The Art Of The Heart (2 page)

Even with his head bent and peering through his bangs, Zac could see Rory eyeing his long pants. His dad nodded. The teenager moved to climb into the truck bed when Mr. Weston stopped him.

“We just hauled some mulch and manure. Best you scooch on up here with us. Zac can sit in your lap. Skinny as he is, you won’t mind.”

Rory slid in as Zac stood and bent forward in the cab. Once the older boy was inside, he pulled Zac back down onto his lap and arranged him in between his splayed legs. It was a tight fit. The younger of the two was sitting on a patch of seat less than six inches wide with the remainder of him resting on both of Rory
’s inner thighs. He could feel their warmth through his jeans.

He
’d never been this close to another person who hadn’t been a family member. His arm was grazing the outer portion of Rory’s thigh. His skin was slightly sticky from the humidity. He could feel the soft track of hair covering it. It tickled like feathers. He seemed parked in a cradle of muscle, his ass pressed up against the tight V of the teenager’s crotch. Heart and breath were captive in his chest.

When he allowed himself to breathe, he could smell the boy
’s breath. Coffee and cigarettes. He knew Rory’s red lips were mere inches from his neck. Everything inside Zac danced with new sensation. Like his nerves had learned to sparkle inside him. A cross between an itch and a tingle trembled in his stomach, crawling into his blood to pool in the now hot and sweating flesh that dangled between his legs beneath the zipper of his jeans. Oddly it seemed to be growing firmer, bothering him more with the strange but delightful sensation. He was clueless about what was happening, and it made him delirious and dizzy. It was as if his flesh had new life, a new ability to feel. If he pressed backwards just slightly he could sense the stiffness of Rory’s nipples against the back of his shirt. He could close his eyes and see them like bronze coins.

The truck hit a rut in the gravel road and threw the three of them abruptly forward. Both of Rory
’s arms swung up and around Zac’s chest to keep his head from crashing into the windshield. He pulled him back tight into his chest. Rory’s palms lay flat and firm against his chest and lower abdomen. That sent alarming signals off in his body.

In that
split second he realized there was something hard and growing in his pants, yanking at him with an unknown need. Like he needed something more from Rory. Like something that couldn’t be done through clothes. It made him anxious. Almost scared. Out of control. He wanted to take Rory’s hand and shove it down in his pants. Feel it on him. He didn’t know why. It was a compulsion for which he had no explanation. He pictured what he wanted. To be naked with him. Laying on him. Feeling him. Stroking his tan skin with his fingers. Discovering him. All the secret places more warm than where the sun kissed him. He wanted to breathe every inch of the teenager into himself. He was sweating. Trying to control the pounding in his chest. Suddenly he knew what all this was: want.

They pulled into Sam Trumbull
’s Mobile. It only had two pumps. One for cars, one for farm vehicles. The station was a small wooden structure just big enough for two windows and a door. Inside there was a cash register and some road maps in a rack on the wall. It had a small restroom at the back of the building. Only the one.

Sam was a drunk. You
’d rarely find him inside the station. He lived in a worn-down single-wide trailer out back. He stayed there most of the time if he wasn’t at the town’s lone tavern, Mickey’s. Most folks pumped their own gas and put their money in the register themselves. Honesty wasn’t a question for the people of Sweetwater. It was as common as a howdy-do!

R
ory slid from under Zac and stepped outside. But his imprint stayed with Zac like it had been ironed onto the back of his shirt. He grabbed the red and gold gas can from the bed of the truck and strode to the pump marked for the farm equipment. His gait was bow-legged like most farm boys who sat on tractors all day. Through auburn strands to hide his gaze, Zac watched him. The muscled wedge of naked back glowed in summer’s bright spotlight. Light caught the gold filaments gathered like a treasure above the top of the jeans. The shorts were stained with sweat in a long crescent band down the center. It was clear he wore no underwear.

Zac could barely contain what was happening beneath his own zipper. He grew nervous due to its newness
, strangeness. He excused himself to use the bathroom; promised his dad to meet him at the general store. In a flash he was out of the pickup, bee-lining his way past Rory and the pumps without looking up, and into the interior of the station. No one was inside. He was thankful. The front of his jeans were poking straight out. He’d never seen anything like it. He was breathing like a racehorse at the end of the track as he dived into the small bathroom and closed the door. It only had a small hook-latch to lock it. He fumbled it in place. He leaned against the small, filthy sink and stared into the six-inch square of mirror that had been framed and hung on the wall above it. He brushed the hair from his face. His two different colored eyes seemed glassy and dazed. Like he was in shock.

The room reeked of stale piss, wet cigarette butts in the toilet
, and old wood. The smells collided with his other senses, making him lightheaded as he looked down at the protrusion which remained in his jeans. He unsnapped and unzipped them; lowered them to his knees. His white boxers were spotted with sweat, and as soon as he dropped his jeans his dick popped itself through the snapped front. It was hard as iron and curved upward in a reddening arc. It was bouncing in tempo with his quickened heartbeat. The head of it was slick and purple. As he was watching, it swelled right in front of his eyes. He tenuously touched it as if inspecting it and the sensation nearly doubled him over the sink. It was like a current of electricity had snapped through his body turning his whole self into quivering jelly. While everything else inside him melted, his dick only got harder, and bigger. But it was at the center of every new feeling he was experiencing.

All of this had happened because of Rory. He reached down and carefully wrapped his fingers around himself, enclosing the hardness in the furnace-hot, moist clasp of his hand. He shuddered from head to toe. He
’d never known one body part could affect the whole of himself so intensely. Without intention, he thought of Rory lying atop the tractor, his brown legs propped wide like a proposal. He could picture the seam of his jean shorts outlining the boy’s own hidden goods. He imagined them to be massive, un-tanned and capable of infinite pleasures similar to what he was feeling by his own hand.

He pushed forward in his cupped palm and gasped. It was beyond belief, this feeling. A train rumbled down the tracks that ran around the edge of town. It rattled the flimsy building, jarred the wood slats of the floor beneath his feet. He felt the vibration deep inside as well. Perspiration spiraled down from beneath his arm pits and trailed down his rib cage that puffed with his heavy breathing. He braced himself with his head against the wall as he began pumping himself within the cocoon of his fingers. His bangs were wet due to the heat boiling from within him. He could see diamond drops clinging to the ends of individual strands of hair. Each motion was pulling new sensations from all corners of his body and mind. What an amazing discovery!

It was as if his body was being driven by unknown impulses. An engine with a mind of its own, headed in a direction of its choice, and he was captive to its power. The faster he followed its motion the more he became lost to its drive. All at once he realized he was staring at himself an inch from the mirror. Into his blue and green eyes. His mouth was wide with formless, silent exclamations. His body’s rhythm became faster, the hard dick in his hand pulsing hotter as it grew firmer and darker with the blood flow. All he could think about was Rory. How he would look stripped naked. How he wanted to press himself up against him because he knew he could find satisfaction with the contact.

Then something happened he didn
’t expect. In a furious flash that seared across his brain, nearly blinding him, he felt like he was emptying himself out into his hand. Like he’d been catapulted into endless space. He didn’t even hear his grunt as hot, thick liquid jettisoned from him in long streams. Each spurt threw him deeper into a void crammed with immeasurable pleasure. His hand was coated with whatever was giving him the feeling and he looked down to see the opaque stream pulsing from the head of his dick, painting his fingers, the rim of the sink and dripping stickily to the floor. He had never seen anything like it. His legs wanted to fail beneath the weight of this wonder. He watched as the last few opalescent drops squirted from him, bringing a burst of such profound laughter that tears welled in his eyes.

His heart seemed to beat threateningly close against his breastbone. Without looking, he knew he was smiling. His whole body seemed alive with some great, heretofore unknown joy. Every limb shook. And he giggled uncontrollably. He wondered what was this strange paste that oozed from his body causing him such
ecstasy. He dipped his index finger in the residue oozing from his hole and brought it to his lips. A curious tongue darted into it for a taste. It was sharp and salty and smelled oddly like bleach. It’s texture was thick but seemed to become more watery with every second. It amazed him. His body’s hidden treasure.

He heard noises beyond the door. It was Rory putting money in the Trumbull register for the gas. Zac grabbed his underwear and jeans and hastily pulled them up, zipping and snapping them. He flushed the toilet as his excuse for disappearing for so long. Then he grabbed a swath of tissue and began cleaning up his mess as it dried on the sink and floor. He flushed this as well. Then, checking his appearance, he unlatched the door and stepped outside. The station was empty.

Striding out into the shimmering heat that summer had laid like a white ribbon across the flat land of Missouri, he saw Rory standing in an angle of shade created by the wall of the general store, smoking a cigarette. The gas can was a safe distance away on a stair at a side door of the store. He briefly looked up in Zac’s direction and nodded and then gazed down the road as if deep in thought. Zac kept his head bent low as he neared the store. He could see the object of his attention through his drying bangs. It was like a hypnotic fascination, for the older boy held him in its sway. He walked past him and into the store.

His dad was still shopping from his mom
’s list so Zac did what he always did at the general store while on a trip into town. He stood at the magazine rack near the front window that faced the street, looking through the new comics. New by Sweetwater’s standards was half a year old. Most of these comics were dated from early fall. They only cost twelve cents but his dad considered them an unnecessary extravagance. However, seeing that Zac hardly ever asked for anything extra, he always gave in. Even though he’d read the whole thing while standing in the store, Zac was glad to have the magazine in his hand as he left. He would study it at length later. He was more excited now because he could view the glorious men with bulging muscles in tights and enjoy them with what would become his new favorite pastime: masturbation.

He climbed back onto his seat in the truck in anticipation of his ride back home in Rory
’s lap. The older boy had disappeared from where he’d stood by the store. Zac peered around for him through hanging strands of his bangs and bent head, but could see him nowhere. As they U-turned back toward Trumbull’s Mobile his dad spotted him. The young man was jumping into the passenger seat of Doreen Steven’s Ford Galaxie convertible. She was the town’s rich widow; former wife of its mayor. He had died two years prior of a sudden heart attack. The burly fifty year old man had inherited a tidy nest egg from a sister up north, but only lived long enough to marry a woman twenty-five years his junior, buy the biggest house on Main street, and live and love them both for a year before collapsing from a massive coronary while eating a double fudge sundae at the town’s diner. They said he spit the maraschino clear across the room and bounced it into an empty coffee cup on his sudden journey to the pearly gates. Doreen inherited it all from him. It paid for the brand new Ford Galaxie ragtop, the newest car in all of Sweetwater. It was the envy of everyone in town.

Doreen was a handsome woman. The mayor had met her on a trip to Kansas City. She had Lucille Ball red hair, a trim waist,
nice clothes and always smelled of expensive big city perfume. She also fancied a number of the young men of Sweetwater. Apparently, Rory qualified. Zac was disappointed as he watched the convertible turn back toward the biggest house on Main Street.

He’d see Rory numerous times over the next few years. He was a fixture at the annual Sweetwater Square Dance at Cloverfield farm. Mr. McHenry was a country-class fiddler, his uncle a caller unmatched by anyone in three counties. Naturally all of the teenaged girls wanted to be Rory’s partner. He was handsome and popular, and the older he got, the more he became the town’s sexual icon. By nineteen his hair was shoulder length, parted in the middle so it framed his face like a sun-drenched halo. Now and again he attempted to grow a moustache and beard, but both were spotty and multi-colored and disappeared quickly. He had filled out more with farm work and good food. He never lacked for dinner invitations to his many girlfriends’ houses. And Zac worshipped him from afar. He was everything a boy could hope to be.

During the harsh hot weather of the summer months there were only two places to escape the heat. One
, of course, was the Beverly Bijou Theater in town. The other, Bullfrog Pond, which was on the Weston property just behind the large silo. It was one of two ponds on their land, but the other was a stagnant basin that held water from the recent rains. Bullfrog Pond was fed from an underground spring, which supplied water to all of Sweetwater. It’s naturally cold freshness was what earned the town it’s name. The pond was directly behind the Weston house, about sixty yards away, within view of Zac Weston’s bedroom window. It earned its name of Bullfrog Pond because of the proliferation of the creatures one summer in Nineteen-Forty, long before the Westons came to own the property. Legend said there were so many of the critters it looked like one of the Pharaoh’s plagues. It was the one and only season they had that problem, but the name stuck. One would rarely find frogs of any kind after that, but the pond did have an abundance of Missouri catfish. A few folks would come to fish there on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon. The pond’s other use was for nighttime teenaged skinny dipping when the temperatures topped the thermometer. With his lights out and a small pair of binoculars he got for a Christmas present when he was eleven, Zac could watch everything that went on there. Especially on a well moonlit night. Like the one in August of last summer.