet to the bedroom.
Danny got out of the rest of his clothes
as Mike fell into the middle of the bed, rolling onto his stomach.
“For a second, I thought we were going to
do it right there on the carpet,” Danny said and dropped naked on top of him.
“We almost did, bud.”
“You need to take a day off more often.”
Mike laughed. “I’m just figurin’ that out.”
Continued . . .
More stories. There are
links to all the Mike and Danny stories, plus a
conversation with the author, pictures of the characters, and some cowboy
poetry at the Rock Lane Cooper home page. Click here.
© 2008 Rock Lane Cooper
rocklanecooper@yahoo.com