I rest my head on my forearm and stare up at the stars, wondering if anything out there in the heavens can compare to this. The campfire throws shadows on the canyon wall. I watch the darkly magnified pantomime of Billy’s bent back and curly head bobbing between my thighs.
I am struck, as I always am, by his tenderness, his supple lips, and the tickle of his beard. Billy’s tongue is a masterwork of physiology, an agile muscle designed to curl in ways that make it impossible for me to delay the inevitable.
Sensing my urgency, Billy rises on his knees. I observe the shadow as he fills his hand and jerks his flesh to match the rhythm of his mouth on my impatient member. With a few deft strokes and a practiced swallow, Billy elicits relief for us both.
He stretches out, nestles his cheek against my belly, and laps up the stray spirit. I trail lazy fingers through his lawless curls.
“Thanks, Harry,” his soft tenor trembles.
His capacity for gratitude humbles me, reminds me of all I have to be thankful for since that night last spring when Cal Perkins’s gift of sour mash left us drunk and melancholy thirty miles from the nearest sign of civilization. When Billy started crying, I could have turned away. Instead, I wrapped my arms around his shoulders. He slipped a hand inside my shirt and confessed between sobs what I had suspected all along.
I could blame the drink, but that would be a lie. Something else moved me that night, a craving I had harbored since my school days in Philadelphia. I had known some men like Billy there. I correct myself: I knew men whose predilections ran as Billy’s do. But they were small and frightened men, practitioners of deception who boasted of bordello escapades and courted bankers’ daughters to avert suspicion. They were not men like Billy.
Billy stands tall and rides hard, laughs easily and suffers gladly all manner of ills. Nothing breaks his spirit, neither the sting of frozen rain nor suffocating prairie heat. Intelligence sparkles in Billy’s green eyes. He wears his work in the long, lean muscles of his back and arms. He is quiet, not because he has nothing to say, but because he prefers silence to lies. Billy lives the cowboy way.
When I told him he could pleasure me, the crying stopped.
I rested against the rocks without objection as he unbuttoned my shirt and fingered the hair on my chest. When his lips grazed my skin and his hands busied themselves with the buttons of my dungarees, I felt no revulsion, no compunction at all. In fact, I rose rapidly, even eagerly, to the occasion.
Billy cradled me across his palm, looked into my eyes and said, “I’ll make you feel real good, Harry, I promise.”
As in all other things, Billy was true to his word. He began with tender nips and kisses such as those practiced by the best French whores, but the strength of his lips and the scratch of his stubble infused the exercise with a strangeness I found intoxicating. When he opened his mouth and granted me entry, I discovered new pleasures of masculinity. I succumbed entirely to his accommodating depth and surrendered to the virtuosity of his tongue. When I grasped his head and lifted my hips to thrust, Billy opened his throat and hummed a little tune, a siren song that shook my bones and extracted from me a searing current of seed. Billy drank it down like mother’s milk.
Since then we have been together every day. In town and on those rare occasions when we settle in on a ranch, we keep up appearances. Billy plays cards while I visit the whores. He never asks me if I prefer their company to his.
Increasingly these days, I find that I do not. Painted and powdered, they offer me little more than a nod at social conventions. I choke on the artificial sweetness of their perfume and plow their pink furrows like a bored gentleman farmer. When I crave release, I think of Billy, his earthy musk and eager mouth, his insatiable hunger for my manhood and his unapologetic enthusiasm for satisfying that need.
Perhaps that’s why we volunteer for range work, long stretches of time under open skies rounding up strays and mending fences. We ride across vast fields, our easy silence a gift of understanding. Sometimes, I let Billy ride ahead so I can admire the graceful way he commands his horse. From time to time, I feel his eyes on me. When I catch him, Billy licks his lips and smiles. I cannot deny the powerful sense of delight those moments provide. Nor can I discount the increasing eagerness with which I anticipate our nights beneath the stars.
Nights like this, when his warm breath and calloused hands tingle against my skin. I wind my fingers through his hair and wish to be as good a man as Billy.
“Billy,” I hear my own voice trembling, half-hoping that he’s already asleep.
“Yeah, Harry?”
I swallow hard and search for words to make my meaning clear.
“Harry?” His breath tickles through my short hairs.
I find the North Star in the sky above us and make my wish.
“I was just wondering if you might want to, well, if there isn’t something else we could do before we go to sleep.”
“Like what?” His cheek flexes against my belly.
“I don’t know, something a little more strenuous, perhaps.”
Billy lifts his head and smiles at me. The firelight shimmers in his eyes. Tightness grips my chest. Something flops in my gut.
“I don’t know, Harry,” he smiles. “It’s been an awful long time since I did anything more strenuous.”
I can tell he’s teasing from the way he strokes my stiffening shaft.
“Will it hurt?”
Billy rubs my balls and explores my virgin pucker with a tentative fingertip. The surge of pleasure surprises me.
“I little,” he kisses my belly, “at first. But I’ll make you feel real good.”
“What do I do?”
Billy rises on his knees, looks down at me, saying, “Roll over.”
I comply, disconcerted by the scratch of my wooly bedroll.
“Now lift up a little, on your knees like this,” he wraps his hands around my hips and hoists my ass into the air.
Head on my forearms, I tremble with uncertainty.
“Don’t be scared,” Billy says.
“I’m not,” I lie. “I understand the mechanics, it’s the protocol that has me worried.”
“Damn, you talk silly when you’re scared, Harry,” Billy laughs. “Don’t worry about a thing. I’ll do you right and easy.”
He strokes my hips and kneads my ass. His lips brush lightly against one cheek and then the other.
“You have a great ass, Harry,” he whispers. His warm breath tingles in my balls. “Now relax and let me get you ready.”
I drop my head and take a deep breath that catches in my throat when his tongue, soft and wet, strong and subtle, tickles and prods my quivering hole. I flinch. He holds me tight. I stiffen and groan.
“That’s okay now, isn’t it?” Billy whispers. “Feels good, I reckon.”
“Feels wonderful,” I confess.
His fingertips, moist with saliva, ply the spot with exploratory zeal. I slacken, open up to him, trust him to deliver on his promise to make me feel good.
“How does this feel?”
The tip of his middle finger assails the aperture. The pleasure surprises me.
“Good.”
“A little more now,” Billy presses his finger deeper inside. I cringe at the thickness of his knuckles, but he strokes me and presses his lips to the small of my back. I relax a little.
“More.”
Another finger stretches me. Billy mitigates my discomfort with a gentle tug at my member. Two fingers now twist and curl inside me, unleashing pleasure in places I never knew I had.
“More,” I say again.
Another finger, another stroke, a soft parade of kisses up my spine. Billy presses against my back, slithers his tongue beneath my ear. The fingers that felt huge and intrusive just minutes ago now seem inadequate. I want the length and girth of him inside me.
“More,” I say again.
Gently, Billy withdraws his fingers, rises, and spreads me with his thumbs. His first advance penetrates my now eager pucker. I close my eyes and bite my lip certain that pleasure will follow pain. He moves forward slowly, stretching me with his flesh. Never before have I imagined such fullness. Like a hearty meal to an empty belly, Billy’s rigid staff is an abundance of relief to me. I whimper with pain and pleasure mixed when his balls slap against my ass.
“You’re a snug fit, Harry,” he growls. “I like a snug fit. You doing all right?”
“Oh, yes,” I say, and it’s true. “I never imagined it would feel this good.”
“Relax now. I’ll make it feel even better.”
Billy grips my cock and rocks his hips, moaning soft and low. I groan and sway beneath him.
My delight impels him, quickens his pace. He splits me with commanding thrusts and mans my manhood with a practiced hand. Deeper, faster, harder, every stroke a lesson for me in how much better one moment can be from the one that came before. I feel him swell and twitch inside me. I swell and twitch in his hand. He floods me with heat that surges through my flesh and spews from me in a fitful deluge. He squeezes me, pulls me, wrings me out then presses me into the viscous puddle on the blanket beneath us.
His ragged breath sears my neck. The weight of him makes my own breath hard to find. Still, I do not want him to move. I want to lie this way for a bit, feeling his body pressed down on mine, my flesh softening in the moist warmth of his hand. He diminishes inside me, oozes out on a syrupy sluice, rolls onto his side, and kisses my shoulder.
“Smarts a little the first time, doesn’t it?”
“A little,” I admit, though I’m suffering more from the ache of emptiness than the pain of use.
I face him, pull him close, and part his lips with my tongue. The spice and vitality of his kiss astonishes me. His arms twine around me like ribbons of steel. We wrestle tenderly, belly-to-belly and thigh-to-thigh until exhaustion wins out over friction and we fall away from each other to gaze up at the stars.
“You’ll feel it a bit in the saddle tomorrow, I’m afraid.” He takes my hand. “It gets better over time.”
Unable to imagine anything better than this moment, I squeeze his hand and whisper, “I believe you, Billy.”
© 2002 by L.A. Smith. All rights reserved. Not to be distributed, reproduced, or transmitted in any manner without the express written permission from the author.