Warning: the following story contains graphic descriptions of sex between consenting adult males. If you are underage or do not wish to read such materials, or if reading this sort of material is illegal in your jurisdiction, then read no further. If you have any feedback or encouragement, feel free to drop me a line at niftystoryteller@yahoo.com.
"I said put those down, you Yankee faggot bastard." Hands shaking even more than his voice, Forrest Hamilton gestured with his elderly rifle at the intricately inlaid table that stood next to me, posed under a two dimensional bouquet of purple and yellow irises that were frozen forever in stained glass. "Those letters don't belong to you any more than to the man in the moon."
The sheaf of envelopes, neatly bound with a black ribbon, suddenly felt as heavy as a stone in my hand. They were my prize from an afternoon spent searching the dusty trunks in my uncle's old storage building, out by the swimming hole where I had spent part of the previous evening with Toby, Randy, and David. Letters received, letters sent, and letters returned, they were a handwritten record of what had once blossomed, what had once grown, and what had finally died, fifty years before.
"Look, I'm not trying to cause any trouble, for you or for anyone else," I said slowly and deliberately. "I'm just trying to understand, to find a way to help you and Beau. . ."
"How dare you, how dare you bring up my grandson," the white-haired lion roared. "You have corrupted that boy. You have brought your filth to this town and pushed him down into it. When I think about the two of you, you on top of him, you making him do things, why, I should have run you out of town the first instant I laid eyes on you. I should have killed you." His eyes were blazing, his face was red, and I could see his finger curling around the trigger. "Now you put those letters down, or I'll not be responsible for my actions."
My heart was pounding, my mouth was as dry as cotton, and I could feel a bead of sweat blossom on my forehead and trickle down the side of my face.
"We're all responsible for our actions," I said slowly, carefully. "You're responsible for yours now. Beau's responsible for his. And you were responsible for yours then, when you and my uncle were together."
"Why you, why you, you, you" he spluttered, his face going a deep red. He gasped for breath, unable to get another word out. As the tall clock behind me began to strike seven very unlucky chimes, Forrest Hamilton's finger chose to finish the statement, chose to express the sentiment, that his strangled voice was unable to complete. I smelled the puff of smoke, I saw the flash of light, I heard the vibrating sounds of the hour, and I instinctively shielded my heart with the thick stack of letters, the leaves of paper that carried kisses and tears, the touch of fingers and the press of lips. Yet I knew that those letters would tear as easily as my flesh, and that my blood would mingle with those tears. And it did, as I felt myself lifted off of my feet and thrown back against that ancestral marker of the passage of time.
It was dark. It was light. Total silence alternated with a chorus of angels. I was falling. I was flying. And then I was waking and tasting the salty bitterness on lips, on lips that were somehow mine, but not mine. I kept eyes closed, eyes that were somehow mine, but not mine. I paused, stopping, not to smell the roses, but to feel for injuries that were somehow mine, but not mine. What was happening, I did not know. All I knew for sure was that a woman's voice was calling to me.
"Edward! Edward for goodness sakes, what is all of that racket?"
Eyes opened just in time to see her step out of the kitchen and into the hall of a house that was old even then.
"Edward! I have told you a thousand times not to take those stairs two at a time. You'll split that thick skull of yours wide open!"
I, we, shook our head back and forth and blinked to try to clear our eyes, which were filmed with unshed tears. I wanted to cry out, "Grandma, it's you," but he wanted to call her Mama. We both looked through the same eyes, we both saw the same things, but somehow they meant different things to us, to him and to me. And we knew it. I knew that he was there, and he knew that I was there, and even though we could not talk to each other in the usual way, I could sense his questions, and he could sense my answers. Our spirits were wrapped around each other, enclosed in the same husk that was made of flesh and blood.
"Edward, if you don't answer me, I'm going to send Cook to fetch the doctor."
"I'm, I'm OK, Mama." The words came out, more his than mine. Tears pooled in our eyes, tears of joy and sorrow at seeing my beloved grandmother again, younger than I had ever known her, but still recognizable. The tears were more mine than his. They confused him, and scared him a little, but he did not try to choke them back.
She bent down and put her cool hand on our, on my forehead, and she smiled. "Now don't be a crybaby. It's just a bump on the head. A big college man like you can't go around sniveling, even when you're home with your mama for your Christmas vacation." She stood up and put her hands on her hips. "Now I really must get back to work. My cousin Loretta will be here altogether too soon, and I need to get the guest room ready for her. Her boy Russell will be staying in your room, so I hope it's at least minimally presentable. You can keep it that way for one night, can't you?"
A nod and a big smile was enough to convince her. We were both grateful that words were unnecessary, because neither of us completely trusted what would come out of that one mouth that we now shared. His sense of confusion was palpable. I suppose that I had an advantage, though just because I could recognize the truth did not mean that I could understand it. I could, however, clearly recognize him for who he was, a younger version of my uncle, a man whom I had known much later. He wouldn't have the opportunity to know me for more than ten years, when his sister, my mother, would bring me into the world. At that time, on that day, I wasn't even a glint in anyone's eye.
It was altogether strange to walk up those stairs, to look back down at that clock, to see all of the things that had been near only an instant before, and to notice the many things that were missing.
"I'm not quite myself, I think," he muttered aloud. I did my best to silently reassure him as he guided the body that we shared to the room he called his own. I intuited that he could sense my familiarity and comfort with our surroundings, which I had known more or less unchanged for my whole life. That seemed to calm him. So did the sight of himself in the full-length bedroom mirror, more or less unchanged from earlier that day, save the red welt on the smooth, unblemished forehead. Calmer now, he could feel the dull throb of the injury he had sustained in his fall, and I could feel it too, and I let him feel what I felt, and he let me feel what he felt through me, and so on in an infinite sequence of dampening ripples of hurt.
Cautiously, curiously, he willed us to touch our lips. Running our fingers back and forth tickled a little bit. I could sense that we could both feel it, and I opened my feelings up to him, and he opened his feelings up to me. We set in motion an echo of pleasurable sensation, each of us feeding on the experience and perception of the other. It was an altogether new thing, to understand truly how another person felt, and to receive one's own feeling reflected and refracted back again through the prism of another person's soul.
My uncle unbuttoned our shirt partway and slipped our hand across our smooth chest. I shuddered a bit as he began to trace around one hardening nipple with our finger. I could sense his growing excitement, not just as a consequence of the act itself, but also from his perception of my reaction. He proposed that we open the old flannel shirt, revealing our muscled torso, and we both watched through our common eyes as the tip of our finger flicked back and forth across the hard bud of flesh. Currents of desire flowed down through our body, and I could feel the cock that hung between our legs start to harden.
If I had still been able, I would have held my breath as he willed our hand to unzip our trousers and reach inside. Our mutual desire bled across whatever boundary separated us. His feelings only served to magnify mine, as mine did to his. Suddenly I was again inside a body that was barely twenty years old, feeling the powerful rush of sexual urgency that I had known before and was being given the opportunity to know again. Feeling the hard, curved, circumcised cock in our hand made me greedy with lust, and I made my needs and wants very clear to my partner in this body. I could sense his wordless grin, assuring me that everything I wanted was what he wanted too. We looked down at our twitching, hard cock from above, observing its leftward arc. Reaching in once again, extracting our cum-heavy balls, stepping back to look once again in the mirror, we both saw the same handsome young man standing there, jacking the fat organ that protruded from the fly of his trousers, watching in wonder while that young man rode the crest of two men's feelings of mutually reinforcing sexual excitement.
I felt a twinge of guilt as I saw the face of my uncle as a young man, reflected back at me, back at us, and I silently communicated my uncertainty about the incestuous nature of this experience. Any concern I had was put aside by the powerful waves of lust that he was sending deep into my soul, fueled by the images of young men he had known, in Dumont and up in Virginia, at school, in locker rooms and swimming holes and hidden clearings up in the forest. All of these images worked in tandem with the electric sensations emanating from the slippery cock that thrust through our hand. Sensing his impatience, I unleashed a flood of visions of my own, past lovers and what we had done together. Urgent, nasty, and spontaneous sex; slow, sweet, passionate love-making. With one or many, at home or outdoors, older or younger men, I showed as much as I could before there was nothing that either of us could do to stop the orgasm that was bearing down on us like a runaway freight train.
I thought that I was going to die, perhaps for the second time that day. I did not know. The feeling of my orgasm, and his, and mine reflected back through him, and his reflected back through me and then back from him to me again, was the most intense thing that I have ever experienced. The light was blinding. And when it faded, that young man still stood before the mirror, still holding his hard and sticky organ, still looking at his face, still trying to see through his own eyes to understand who was inside of him.