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Provisos to anybody reading this: this is eight thousand seven hundred and seventy two words of out-in-left field sequel to a twenty thousand word crackfic that . . . hasn't been written and was supposed to be a retelling of Lieutenant Hornblower. But um. Set in the context of an American university's football program. Shut up. I recognize that it's OOC. I recognize that I just have a kink for rampant gay sex.
All the good ideas, such as they are in this, are from iansmomesq.
The first time that William Bush gives a blowjob is the day before New Year's.
...
Here is the story back a few steps: Horatio and Bush are both on the football team at a school in the Midwest. Bush is their very good, draft-quality running back; Hornblower is so far back on the quarterback depth chart that he barely appears. He is, in fact, too bad for the junior varsity and spends most of his time keeping score for intersquad scrimmages. Nevertheless, Hornblower proves his worth on the field of play during the last game of the season after injuries and cowardice and a strange accident down the stairs have taken out the quarterbacks ahead of him, and since he has also come to be Bush's closest friend since high school and since Horatio let it slip that he didn't have family, Horatio is at Bush's for Thanksgiving.
They make the four hour drive back to Chichester Falls in Bush's car, and Bush's four sisters and mother swarm Hornblower under when they set foot on the family farm. For the first two hours of the visit, Horatio can't keep the sisters separate -- he'd put their names on an index card and memorized them before setting out with Bush -- but it's a whirl of women and family and warmth. Hornblower lost his father when he was a month past seventeen, and he went to college a month later.
"Um, Miss Bush -- " he says, and four heads turn around. Four mouths smile at him. Bush -- William, Bill to his family, generally -- also turns his head and grins at how Horatio is reddening.
...
The trouble doesn't really start until the second day of Thanksgiving break: they drove back in the afteroon, and they went hunting the first day. Horatio puked when Bush field-dressed the deer, and he felt absurd up in the stand, wearing the hunting clothes that Bush wore back when he was in high school and his shoulders hadn't caught up with his growth spurt. But it was all right. Bush took the tenderloin out of the deer to keep the butcher (great guy, his daughter, Linda, has great tits) from stealing them, and Ma cooked them up in a way that made Horatio promise that he would be positively murderous to the next deer he came across.
No, the trouble doesn't really start until the day that Bush goes out to take care of the heifers. Ma has given the hired guys the day before Thanksgiving off, as well as the day of, and Bush is doing his work. Horatio is useless, so he hands Horatio the bottles and tells him to take care of the calves. Hornblower can't even manage that, though, despite him having the biggest brain that Bush has ever seen outside of a classroom, and he ends up slipping on a patty and caking himself. Bush tries to help him up, and they both end up fairly disgusting.
The girls are out with Ma doing the Thanksgiving shopping. There's a bathroom off the mudroom -- it's the men's bathroom, and the help uses it sometimes in case of emergency, but it's been basically Bush's. He uses it when he's home, and through one contrivance or another, they end up in the shower together. It should be the least arousing thing ever given how many times they've hit the showers together in the locker-room, but it's somehow different watching Horatio wash. There are other things to do in the lockerroom showers. There's talking. There's laughing. It's much bigger.
Instead, Bush is staring at Horatio's back. There isn't anywhere to watch, and Horatio is soaping himself down. Steam fills the room. Maybe it's the fact that they're away from campus. Maybe it's the fact that Bush is both happy and frustrated, the way he always is when he comes home.
"Missed a spot," he says to Horatio and points a spot on the back of Horatio's neck, and Horatio twists his arm up and soaps it down. He turns half-around, and Bush sees the muscles in Horatio's side twist and move a little.
"Your turn," Horatio says, soon after that. There isn't much hot water, and he wants to be sure that Bush gets some of it.
He tries to get out by sliding past Bush, but the shower is small. There's no dreaded front-to-front contact, but his still-soapy hand touches Bush's hip and waist. Brushes against his ribs.
Bush can't explain it, but as he listens to the sound of Horatio drying himself off and getting dressed: he can't explain it, but he's profoundly grateful for the fact that the water turns cold about one point five seconds after he gets under it.
...
Here's another wrinkle on the trouble.
Since this is where Bush grew up, he feels the obligation to give Horatio the tour the next day while they're out grabbing last-minute groceries for Thanksgiving dinner. Here is the elementary school. Here is the field where we played Peewee football. The big factory over in the trees is where there used to be a big defense plant, making stuff for the Navy, but it's working on a reduced basis these days. Only one shift. When I was little, I always thought that I'd go there to work.
They get to the grocery store eventually, and they're getting the list of things that Ma gave them. They're also horsing around some, yelling and sliding up and down the empty aisles, and they're right around the breakfast cereal aisle when a familiar voice says.
"Hi, Bill."
Bush freezes. He's in the middle of squeezing Horatio into a headlock, and when he looks down the aisle, he sees, uh.
She's coming closer, and Bush lets go of Horatio, who pops up, kind of red-faced and trying to straighten himself. There are a couple boxes of cereal knocked down on the aisle, but nobody pays them much attention.
"Hi," Bush says. She looks a lot like she did in high school. Tall, kind of skinny, but with those pretty eyes. There are some lines around her mouth that he doesn't remember, and she stops about five feet away from them both. Bush is so red in the face that it takes Horatio clearing his throat for him to snap out of it.
"I'm Harry," Horatio says and sticks his hand out for shaking. He doesn't like to tell people his first name. "I go to school with, uh, Bill." After a moment of thought, he adds, "I'm on the football team with him."
"Oh," she says. And then looks at Bush, who's reddening a lot more. "I don't know if Bill told you, but we used to date."
"Oh." Horatio says.
There's another long moment of silence. And then he dumped me hangs pretty clearly between the Captain Crunch and the generic rice puffs. Horatio clears his throat again, and finally, she turns awya to go back to checking stock. Even when she's gone, though, Horatio won't look at Bush.
...
All right, here's where the trouble really starts: in this world, instead of two hard days and nights after the Renown gets into Kingston, Bush and Hornblower have four days off for Thanksgiving at Bush's family farm out in Chichester, and when Bush gets out of the shower, he finds that, to his surprise, Hornblower is still knocking around.
"Where are the Q-tips?" Hornblower asks. He's in a t-shirt -- one of Bush's old high school ones -- and sweatpants. His hair is still wet, and it's dripping down his forehead and onto his shoulders.
There's still steam in the room.
"Here," Bush says and reaches up into the cabinet over the sink.
It's all very fine and well for another half-second after that, and then Horatio steps close to see where, exactly, the Q-tips are, which means that he's right there. This time, it's Bush who turns into Hornblower, and now, they are front-against-front. Bush is holding a towel around himself, kinda, sorta, and Horatio is fully dressed, and the Q-tips fall out of Bush's hand because he feels like he's just been shocked with electricity. That can't possibly be what's happening, because there isn't anything plugged in. There's only that one light bulb over the sink, and they're standing so close to each other, and Horatio is grinning at him.
They end up making out against the wall. Bush didn't shave that morning, and Horatio has worked up a good amount of stubble by this point. It's just feverish touching, for the most part; the towel is somewhere tangled in their feet, and Horatio touches Bush again. At the side, above the hip, at the waist, and while they're sucking on each other's tongues and lips like flesh has taken the place of oxygen, Bush lifts Horatio's shirt and touches him in those same places.
Out of the corner of his eye, Bush realizes that Hornblower has rubbed a clear spot in the mirror over the sink. He's looking over at it now, and it's a small mirror, a small clear spot. All they can really see is Bush's bare ass, and as background for it, Hornblower's stomach. A patch of solid dark color for Hornblower's pants, and Hornblower's hand hovering a bit to the side.
Bush comes right there and then.
That's trouble.
...
And the trouble continues that night. After the bathroom, Bush goes and takes another shower, and Hornblower goes upstairs and changes into another pair of pants. It happens without anybody saying anything about anything, and Bush feels like the ten thousand tiny needles on his back have gone away.
Come bedtime, though, or at least bedtime for everybody else in the house, Hornblower comes and knocks on Bush's door.
"Hey," he says.
"Hey," Bush says. He's reading comics while lying on the floor on his stomach. Normally, he'd be downstairs, watching Conan with Horatio, but it doesn't feel right after what happened in the bathroom. "You need something?"
"Nah. I just wanted to see if I should set my alarm for tomorrow. For, you know. The cows."
It's a perfectly normal conversation. Horatio is just standing there, with his hand on the door, talking low so as not to wake anybody else, and the light is on and it's all safe, but somehow, in about three minutes flat after that, the door is closed and locked and the chair from Bush's desk jammed up against the handle, and Bush on his back on his childhood bed. His pants are down, and the lights are out. Horatio is kneeling down on the floor, and he has Bush's dick in his mouth.
The comics are still on the floor, but Bush is chewing on the knuckles of his right hand. Hornblower has a hand on Bush's stomach, spread flat, and he's bobbing his head up and down, and Bush bites his knuckles. He has posters of Jim McMahon and Dan Marino up on the wall, and Brett Favre is up on the ceiling, and Horatio is sucking his dick so good and sweet and slow that Bush has to bite down on his fingers, hard. Hornblower is doing something with his tongue now, not moving his head so much, and Bush squeezes his eyes shut. He doesn't want to come. It's slow and sweet and so good that it hurts like being hit in the stomach and the chest and everywhere else.
The poster of Brett Favre is printed to look like it's autographed. It's not, of course.
Bush props himself up on one elbow; he figures that he can't see anything. Maybe the change in position will distract him.
It distracts Horatio a little too, it seems. Bush looks down; Horatio looks up. Their eyes meet. There's just enough light for that to happen.
"Oh God," Bush says. He can't stop himself, and his hips jerk up into Horatio's mouth. "Oh God."
And then Horatio actually moans. He puts his hands on Bush's knees and squeezes and moans and Bush's hips move again, but Horatio doesn't move. He's looking Bush in the eye, holding onto him, while Bush puts his dick into that mouth. There's Hornblower's tongue when he readjusts his mouth a little; that's Bush's dick sliding past his lips. He's letting Bush fuck his mouth while he looks Bush in the eye.
"Oh God," Bush says, once more, though he's not sure whether it's out loud or just in his head. He hopes it's just in his head, he really hopes that this is all just in his head, and then he can't think about anything anymore because he's coming.
It's serious bad mojo.
...
This mojo, perhaps, what Horatio is sensing when he comes and stands by Bush's shoulder after the blowjob. It's still dark in the room; Bush has managed to pull his pants up, but that's about it. Horatio looks down at Bush for a while, and he opens his mouth to say something, but changes his mind and says something else.
"Look, this doesn't make us gay," Horatio says.
"Good. That was worrying me," Bush says. He's still holding onto the sheets.
And Horatio goes back to the rec room.
...
Bush believes Horatio when he says that this doesn't make them gay. Bush wants you to know this because, first of all, he likes tits and long hair and sweet smiles, and in high school, with recruiters in the stands, on the field, he decked a guy from the other team who galled him a faggot. It ruined North Carolina on him, and yes, looking at Horatio while Horatio sucks his dick feels suspiciously faggoty. Standing under a Wisconsin winter cold water shower, hard as anything, because Horatio touched his bare stomach and hip is really faggoty. Once Bush is alerted to the possibility, he realizes that Horatio makes him feel distinctly faggoty -- the skinny shoulders, the long face, the curly hair and the way his hands move when he's setting the table or turning the page on a book. That soft mouth and the way that Horatio doesn't smile very often, and then, not with his mouth, if that even makes sense.
Hornblower could get an extra fifteen feet on his throw if only he'd work out more, maybe eat more protein and change his diet a little.
Bush believes Horatio when he says that this doesn't make either of them gay. It's much like the way he belives Horatio when he explains how a solar eclipse happens or how a dead Greek guy proved that the Earth was round fifteen hundred years before Columbus. Horatio tells Bush that this is the way that you plot a parabola, and Bush believes it. The second number in the equation is where the parabola runs into the vertical axis.
Horatio throws, and Bush catches. Faggoty baseball analogies aside, that's the way it works in football, and that's the way it works when Horatio tells him that this kind of thing doesn't make either of them gay. Bush takes it and runs with it and he's totally comfortable and happy doing that. As they're pulling out of the grocery store on Thanksgiving day -- how do you forget the marshmallows? how do you fucking forget the marshmallows for the casserole for Thanksgiving dinner -- Bush remarks on this topic.
"Yeah," he says to Horatio. "Jean and me went out, off and on, for most of high school. Great girl, but it just didn't work out between us. I broke up with her for the last time right before I transferred schools. Real smart girl. She read a lot like you do."
...
It's a family tradition that Bush and his oldest sister, Lisa go out and take care of the chores on Thanksgiving morning. It's been that way ever since Bush was eleven and Lisa was thirteen, and it's gotten more significant since they both left home. They're out there with the snow and the smell of the heifers and the milking parlor, the shit up to the ankles, and while they're taking care of that, they don't talk a lot. Lisa has always been the least talky of his sisters.
They both know what they're doing, so it doesn't take too long. They take care of the herd and rinse themselves off, and when they're heading back to the house, a bit of wind coming down from northwest and the world looking wide and cold and perfect in the way that it never does when Bush is at school -- they talk a little about taking the herd organic, about the price of milk. The price of feed.
And then Lisa looks over, studies him for a bit. "The four of us love you no matter what, you know. And Ma would come around eventually. In this case, I think she practically has."
Bush just looks at her, blankly.
...
When the girls came back with the groceries, Bush and Hornblower came to help move the groceries into the kitchen. Bush noticed, with the rocrner of his mind, that Hornblower's hair was almost completely dry now, but that was all that he noticed until they'd gotten just about everything in, and then his mother, who had already put on the apron, gasped.
"Horatio, what happened to you?"
Horatio looks genuinely startled, and then, both he and Bush realize that Bush's mother is talking about the cut on Horatio's upper lip, off the center a bit. Bush realizes, cheeks coloring, that must have been where he bit Horatio, when he --
"Hunting, Ma. We must've stayed out hunting in the stand too long."
...
Bush carves the turkey at Thanksgiving, of course, and he eats until he thinks he's going to die, and after him and Horatio clear the table and stack it in the sink, they go down to the rec room to watch football. Bush carved the turkey because he's the man of the house, and then Ma asked Horatio if he'd like to say the blessing.
"Bill usually says it, but we usually don't bring a guest," she says.
Lisa makes a gargling noise in her throat, but Bush won't look at her. Instead, he looks at Horatio. He knows Horatio isn't religious -- he doesn't even bow his head during team prayer before the game, he hadn't thought about this beofre, and with everything, he hadn't thought about asking Horatio to do this as a special favor or to talk about a prayer that he, but Horatio agrees without a word more from anybody. He bows his head, and they join hands around the table.
"For each new morning with its light, for rest and shelter of the night, for health and food, for love and friends, for -- for the kindness of family and everything else that Your goodness sends. Thank You."
After the football that comes after the turkey, Horatio goes down on him again, again in Bush's room, against the door where he has a full, life-size poster of Walter Payton, and Bush balks at the lights being on, but Horatio gives him a look as he gets down on his knees. They'd been kissing, so Horatio's lips have that funny look to them again. He has a funny expression in his eyes, too, particularly when Bush runs his hand through Horatio's hair and touches his cheek to Horatio's cheek.
"Maybe we shouldn't -- "
"Just pretend I'm Jean, all right?"
It's the last word that Horatio says for a while.
...
The house is a small one. The farm and herd are small, too -- it's why Lisa was talking about taking the herd organic. Even with rBGH, they don't have enough output to really do more than stay afloat, but there are questions, too, about pasturage and the eventual drop in organic milk prices and the problems of certification. All of the pastureland has been treated with pesticides and herbicides at one time, and with the long winters, it'll be hard to meet the grass-feeding requirements that go with the really good prices for milk. It's worrying. It eats at Bush when he thinks about it too hard; it eats at Bush, too, to know that his mother is worrying about it, that Lisa thinks about it during her days in town working as a warehouse manager in that Navy plant, that she drives in three times a week, after she gets off work, to help Ma with the place.
He wakes on that last morning by himself. It's still dark. He doesn't have his alarm set, but maybe it's having done chores for two days in a row, and once the worries set into him, there's nothing he can do. He wakes alone, in his bed, and he shakes the sleep out of his arms and legs. And he goes down the stairs and goes into the front room that Ma uses as a parlor for when they have company, and he looks at the furniture and the coffee table and the pictures on the walls. The last time that Bush was standing in a room during this time of day, with all of these worries tearing at him, it was during the start of football season, and he was going to the kitchen for a drink of water and thought he heard somebody whimpering. Wellard, it turned out to be, being beaten in the basement, and Sawyer made Horatio go down there with him.
Everything, as far as Bush can tell, is quiet in the basement.
Everything, as far as Bush can tell, is such a dark blue that it might as well be black, and Bush goes over to the whatnot in the corner and looks at the pictures of his father and mother on their wedding day. He puts his hands in his pockets and studies the photographs.
It's trouble, he knows. Eventually, Ma wakes up, and she comes down and starts breakfast, and it's trouble. Bush goes to help her, but he knows. It's terrible trouble. He's got to get away from it.
...
"He has have some family, Bill. Even if his parents are dead, he has to have some relatives. His parents didn't spring out of mud -- do they just live back in New York?"
"I don't know, Ma. He doesn't talk about them."
...
On the drive back to campus, Bush is honestly sort of worried that Horatio is going to try something again -- after all, every other time they've been alone in these past few days has turned into that, but Horatio must have been tired from throwing the ball around and entertaining Anna and Danielle, so Bush just puts the Bears game on the radio for as long as it'll stay on, and then he puts Nickeback onto the CD player when the signal that peters out after two hours. Horatio makes conversation for the first ten minutes or so, but once they get on the highway, he falls asleep in the passenger's seat, and Bush drives.
They don't talk. Bush sings "Bear Down, Chicago Bears" under his breath a couple times. Horatio sleeps, and yes, on mile one hundred and forty nine, the Bears game dies away in static.
...
It feels like a breakup.
Bush can't explain it, but it feels like Horatio was a girl, and they were seeing each other, and they've now decided to see other people. There are the strange lapses in conversation; there are the strange, awkward moments where neither of them can look at each other, and sometimes, they bump into each other in the kitchen when Bush is making his morning smoothie and Horatio is heading out the door. There are some of Bush's mother's tupperware boxes with Horatio's name on them in masking tape, in Lisa's handwriting, and Bush is back at the gym twice a day. He's incorporating more Romanian dead lifts into his routine, and it hurts, obscurely, to see Hornblower come back from the library with a bookbag and not know what he's been studying, what books he's got in that bag.
Finals are coming, but Bush is doing well enough so that he's not afraid of failing any classes. That's all he needs.
"Is Horatio back for Christmas? If you can bring him back a two days early, my history ptroject will still be in the gym, and I want him to see how the guillotine turned out. I sent him pictures, but -- "
Bush interrupts. "You sent him pictures?"
"By e-mail. Duh. You know what that is, right?" He can practically hear Danielle rolling her eyes through the phone.
One of the new pledges-now-a-full-brother is named Gerard, and Bush heads out to party, on Thursday, with Gerard, and he doesn't even check to see if Horatio is doing anything.
...
It feels like a breakup, and Bush does his usual post-football season thing where he messes around with a few girls. Casual things. It's really easy to meet them, particularly now that he's hanging with Gerard, and it's not anything serious. Making out, mostly, though he does get a blowjob from one of them, and it's such a weird experience because they're back at her place, and she's in a bra and panties, and he's lying in her bed in th emiddle of her pillows and stuffed animals. He's looking up at the little draped canopy thing she has going, and she's wearing a pink bra and pink panties.
Her bed smells sugary. There are Christmas lights on her walls, white ones, in a string, and she's living in an apartment with some of her friends.
Bush puts himself up on one elbow, looks down at her.
"Put your mouth around me tighter, baby," he says. "Use your tongue a little more, honey."
She's a freshman, and she's still wearing her charm necklace with a diamond on it. Her nails are the same color as her bra -- Bush realizes that she got dressed to go to the party, and they're both more than a little drunk. Her hair feels wrong under his hands, strangely smooth and light, and he bites his lip.
"Come on, baby," he says.
...
During the drive back, Horatio stays firmly asleep until Bush stops for gas, Horatio gets out, and they have a little squabble about who's going to pay for the gas, and at hte end, Horatio just tells him, straight-up, that unless Bush wants to waste more of the heat from the car, he's just going to have to let Horatio pay for it.
So he pays for the gas. And he pumps it, shivering a little with cold, and Bush tries not to watch Horatio in the rear-view mirror, over their duffel bags and the containers and containers of leftovers. He looks at everything else, turns up the volume on the music a little, and when the pump won't take Horatio's card, he goes in to pay for it at the counter, and yet, Bush can't escape the thought he had when he watched Horatio get out of the car: the shoulders, the back of Horatio's neck, the narrow hips. He remembers what Horatio's ass felt like under his hands -- different from a girl's, and the expression on Horatio's face when he'd turned his head and seen that clear spot in the mirror.
Horatio gave blowjobs like a girl, though, better than a girl.
"Did you want something?" Horatio sounds a little guilty. He has a thing of orange juice and a pocket full of Twizzlers.
"Nah." Bush looks straight ahead, and that's the last thing he says to Horatio on that car ride.
...
A week and a half after Thanksgiving, four girls and two mediocre blowjobs later, Bush meets Tem. She is a Delta Gamma Delta, and usually, those aren't his kind of girl, but Tem really isn't not a snobby, and she's not bitchy. She's classy and funny; her sorority nickname is Saucy, and Bush even gets into trouble for her sake: one night, he overstays the house curfew on male guests, and he has to sneak out the window, onto the fire escape. When she agrees to come home with him for Christmas -- he brings her a poinsettia with a little teddy bear wearing a Santa Claus hat, and she throws her arms around him and laughs at him for being so sweet -- Bush is so happy that he sings all the way back to his room.
...
Bush was in the hunting stand with Horatio two days before Thanksgiving, and Horatio had been wearing Bush's old hunting clothes, from back when Bush had his growth spurt, but hadn't yet filled into his shoulders. They hung a little loose on him, but an extra sweater underneath helped, and Horatio brought the newspaper. Bush had, for reading material, some old comics. Superman, mostly. Some Justice League, and eventually, Horatio gives over the newspaper and scootches next to Bush in the stand so that he can read over Bush's shoulder.
"Are you cold?"
Horatio had reached over to turn the page a little, and his fingers were red.
"No, I'm not cold." Horatio said. Bush's breath hung in the air, but Horatio had gotten cold enough so that his didn't, not really. It meant that his mouth and lips had been chilled, and Bush turned his head to look at him.
"Do you want coffee? There's hot coffee in a thermos. Or something to eat. Ma made us sandwiches."
Horatio shook his head; he reached over to turn the page, but his fingers were so cold that they wouldn't bend properly, and his hands were shaking, too. Maybe it was the angle that he was reaching over Bush's shoulder.
"You'll tear the page," Bush said, and he settled the comic on his knee. "Here." And he took Hornblower's right hand and held it between his palms. Hornblower put his other hand in the pocket of his coat, and he looked at Bush for a moment -- Bush caught only the tail of it out of his eye, but it was bright and cold, and Horatio's orange hunting hat didn't entirely cover his hair.
...
"You'll love her, Ma."
It's hard not to add, over the phone: I love her.
...
Bush remembers holding Horatio's hand in the hunting stand. Horatio's fingers were cold; his lips were red, and Bush remembered wondering whether they were cold, too.
...
In contrast, there's a bit of a thaw come Chirstmastime: the farm being where it is, there's still plenty of white, but the weather warms. It's rain coming down out of the sky; there are almost patches of green showing on the sides of the road, and Bush puts Top 40 on the radio.
"Do you mind?" he asks her.
Tem shakes her head -- she's bundled up to the ears despite the fact that it's relatively warm, and she grins at him becase she knows how ridiculous she looks with a scarf over her down vest and ear muffs with the heat at full blast, and Bush takes his eyes off the road long enough to look at her. When he does, it's hard not to smile. "I'll keep it down soft," he says. "In case you want to sleep. And tell me if you get hungry or something."
"All right," she says, smiling more softly. Almost shyly, and Bush finds that he's smiling back at her.
When the college Top 40 station fades out, Bush finds another. He's exhasuted from muddling through three finals in two days; he struggles with it, and the miles roll by.
...
Lisa comes out with a mug of coffee in her hand. Her hair is wet and pulled back, and there are shadows under her eyes. Bush guesses that she went to work, then came out to the farm. She must have doing some work in the barn and then gone to shower afterwards -- Danielle comes out with her, too, holding onto her elbow.
"Where's Horatio?" Lisa says.
"I brought Tem," Bush replies. He points her out. As if it were necessary, and Danielle makes a face that involves wrinkling her nose and frowning at the same time. Neither Bush nor Lisa say anything; eventually, Danielle skips off to examine Tem at close range, and there's more silence between Bush and his sister. Danielle stands next to Ma, peeks out at Tem arond her arm, and Ma puts her arm arond Danielle. Bush is about to ask Lisa what she was doing in the barn when she says, after another sip of coffee --
"That's a lot of luggage."
"We've got three weeks of vacation. She's flying straight to Raleigh for New Year's day."
Danielle is being introduced to Tem. Ma has her hand on Danielle's back, between the shoulderblades, and Danielle has her head angled up and is sqinting at Tem until she says something that makes Ma whack her between the shoulderblades. Tem laughs and offers her hand, which Danielle, after a moment of consideration, grudgingly takes.
"Well," Lisa says, considering. She's holding her coffee mug in both hands, and Bush realizes that he's perishing for some. "I guess you couldn't have brought them both."
It starts raining again shortly after that.
...
Tem is beautiful.
Bush has dated pretty girls before, but he doesn't think he's ever dated anybody honestly beautiful before -- she's tall for a girl and strong and surprisingly graceful. She explains to Bush that she used to be a cheerleader until she got too tall for it, and Bush can't explain why she looks beautiful to him. There are the usual things that he likes in a girl, like long legs and great tits and a stomach that's hard, but not too hard. She smells good, but all of that goes into making her pretty, not beautiful.
Instead, he just knows that when he looks at her, he knows that she's beautiful. When he wakes up in her bed in the mornings, the first thing he recognizes is her steady breathing -- she's in his arms, and she's breathing deep and steady. It's a miracle to feel it under his hands, and when she comes and sits on his knee, there is this deep sense of pride, this feeling that everything is in its place. The only analogy that Bush has is the feeling that comes over him sometimes when the chores for the day and then some are done, and he looks down the barn with the lights on and the heifers lined up and the floor hosed down: she touches his cheek, and he puts his arm arond her waist. Even when they are alone, that feeling of rightness stays there, and for Christmas, she gives him a football signed by Mike Ditka.
Each of his sisters gets a Bath and Body Works gift basket, and his mother gets a Coach appointment book. Even Lisa is impressed by how beautiful leather is, and Danielle runs her fingers over the cover. Her eyes are as big as fifty-cent pieces.
"Who'd think that something so pretty could come from cows?"
"It's too pretty to write in," Ma says, and Tem beams.
"Bill was telling me about what a wonderful job you do with the farm. I can't even imagine how you do it."
They're sitting on the floor in front of the tree, and Bush is sitting in the armchair, drinking eggnog and watching them. It's a colder sort of morning, so there's snow coming down, and the phone rings.
"I'll get it," Bush says.
...
From the kitchen, where the downstairs phone is, Bush can see into the living room. There's the tree. There's Ma, taking Tem around the room and showing her the photos and explaining them, and there're Danielle and Anna and Patricia trying to get Lisa to play Scrabble with them. The lights are warm; the tree is decorated, and Lisa has given up trying to pretend that she's too old and responsible to enjoy squabbling with them.
The curtains are still drawn in the kitchen, and all the lights are off. The living room practically glows, and It's not fair, Bush thinks as he picks up the phone.
It's just not fair.
...
"What a lovely, unusual name you have, Tem."
"It's short for Temeraire, actally. My uncle named me, and he's a big military history nut. It's French, I think."
"Has your family lived in North Carolina for a long time?"
...
After years of campaigning by Danielle and Anna and Patricia, the downstairs kitchen phone is now cordless, and Bush brings the phone into the living room.
"It's Horatio, Ma," he says and holds the phone in front of him. "He wants to wish you a Merry Christmas."
Danielle squeals and asks if she can talk to him.
...
"Where are you?"
"Hotel." There's a creaking noise, and if Bush closes his eyes, he can imagine Hornblower holding one of those beige hotel phones in his hand while he walks around. He knows how Horatio paces. "Actually, the hotel part of a casino. I figured that I'd make a little money over Christmas."
"How's it going?"
Horatio laughs, but he's not really happy. "All right. I win some, and I lose some."
"Are you losing more than you're winning?"
"I've got a little bit saved. The buffets are cheap. Everybody at the poker table right now is either really good or really addicted, so I have fun either way."
Bush has had his eyes closed for most of this conversation, and he still has his eyes closed as he finds his way to a bit of open wall and leans his sholders back against it. He'd stayed in the kitchen when the phone went circulating arond his family. "Good to hear."
The phone had circlated to Tem, and she'd talked to him for a little while. He must have asked her how her econ final went; how did Horatio even know that she was taking that? And Bush's mother also asked where Horatio was; whatever Horatio had told her, it hadn't been "a casino hotel, eating Christmas dinner on the five dollar buffet."
It was a terrible thing to think about.
"Look," Bush says. His throat feels strange. It's dark inside the kitchen, and after another moment where he's listening to Horatio breathe, he makes his offer. "There's always room for you. Especially since Tem is flying out tomorrow. If you need it, I can send you a Greyhound ticket. Or come pick you up. What casino are you at? I'll drive. How did you even get out to the casino?"
There's a long time where Horatio doesn't say anything, and Bush feels like an idiot. His throat feels even stranger, and he can't swallow. They're laughing in the living room.
"I can't let you do that," Horatio says finally. "You know I can't. But I'll come out to see you and Danielle. There's a Greyhound that I can take."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah."
...
So that's how it goes. Bush drives Tem to the airport the next day, and he gets the four pieces of matched roller luggage out of the car and tips the valet to take them to the checkin counter. He offers to put the car in short-term parking so that he can stand with her in line, but she hugs him, and the weather has continued to stay warm, and Bush is suddenly so proud of her that he can't say anything.
"I'll see you back at school," she says.
She has her hands over his, and she rests her fingers over the back of his hands.
Bush kisses her on each cheek; he still can't say anything. He even tries, but his throat won't work, and that's the way it goes. She goes into the building, and he gets back into his Jeep and drives the exit and twelve minutes to the Greyhound station.
...
There are trees on the farm. Theoretically, they could clear them out and get an extra few acres of pastureland, but Bush's father let them grow up out of old pastureland he wasn't using, and there isn't a real need to clear them. They used to play in these trees when they were children, and Bush points out to Horatio the evergreens mixed in with the birches and larches and occaisional maple.
"We get our Christmas trees from here," Bush says. "In the next year or two, I should come back and put in some more. Mostly basalm, but Ma likes a Douglas every few years."
They're in the trees now. The house is half a mile behind them, and the ground is soaked. It almost feels like spring, and when they get another hundred feet into the woods, Bush puts Horatio into one of the maples. Horatio is wearing borrowed sweatpants tucked into the top of borrowed galoshes; he didn't knot the string at the top of the sweatpants, and Bush is holding him against the tree with a hand on the shoulder, and the other hand is down at Horatio's hip, holding him against Bush. It's fast, so Horatio hasn't had much more of a chance to let half of a breath out of his lungs, and he can't really tilt his head back and away, but he doesn't even try.
Bush moves an arm behind Horatio so that Horatio's back isn't pressed against the tree, and in between the feverish kisses, he manages to get his hand down Horatio's -- his, actually -- sweatpants. There's a moment when Bush is fumbling to get enough space between them, and then, he wraps his hand on Horatio's cock, and Horatio lets out a noise that almost sounds like a sob.
It's awkward, and it's frantic. It starts raining halfway through, and Horatio ends up with bark in his hair, but he also gets a handjob out in the trees with Bush telling him the whole time, whispering into his ear, kissing him on the mouth and jaw and chin, and telling about how happy he is to see Horatio. How glad he is to see him.
...
What it comes down to is this: it makes Bush proud and steady to look at Tem. He thinks about the future and what he should do to get there, about what his duty and work should be. Looking at Horatio brings out something in him that he can't quite think of in such kind terms. It's wild and troubling, but the truth of it is that looking at Tem makes him content.
Looking at Horatio makes him happy, and what Bush has decided is that there's got to be duty in that feeling somewhere, too. He's just got to find it.
...
"Sorry, Danielle. All I've got for a present is this."
"What is it, Horatio?"
"It's a, uh. Five dollar poker chip."
...
After dinner, there's Scrabble. The Christmas tree hasn't been taken down yet, and Lisa makes a bowl of popcorn. Ma knits, and everybody else plays Scrabble. Horatio has, apparently, memorized the dictionary, and he keeps pointing out that the words that Bush is trying to play are not, in fact, allowable.
Danielle gets away with "snead" and "partray." The extra "r" lets her get a triple word score, and she spends the rest of the night crowing that she beat Hornblower, and what happens once the house is quiet, once they've gone to bed, is that Bush and Hornblower go down to the rec room, and they watch television. Network television, whatever is on, and then Conan. Bush keeps getting up and going upstairs to get water, to get chips, to use the bathroom, to get more water, and when he's finally convinced himself that everyone in the hose is asleep, he comes back downstairs, and he gets down on the floor in front of Hornblower.
The rec room door doesn't lock. There's a long staircase, though, and most of the steps creak. The lights are off, but the TV is on, bright enough for Bush to see what he's doing, and Horatio's breath hitches again when he realizes what's going on. He doesn't say anything -- not at first. He was half-asleep before. He lifts his hips off the couch so Bush can get the pajamas down to his ankles, and Bush saw how Horatio's breath hitched. It started in Horatio's stomach, and then stopped, and if this is what girls feel everytime they go down on a guy, it's not a surprise, Bush thinks, that most of them are so reluctant to do it.
"Look," Horatio says. "You don't have to do this. You really, really don't."
He can't really see Horatio's face. The light from the TV goes about to Horatio's waist; Bush puts his hand around Horatio's back to pull him closer to the edge of the couch, and Bush puts his lips over his teeth. He has to remember to breathe out of his nose.
It's different from going down on a girl.
...
The first time that William Bush kisses a boy is the day before Thanksgiving. The first time that he gives anyone a blowjob is the day before New Year's. If he thinks about it too much, if he thinks about the fact that he has the heel of his hand pressed against his dick through his pants while he's got Horatio's in his mouth -- if he'll get dizzy.
...
In a way, it's not as difficult as Bush would have imagined. He'd been looking at websites for this, even snuck one of Patricia's magazines because of the promise on the front, and the hardest part is remembering to do all the things. Keep his lips wrapped over his teeth. Breathe through his nose. Keep his tongue against the underside, and then, Horatio touches Bush's face. "Teeth," Horatio says, sounding a little pained, and Bush feels his ears burn.
And the hand on the side of Bush's face moves down to hold him, gently, under at the jaw, to close Bush's mouth a little and lead him further down. Another half-inch, and Horatio's hand slides up and strokes Bush's cheek. Back down to the jaw, lightly, and then Bush moves his head down another bit, and Horatio's hand is back at his cheek. Three breaths, and more, all at a steady pace, until Horatio shifts position a little and sees -- looks down a little and sees that Bush has his right hand pressed, through his pants, against his dick. Bush has his eyes closed, and he's concentrating too hard to do more than keep his hand there, but in the spaces, he's rubbing, and his eyes are closed.
"Bush -- " When it comes out of Horatio's mouth, it's more of a sound than an actual word.
Things speed up a little, then. Bush recognizes his name, maybe. Horatio keeps his hands off Bush's face, but he wraps two fingers arond the base of his cock to keep Bush from going too far and choking himself, and he tries to get Bush to slow down, but Bush pulls away from the hand that Horatio that tries to put in his hair. The rhythm is wrong, too, because Bush can't quite get the hang of moving his mouth forward when Horatio moves his hips forward; they keep meeting each other at cross-purposes.
Horatio's breath grows shorter and shorter. He can feel Bush's breath on his thighs and stomach, and that surprised noise was Bush, adjusting to his first taste. He puts a hand on Horatio's knee, and Horatio reaches out and holds Bush by the jaw. Bush tries to pull away a bit because he has ideas of his own, but Horatio keeps his hand there, holds Bush still, makes him open his mouth wide, and angles his hips up. Two strokes along the top of Bush's mouth, against the palate, and Bush somehow puts his tongue along the underside so that it's trailing along the underside, three, four, Hornblower pulls out.
Two more strokes with his hand along the underside, and he comes.
...
The rec room was in the basement, and the basement had plywood walls over wood framing. Hornblower had been intending to sleep directly on the sofa, but now that Bush was sleeping here too, they pulled the bed out from inside the sofa, and along the side of the room, there were curtains that separated the rec room from the storage area. Bush mentioned, before falling asleep, that he had sewn them -- a home economics project in middle school. It was either that or a stuffed animal, and Bush chose the curtains because he could choose a football-themed print.
Patricia had done the pillows. The hook rug was Danielle, who contributed most of the softabll trophies on the wall. Bush had football ones, mostly, but there were some basketball ones and some baseball from when he was young, and it was quiet.
Hornblower listened to Bush breathe -- snore, actually, a little in the bottom of his throat -- and he listened to the furnace, working in the night. He moved the Kleenex off the bed; he turned the television off entirely, and when he lay back down on the bed, Bush moved so that there was room for him, and eventually, his arm and body shifted over so that he was lying against Horatio. Bush continued to snore in the base of his throat, and the furnace continued to work.
Otherwise, it was completely silent.
...
"Listen," Horatio says. It's morning, and they're standing in front of the house. "I'm not going to be at school next semester. I'm going to be in England."
"England?"
"Oxford. I got a scholarship. It's for two years, but I can stay a third if I want to, and I've been trying to make up my mind about whehter to go since November. Prestigious stuff."
They both have coffee in their hands. Bush doesn't drink caffiene during the season, but he lets himself have a few cups in the winter before things get really started again. Horatio has it year-round and sweetens it to the point that it's almost syrup.
"Congratulations," Bush says, after a moment, but can't manage anything else. He still thinks that he heard Horatio wrong.
"I thought I was going to be staying until May." Horatio looks down into the yard. There's a dusting of snow on the grass. "I've got the credits to graduate this semester anyways, so I applied. Magdalen said they'd take me early, and I'm flying out at -- at the end of the week."
"You'll miss football."
Horatio grins a little, but it drops off of his face quickly. It's cold this morning, and there's going to be more snow later in the afternoon. "I guess I will, but I want to be there for the Hilary term -- that's what they call their spring term. Trinity runs from April through June, and then, during the summer, I've got a job in London."
"A job?"
"It's why I've got to get out there now. Once in a lifetime chance with the, ah. Embassy. In London."
Horatio's smile is back; he can't quite control it, and Bush finds that he can't, no matter what he does, look at Horatio's smile.
...
"You should tell Ma. And Danielle. Otherwise, they'll be expecting you for Easter."
...
Bush asked Hornblower whether there was anything that he needed back at school, but Hornblower explained that he had taken everything out of his room. Maria -- a friend, a girl who he had volunteer tutored with -- had helped him take his personal furniture down to the Salvation Army, and at the end of the week, a shuttle came for Hornblower. He wouldn't hear of Bush driving him to the airport, turning around, and coming directly back, He had enough left over form his casino winnings for a one-way ticket, and thus, in the grey down on the day after New Year's, Bush rolled out of his bed upstairs and went down to see Horatio go.
Hornblower had his passport, his plane ticket, and a single piece of luggage. Bush had dressed, and he stood in his coat and shoes.
"Here," Hornblower said and held the shirt that he'd been sleeping in back at Bush. "Thank you."
"Keep it," Bush said and put his hands in his pockets. It was hard to look at Horatio, and everyone else had said their goodbyes the night before.
Horatio fumbled with the shirt for a moment, then looped it over the straps on his duffel bag. The shirt was one of Bush's high school football shirts, and it was strange to think that he had met Hornblower in the context of football. Bush loved football,
"No, thank you," Hornblower said, and now, he stuck his hand out for Bush to shake. Bush shook it, and Hornblower was looking at him. There were spots of color on his cheeks, and he actually looked relieved.
"Thank you, Bush," he said. "I couldn't have had a more perfect friend."
And then he was gone.
All the good ideas, such as they are in this, are from iansmomesq.
The first time that William Bush gives a blowjob is the day before New Year's.
...
Here is the story back a few steps: Horatio and Bush are both on the football team at a school in the Midwest. Bush is their very good, draft-quality running back; Hornblower is so far back on the quarterback depth chart that he barely appears. He is, in fact, too bad for the junior varsity and spends most of his time keeping score for intersquad scrimmages. Nevertheless, Hornblower proves his worth on the field of play during the last game of the season after injuries and cowardice and a strange accident down the stairs have taken out the quarterbacks ahead of him, and since he has also come to be Bush's closest friend since high school and since Horatio let it slip that he didn't have family, Horatio is at Bush's for Thanksgiving.
They make the four hour drive back to Chichester Falls in Bush's car, and Bush's four sisters and mother swarm Hornblower under when they set foot on the family farm. For the first two hours of the visit, Horatio can't keep the sisters separate -- he'd put their names on an index card and memorized them before setting out with Bush -- but it's a whirl of women and family and warmth. Hornblower lost his father when he was a month past seventeen, and he went to college a month later.
"Um, Miss Bush -- " he says, and four heads turn around. Four mouths smile at him. Bush -- William, Bill to his family, generally -- also turns his head and grins at how Horatio is reddening.
...
The trouble doesn't really start until the second day of Thanksgiving break: they drove back in the afteroon, and they went hunting the first day. Horatio puked when Bush field-dressed the deer, and he felt absurd up in the stand, wearing the hunting clothes that Bush wore back when he was in high school and his shoulders hadn't caught up with his growth spurt. But it was all right. Bush took the tenderloin out of the deer to keep the butcher (great guy, his daughter, Linda, has great tits) from stealing them, and Ma cooked them up in a way that made Horatio promise that he would be positively murderous to the next deer he came across.
No, the trouble doesn't really start until the day that Bush goes out to take care of the heifers. Ma has given the hired guys the day before Thanksgiving off, as well as the day of, and Bush is doing his work. Horatio is useless, so he hands Horatio the bottles and tells him to take care of the calves. Hornblower can't even manage that, though, despite him having the biggest brain that Bush has ever seen outside of a classroom, and he ends up slipping on a patty and caking himself. Bush tries to help him up, and they both end up fairly disgusting.
The girls are out with Ma doing the Thanksgiving shopping. There's a bathroom off the mudroom -- it's the men's bathroom, and the help uses it sometimes in case of emergency, but it's been basically Bush's. He uses it when he's home, and through one contrivance or another, they end up in the shower together. It should be the least arousing thing ever given how many times they've hit the showers together in the locker-room, but it's somehow different watching Horatio wash. There are other things to do in the lockerroom showers. There's talking. There's laughing. It's much bigger.
Instead, Bush is staring at Horatio's back. There isn't anywhere to watch, and Horatio is soaping himself down. Steam fills the room. Maybe it's the fact that they're away from campus. Maybe it's the fact that Bush is both happy and frustrated, the way he always is when he comes home.
"Missed a spot," he says to Horatio and points a spot on the back of Horatio's neck, and Horatio twists his arm up and soaps it down. He turns half-around, and Bush sees the muscles in Horatio's side twist and move a little.
"Your turn," Horatio says, soon after that. There isn't much hot water, and he wants to be sure that Bush gets some of it.
He tries to get out by sliding past Bush, but the shower is small. There's no dreaded front-to-front contact, but his still-soapy hand touches Bush's hip and waist. Brushes against his ribs.
Bush can't explain it, but as he listens to the sound of Horatio drying himself off and getting dressed: he can't explain it, but he's profoundly grateful for the fact that the water turns cold about one point five seconds after he gets under it.
...
Here's another wrinkle on the trouble.
Since this is where Bush grew up, he feels the obligation to give Horatio the tour the next day while they're out grabbing last-minute groceries for Thanksgiving dinner. Here is the elementary school. Here is the field where we played Peewee football. The big factory over in the trees is where there used to be a big defense plant, making stuff for the Navy, but it's working on a reduced basis these days. Only one shift. When I was little, I always thought that I'd go there to work.
They get to the grocery store eventually, and they're getting the list of things that Ma gave them. They're also horsing around some, yelling and sliding up and down the empty aisles, and they're right around the breakfast cereal aisle when a familiar voice says.
"Hi, Bill."
Bush freezes. He's in the middle of squeezing Horatio into a headlock, and when he looks down the aisle, he sees, uh.
She's coming closer, and Bush lets go of Horatio, who pops up, kind of red-faced and trying to straighten himself. There are a couple boxes of cereal knocked down on the aisle, but nobody pays them much attention.
"Hi," Bush says. She looks a lot like she did in high school. Tall, kind of skinny, but with those pretty eyes. There are some lines around her mouth that he doesn't remember, and she stops about five feet away from them both. Bush is so red in the face that it takes Horatio clearing his throat for him to snap out of it.
"I'm Harry," Horatio says and sticks his hand out for shaking. He doesn't like to tell people his first name. "I go to school with, uh, Bill." After a moment of thought, he adds, "I'm on the football team with him."
"Oh," she says. And then looks at Bush, who's reddening a lot more. "I don't know if Bill told you, but we used to date."
"Oh." Horatio says.
There's another long moment of silence. And then he dumped me hangs pretty clearly between the Captain Crunch and the generic rice puffs. Horatio clears his throat again, and finally, she turns awya to go back to checking stock. Even when she's gone, though, Horatio won't look at Bush.
...
All right, here's where the trouble really starts: in this world, instead of two hard days and nights after the Renown gets into Kingston, Bush and Hornblower have four days off for Thanksgiving at Bush's family farm out in Chichester, and when Bush gets out of the shower, he finds that, to his surprise, Hornblower is still knocking around.
"Where are the Q-tips?" Hornblower asks. He's in a t-shirt -- one of Bush's old high school ones -- and sweatpants. His hair is still wet, and it's dripping down his forehead and onto his shoulders.
There's still steam in the room.
"Here," Bush says and reaches up into the cabinet over the sink.
It's all very fine and well for another half-second after that, and then Horatio steps close to see where, exactly, the Q-tips are, which means that he's right there. This time, it's Bush who turns into Hornblower, and now, they are front-against-front. Bush is holding a towel around himself, kinda, sorta, and Horatio is fully dressed, and the Q-tips fall out of Bush's hand because he feels like he's just been shocked with electricity. That can't possibly be what's happening, because there isn't anything plugged in. There's only that one light bulb over the sink, and they're standing so close to each other, and Horatio is grinning at him.
They end up making out against the wall. Bush didn't shave that morning, and Horatio has worked up a good amount of stubble by this point. It's just feverish touching, for the most part; the towel is somewhere tangled in their feet, and Horatio touches Bush again. At the side, above the hip, at the waist, and while they're sucking on each other's tongues and lips like flesh has taken the place of oxygen, Bush lifts Horatio's shirt and touches him in those same places.
Out of the corner of his eye, Bush realizes that Hornblower has rubbed a clear spot in the mirror over the sink. He's looking over at it now, and it's a small mirror, a small clear spot. All they can really see is Bush's bare ass, and as background for it, Hornblower's stomach. A patch of solid dark color for Hornblower's pants, and Hornblower's hand hovering a bit to the side.
Bush comes right there and then.
That's trouble.
...
And the trouble continues that night. After the bathroom, Bush goes and takes another shower, and Hornblower goes upstairs and changes into another pair of pants. It happens without anybody saying anything about anything, and Bush feels like the ten thousand tiny needles on his back have gone away.
Come bedtime, though, or at least bedtime for everybody else in the house, Hornblower comes and knocks on Bush's door.
"Hey," he says.
"Hey," Bush says. He's reading comics while lying on the floor on his stomach. Normally, he'd be downstairs, watching Conan with Horatio, but it doesn't feel right after what happened in the bathroom. "You need something?"
"Nah. I just wanted to see if I should set my alarm for tomorrow. For, you know. The cows."
It's a perfectly normal conversation. Horatio is just standing there, with his hand on the door, talking low so as not to wake anybody else, and the light is on and it's all safe, but somehow, in about three minutes flat after that, the door is closed and locked and the chair from Bush's desk jammed up against the handle, and Bush on his back on his childhood bed. His pants are down, and the lights are out. Horatio is kneeling down on the floor, and he has Bush's dick in his mouth.
The comics are still on the floor, but Bush is chewing on the knuckles of his right hand. Hornblower has a hand on Bush's stomach, spread flat, and he's bobbing his head up and down, and Bush bites his knuckles. He has posters of Jim McMahon and Dan Marino up on the wall, and Brett Favre is up on the ceiling, and Horatio is sucking his dick so good and sweet and slow that Bush has to bite down on his fingers, hard. Hornblower is doing something with his tongue now, not moving his head so much, and Bush squeezes his eyes shut. He doesn't want to come. It's slow and sweet and so good that it hurts like being hit in the stomach and the chest and everywhere else.
The poster of Brett Favre is printed to look like it's autographed. It's not, of course.
Bush props himself up on one elbow; he figures that he can't see anything. Maybe the change in position will distract him.
It distracts Horatio a little too, it seems. Bush looks down; Horatio looks up. Their eyes meet. There's just enough light for that to happen.
"Oh God," Bush says. He can't stop himself, and his hips jerk up into Horatio's mouth. "Oh God."
And then Horatio actually moans. He puts his hands on Bush's knees and squeezes and moans and Bush's hips move again, but Horatio doesn't move. He's looking Bush in the eye, holding onto him, while Bush puts his dick into that mouth. There's Hornblower's tongue when he readjusts his mouth a little; that's Bush's dick sliding past his lips. He's letting Bush fuck his mouth while he looks Bush in the eye.
"Oh God," Bush says, once more, though he's not sure whether it's out loud or just in his head. He hopes it's just in his head, he really hopes that this is all just in his head, and then he can't think about anything anymore because he's coming.
It's serious bad mojo.
...
This mojo, perhaps, what Horatio is sensing when he comes and stands by Bush's shoulder after the blowjob. It's still dark in the room; Bush has managed to pull his pants up, but that's about it. Horatio looks down at Bush for a while, and he opens his mouth to say something, but changes his mind and says something else.
"Look, this doesn't make us gay," Horatio says.
"Good. That was worrying me," Bush says. He's still holding onto the sheets.
And Horatio goes back to the rec room.
...
Bush believes Horatio when he says that this doesn't make them gay. Bush wants you to know this because, first of all, he likes tits and long hair and sweet smiles, and in high school, with recruiters in the stands, on the field, he decked a guy from the other team who galled him a faggot. It ruined North Carolina on him, and yes, looking at Horatio while Horatio sucks his dick feels suspiciously faggoty. Standing under a Wisconsin winter cold water shower, hard as anything, because Horatio touched his bare stomach and hip is really faggoty. Once Bush is alerted to the possibility, he realizes that Horatio makes him feel distinctly faggoty -- the skinny shoulders, the long face, the curly hair and the way his hands move when he's setting the table or turning the page on a book. That soft mouth and the way that Horatio doesn't smile very often, and then, not with his mouth, if that even makes sense.
Hornblower could get an extra fifteen feet on his throw if only he'd work out more, maybe eat more protein and change his diet a little.
Bush believes Horatio when he says that this doesn't make either of them gay. It's much like the way he belives Horatio when he explains how a solar eclipse happens or how a dead Greek guy proved that the Earth was round fifteen hundred years before Columbus. Horatio tells Bush that this is the way that you plot a parabola, and Bush believes it. The second number in the equation is where the parabola runs into the vertical axis.
Horatio throws, and Bush catches. Faggoty baseball analogies aside, that's the way it works in football, and that's the way it works when Horatio tells him that this kind of thing doesn't make either of them gay. Bush takes it and runs with it and he's totally comfortable and happy doing that. As they're pulling out of the grocery store on Thanksgiving day -- how do you forget the marshmallows? how do you fucking forget the marshmallows for the casserole for Thanksgiving dinner -- Bush remarks on this topic.
"Yeah," he says to Horatio. "Jean and me went out, off and on, for most of high school. Great girl, but it just didn't work out between us. I broke up with her for the last time right before I transferred schools. Real smart girl. She read a lot like you do."
...
It's a family tradition that Bush and his oldest sister, Lisa go out and take care of the chores on Thanksgiving morning. It's been that way ever since Bush was eleven and Lisa was thirteen, and it's gotten more significant since they both left home. They're out there with the snow and the smell of the heifers and the milking parlor, the shit up to the ankles, and while they're taking care of that, they don't talk a lot. Lisa has always been the least talky of his sisters.
They both know what they're doing, so it doesn't take too long. They take care of the herd and rinse themselves off, and when they're heading back to the house, a bit of wind coming down from northwest and the world looking wide and cold and perfect in the way that it never does when Bush is at school -- they talk a little about taking the herd organic, about the price of milk. The price of feed.
And then Lisa looks over, studies him for a bit. "The four of us love you no matter what, you know. And Ma would come around eventually. In this case, I think she practically has."
Bush just looks at her, blankly.
...
When the girls came back with the groceries, Bush and Hornblower came to help move the groceries into the kitchen. Bush noticed, with the rocrner of his mind, that Hornblower's hair was almost completely dry now, but that was all that he noticed until they'd gotten just about everything in, and then his mother, who had already put on the apron, gasped.
"Horatio, what happened to you?"
Horatio looks genuinely startled, and then, both he and Bush realize that Bush's mother is talking about the cut on Horatio's upper lip, off the center a bit. Bush realizes, cheeks coloring, that must have been where he bit Horatio, when he --
"Hunting, Ma. We must've stayed out hunting in the stand too long."
...
Bush carves the turkey at Thanksgiving, of course, and he eats until he thinks he's going to die, and after him and Horatio clear the table and stack it in the sink, they go down to the rec room to watch football. Bush carved the turkey because he's the man of the house, and then Ma asked Horatio if he'd like to say the blessing.
"Bill usually says it, but we usually don't bring a guest," she says.
Lisa makes a gargling noise in her throat, but Bush won't look at her. Instead, he looks at Horatio. He knows Horatio isn't religious -- he doesn't even bow his head during team prayer before the game, he hadn't thought about this beofre, and with everything, he hadn't thought about asking Horatio to do this as a special favor or to talk about a prayer that he, but Horatio agrees without a word more from anybody. He bows his head, and they join hands around the table.
"For each new morning with its light, for rest and shelter of the night, for health and food, for love and friends, for -- for the kindness of family and everything else that Your goodness sends. Thank You."
After the football that comes after the turkey, Horatio goes down on him again, again in Bush's room, against the door where he has a full, life-size poster of Walter Payton, and Bush balks at the lights being on, but Horatio gives him a look as he gets down on his knees. They'd been kissing, so Horatio's lips have that funny look to them again. He has a funny expression in his eyes, too, particularly when Bush runs his hand through Horatio's hair and touches his cheek to Horatio's cheek.
"Maybe we shouldn't -- "
"Just pretend I'm Jean, all right?"
It's the last word that Horatio says for a while.
...
The house is a small one. The farm and herd are small, too -- it's why Lisa was talking about taking the herd organic. Even with rBGH, they don't have enough output to really do more than stay afloat, but there are questions, too, about pasturage and the eventual drop in organic milk prices and the problems of certification. All of the pastureland has been treated with pesticides and herbicides at one time, and with the long winters, it'll be hard to meet the grass-feeding requirements that go with the really good prices for milk. It's worrying. It eats at Bush when he thinks about it too hard; it eats at Bush, too, to know that his mother is worrying about it, that Lisa thinks about it during her days in town working as a warehouse manager in that Navy plant, that she drives in three times a week, after she gets off work, to help Ma with the place.
He wakes on that last morning by himself. It's still dark. He doesn't have his alarm set, but maybe it's having done chores for two days in a row, and once the worries set into him, there's nothing he can do. He wakes alone, in his bed, and he shakes the sleep out of his arms and legs. And he goes down the stairs and goes into the front room that Ma uses as a parlor for when they have company, and he looks at the furniture and the coffee table and the pictures on the walls. The last time that Bush was standing in a room during this time of day, with all of these worries tearing at him, it was during the start of football season, and he was going to the kitchen for a drink of water and thought he heard somebody whimpering. Wellard, it turned out to be, being beaten in the basement, and Sawyer made Horatio go down there with him.
Everything, as far as Bush can tell, is quiet in the basement.
Everything, as far as Bush can tell, is such a dark blue that it might as well be black, and Bush goes over to the whatnot in the corner and looks at the pictures of his father and mother on their wedding day. He puts his hands in his pockets and studies the photographs.
It's trouble, he knows. Eventually, Ma wakes up, and she comes down and starts breakfast, and it's trouble. Bush goes to help her, but he knows. It's terrible trouble. He's got to get away from it.
...
"He has have some family, Bill. Even if his parents are dead, he has to have some relatives. His parents didn't spring out of mud -- do they just live back in New York?"
"I don't know, Ma. He doesn't talk about them."
...
On the drive back to campus, Bush is honestly sort of worried that Horatio is going to try something again -- after all, every other time they've been alone in these past few days has turned into that, but Horatio must have been tired from throwing the ball around and entertaining Anna and Danielle, so Bush just puts the Bears game on the radio for as long as it'll stay on, and then he puts Nickeback onto the CD player when the signal that peters out after two hours. Horatio makes conversation for the first ten minutes or so, but once they get on the highway, he falls asleep in the passenger's seat, and Bush drives.
They don't talk. Bush sings "Bear Down, Chicago Bears" under his breath a couple times. Horatio sleeps, and yes, on mile one hundred and forty nine, the Bears game dies away in static.
...
It feels like a breakup.
Bush can't explain it, but it feels like Horatio was a girl, and they were seeing each other, and they've now decided to see other people. There are the strange lapses in conversation; there are the strange, awkward moments where neither of them can look at each other, and sometimes, they bump into each other in the kitchen when Bush is making his morning smoothie and Horatio is heading out the door. There are some of Bush's mother's tupperware boxes with Horatio's name on them in masking tape, in Lisa's handwriting, and Bush is back at the gym twice a day. He's incorporating more Romanian dead lifts into his routine, and it hurts, obscurely, to see Hornblower come back from the library with a bookbag and not know what he's been studying, what books he's got in that bag.
Finals are coming, but Bush is doing well enough so that he's not afraid of failing any classes. That's all he needs.
"Is Horatio back for Christmas? If you can bring him back a two days early, my history ptroject will still be in the gym, and I want him to see how the guillotine turned out. I sent him pictures, but -- "
Bush interrupts. "You sent him pictures?"
"By e-mail. Duh. You know what that is, right?" He can practically hear Danielle rolling her eyes through the phone.
One of the new pledges-now-a-full-brother is named Gerard, and Bush heads out to party, on Thursday, with Gerard, and he doesn't even check to see if Horatio is doing anything.
...
It feels like a breakup, and Bush does his usual post-football season thing where he messes around with a few girls. Casual things. It's really easy to meet them, particularly now that he's hanging with Gerard, and it's not anything serious. Making out, mostly, though he does get a blowjob from one of them, and it's such a weird experience because they're back at her place, and she's in a bra and panties, and he's lying in her bed in th emiddle of her pillows and stuffed animals. He's looking up at the little draped canopy thing she has going, and she's wearing a pink bra and pink panties.
Her bed smells sugary. There are Christmas lights on her walls, white ones, in a string, and she's living in an apartment with some of her friends.
Bush puts himself up on one elbow, looks down at her.
"Put your mouth around me tighter, baby," he says. "Use your tongue a little more, honey."
She's a freshman, and she's still wearing her charm necklace with a diamond on it. Her nails are the same color as her bra -- Bush realizes that she got dressed to go to the party, and they're both more than a little drunk. Her hair feels wrong under his hands, strangely smooth and light, and he bites his lip.
"Come on, baby," he says.
...
During the drive back, Horatio stays firmly asleep until Bush stops for gas, Horatio gets out, and they have a little squabble about who's going to pay for the gas, and at hte end, Horatio just tells him, straight-up, that unless Bush wants to waste more of the heat from the car, he's just going to have to let Horatio pay for it.
So he pays for the gas. And he pumps it, shivering a little with cold, and Bush tries not to watch Horatio in the rear-view mirror, over their duffel bags and the containers and containers of leftovers. He looks at everything else, turns up the volume on the music a little, and when the pump won't take Horatio's card, he goes in to pay for it at the counter, and yet, Bush can't escape the thought he had when he watched Horatio get out of the car: the shoulders, the back of Horatio's neck, the narrow hips. He remembers what Horatio's ass felt like under his hands -- different from a girl's, and the expression on Horatio's face when he'd turned his head and seen that clear spot in the mirror.
Horatio gave blowjobs like a girl, though, better than a girl.
"Did you want something?" Horatio sounds a little guilty. He has a thing of orange juice and a pocket full of Twizzlers.
"Nah." Bush looks straight ahead, and that's the last thing he says to Horatio on that car ride.
...
A week and a half after Thanksgiving, four girls and two mediocre blowjobs later, Bush meets Tem. She is a Delta Gamma Delta, and usually, those aren't his kind of girl, but Tem really isn't not a snobby, and she's not bitchy. She's classy and funny; her sorority nickname is Saucy, and Bush even gets into trouble for her sake: one night, he overstays the house curfew on male guests, and he has to sneak out the window, onto the fire escape. When she agrees to come home with him for Christmas -- he brings her a poinsettia with a little teddy bear wearing a Santa Claus hat, and she throws her arms around him and laughs at him for being so sweet -- Bush is so happy that he sings all the way back to his room.
...
Bush was in the hunting stand with Horatio two days before Thanksgiving, and Horatio had been wearing Bush's old hunting clothes, from back when Bush had his growth spurt, but hadn't yet filled into his shoulders. They hung a little loose on him, but an extra sweater underneath helped, and Horatio brought the newspaper. Bush had, for reading material, some old comics. Superman, mostly. Some Justice League, and eventually, Horatio gives over the newspaper and scootches next to Bush in the stand so that he can read over Bush's shoulder.
"Are you cold?"
Horatio had reached over to turn the page a little, and his fingers were red.
"No, I'm not cold." Horatio said. Bush's breath hung in the air, but Horatio had gotten cold enough so that his didn't, not really. It meant that his mouth and lips had been chilled, and Bush turned his head to look at him.
"Do you want coffee? There's hot coffee in a thermos. Or something to eat. Ma made us sandwiches."
Horatio shook his head; he reached over to turn the page, but his fingers were so cold that they wouldn't bend properly, and his hands were shaking, too. Maybe it was the angle that he was reaching over Bush's shoulder.
"You'll tear the page," Bush said, and he settled the comic on his knee. "Here." And he took Hornblower's right hand and held it between his palms. Hornblower put his other hand in the pocket of his coat, and he looked at Bush for a moment -- Bush caught only the tail of it out of his eye, but it was bright and cold, and Horatio's orange hunting hat didn't entirely cover his hair.
...
"You'll love her, Ma."
It's hard not to add, over the phone: I love her.
...
Bush remembers holding Horatio's hand in the hunting stand. Horatio's fingers were cold; his lips were red, and Bush remembered wondering whether they were cold, too.
...
In contrast, there's a bit of a thaw come Chirstmastime: the farm being where it is, there's still plenty of white, but the weather warms. It's rain coming down out of the sky; there are almost patches of green showing on the sides of the road, and Bush puts Top 40 on the radio.
"Do you mind?" he asks her.
Tem shakes her head -- she's bundled up to the ears despite the fact that it's relatively warm, and she grins at him becase she knows how ridiculous she looks with a scarf over her down vest and ear muffs with the heat at full blast, and Bush takes his eyes off the road long enough to look at her. When he does, it's hard not to smile. "I'll keep it down soft," he says. "In case you want to sleep. And tell me if you get hungry or something."
"All right," she says, smiling more softly. Almost shyly, and Bush finds that he's smiling back at her.
When the college Top 40 station fades out, Bush finds another. He's exhasuted from muddling through three finals in two days; he struggles with it, and the miles roll by.
...
Lisa comes out with a mug of coffee in her hand. Her hair is wet and pulled back, and there are shadows under her eyes. Bush guesses that she went to work, then came out to the farm. She must have doing some work in the barn and then gone to shower afterwards -- Danielle comes out with her, too, holding onto her elbow.
"Where's Horatio?" Lisa says.
"I brought Tem," Bush replies. He points her out. As if it were necessary, and Danielle makes a face that involves wrinkling her nose and frowning at the same time. Neither Bush nor Lisa say anything; eventually, Danielle skips off to examine Tem at close range, and there's more silence between Bush and his sister. Danielle stands next to Ma, peeks out at Tem arond her arm, and Ma puts her arm arond Danielle. Bush is about to ask Lisa what she was doing in the barn when she says, after another sip of coffee --
"That's a lot of luggage."
"We've got three weeks of vacation. She's flying straight to Raleigh for New Year's day."
Danielle is being introduced to Tem. Ma has her hand on Danielle's back, between the shoulderblades, and Danielle has her head angled up and is sqinting at Tem until she says something that makes Ma whack her between the shoulderblades. Tem laughs and offers her hand, which Danielle, after a moment of consideration, grudgingly takes.
"Well," Lisa says, considering. She's holding her coffee mug in both hands, and Bush realizes that he's perishing for some. "I guess you couldn't have brought them both."
It starts raining again shortly after that.
...
Tem is beautiful.
Bush has dated pretty girls before, but he doesn't think he's ever dated anybody honestly beautiful before -- she's tall for a girl and strong and surprisingly graceful. She explains to Bush that she used to be a cheerleader until she got too tall for it, and Bush can't explain why she looks beautiful to him. There are the usual things that he likes in a girl, like long legs and great tits and a stomach that's hard, but not too hard. She smells good, but all of that goes into making her pretty, not beautiful.
Instead, he just knows that when he looks at her, he knows that she's beautiful. When he wakes up in her bed in the mornings, the first thing he recognizes is her steady breathing -- she's in his arms, and she's breathing deep and steady. It's a miracle to feel it under his hands, and when she comes and sits on his knee, there is this deep sense of pride, this feeling that everything is in its place. The only analogy that Bush has is the feeling that comes over him sometimes when the chores for the day and then some are done, and he looks down the barn with the lights on and the heifers lined up and the floor hosed down: she touches his cheek, and he puts his arm arond her waist. Even when they are alone, that feeling of rightness stays there, and for Christmas, she gives him a football signed by Mike Ditka.
Each of his sisters gets a Bath and Body Works gift basket, and his mother gets a Coach appointment book. Even Lisa is impressed by how beautiful leather is, and Danielle runs her fingers over the cover. Her eyes are as big as fifty-cent pieces.
"Who'd think that something so pretty could come from cows?"
"It's too pretty to write in," Ma says, and Tem beams.
"Bill was telling me about what a wonderful job you do with the farm. I can't even imagine how you do it."
They're sitting on the floor in front of the tree, and Bush is sitting in the armchair, drinking eggnog and watching them. It's a colder sort of morning, so there's snow coming down, and the phone rings.
"I'll get it," Bush says.
...
From the kitchen, where the downstairs phone is, Bush can see into the living room. There's the tree. There's Ma, taking Tem around the room and showing her the photos and explaining them, and there're Danielle and Anna and Patricia trying to get Lisa to play Scrabble with them. The lights are warm; the tree is decorated, and Lisa has given up trying to pretend that she's too old and responsible to enjoy squabbling with them.
The curtains are still drawn in the kitchen, and all the lights are off. The living room practically glows, and It's not fair, Bush thinks as he picks up the phone.
It's just not fair.
...
"What a lovely, unusual name you have, Tem."
"It's short for Temeraire, actally. My uncle named me, and he's a big military history nut. It's French, I think."
"Has your family lived in North Carolina for a long time?"
...
After years of campaigning by Danielle and Anna and Patricia, the downstairs kitchen phone is now cordless, and Bush brings the phone into the living room.
"It's Horatio, Ma," he says and holds the phone in front of him. "He wants to wish you a Merry Christmas."
Danielle squeals and asks if she can talk to him.
...
"Where are you?"
"Hotel." There's a creaking noise, and if Bush closes his eyes, he can imagine Hornblower holding one of those beige hotel phones in his hand while he walks around. He knows how Horatio paces. "Actually, the hotel part of a casino. I figured that I'd make a little money over Christmas."
"How's it going?"
Horatio laughs, but he's not really happy. "All right. I win some, and I lose some."
"Are you losing more than you're winning?"
"I've got a little bit saved. The buffets are cheap. Everybody at the poker table right now is either really good or really addicted, so I have fun either way."
Bush has had his eyes closed for most of this conversation, and he still has his eyes closed as he finds his way to a bit of open wall and leans his sholders back against it. He'd stayed in the kitchen when the phone went circulating arond his family. "Good to hear."
The phone had circlated to Tem, and she'd talked to him for a little while. He must have asked her how her econ final went; how did Horatio even know that she was taking that? And Bush's mother also asked where Horatio was; whatever Horatio had told her, it hadn't been "a casino hotel, eating Christmas dinner on the five dollar buffet."
It was a terrible thing to think about.
"Look," Bush says. His throat feels strange. It's dark inside the kitchen, and after another moment where he's listening to Horatio breathe, he makes his offer. "There's always room for you. Especially since Tem is flying out tomorrow. If you need it, I can send you a Greyhound ticket. Or come pick you up. What casino are you at? I'll drive. How did you even get out to the casino?"
There's a long time where Horatio doesn't say anything, and Bush feels like an idiot. His throat feels even stranger, and he can't swallow. They're laughing in the living room.
"I can't let you do that," Horatio says finally. "You know I can't. But I'll come out to see you and Danielle. There's a Greyhound that I can take."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah."
...
So that's how it goes. Bush drives Tem to the airport the next day, and he gets the four pieces of matched roller luggage out of the car and tips the valet to take them to the checkin counter. He offers to put the car in short-term parking so that he can stand with her in line, but she hugs him, and the weather has continued to stay warm, and Bush is suddenly so proud of her that he can't say anything.
"I'll see you back at school," she says.
She has her hands over his, and she rests her fingers over the back of his hands.
Bush kisses her on each cheek; he still can't say anything. He even tries, but his throat won't work, and that's the way it goes. She goes into the building, and he gets back into his Jeep and drives the exit and twelve minutes to the Greyhound station.
...
There are trees on the farm. Theoretically, they could clear them out and get an extra few acres of pastureland, but Bush's father let them grow up out of old pastureland he wasn't using, and there isn't a real need to clear them. They used to play in these trees when they were children, and Bush points out to Horatio the evergreens mixed in with the birches and larches and occaisional maple.
"We get our Christmas trees from here," Bush says. "In the next year or two, I should come back and put in some more. Mostly basalm, but Ma likes a Douglas every few years."
They're in the trees now. The house is half a mile behind them, and the ground is soaked. It almost feels like spring, and when they get another hundred feet into the woods, Bush puts Horatio into one of the maples. Horatio is wearing borrowed sweatpants tucked into the top of borrowed galoshes; he didn't knot the string at the top of the sweatpants, and Bush is holding him against the tree with a hand on the shoulder, and the other hand is down at Horatio's hip, holding him against Bush. It's fast, so Horatio hasn't had much more of a chance to let half of a breath out of his lungs, and he can't really tilt his head back and away, but he doesn't even try.
Bush moves an arm behind Horatio so that Horatio's back isn't pressed against the tree, and in between the feverish kisses, he manages to get his hand down Horatio's -- his, actually -- sweatpants. There's a moment when Bush is fumbling to get enough space between them, and then, he wraps his hand on Horatio's cock, and Horatio lets out a noise that almost sounds like a sob.
It's awkward, and it's frantic. It starts raining halfway through, and Horatio ends up with bark in his hair, but he also gets a handjob out in the trees with Bush telling him the whole time, whispering into his ear, kissing him on the mouth and jaw and chin, and telling about how happy he is to see Horatio. How glad he is to see him.
...
What it comes down to is this: it makes Bush proud and steady to look at Tem. He thinks about the future and what he should do to get there, about what his duty and work should be. Looking at Horatio brings out something in him that he can't quite think of in such kind terms. It's wild and troubling, but the truth of it is that looking at Tem makes him content.
Looking at Horatio makes him happy, and what Bush has decided is that there's got to be duty in that feeling somewhere, too. He's just got to find it.
...
"Sorry, Danielle. All I've got for a present is this."
"What is it, Horatio?"
"It's a, uh. Five dollar poker chip."
...
After dinner, there's Scrabble. The Christmas tree hasn't been taken down yet, and Lisa makes a bowl of popcorn. Ma knits, and everybody else plays Scrabble. Horatio has, apparently, memorized the dictionary, and he keeps pointing out that the words that Bush is trying to play are not, in fact, allowable.
Danielle gets away with "snead" and "partray." The extra "r" lets her get a triple word score, and she spends the rest of the night crowing that she beat Hornblower, and what happens once the house is quiet, once they've gone to bed, is that Bush and Hornblower go down to the rec room, and they watch television. Network television, whatever is on, and then Conan. Bush keeps getting up and going upstairs to get water, to get chips, to use the bathroom, to get more water, and when he's finally convinced himself that everyone in the hose is asleep, he comes back downstairs, and he gets down on the floor in front of Hornblower.
The rec room door doesn't lock. There's a long staircase, though, and most of the steps creak. The lights are off, but the TV is on, bright enough for Bush to see what he's doing, and Horatio's breath hitches again when he realizes what's going on. He doesn't say anything -- not at first. He was half-asleep before. He lifts his hips off the couch so Bush can get the pajamas down to his ankles, and Bush saw how Horatio's breath hitched. It started in Horatio's stomach, and then stopped, and if this is what girls feel everytime they go down on a guy, it's not a surprise, Bush thinks, that most of them are so reluctant to do it.
"Look," Horatio says. "You don't have to do this. You really, really don't."
He can't really see Horatio's face. The light from the TV goes about to Horatio's waist; Bush puts his hand around Horatio's back to pull him closer to the edge of the couch, and Bush puts his lips over his teeth. He has to remember to breathe out of his nose.
It's different from going down on a girl.
...
The first time that William Bush kisses a boy is the day before Thanksgiving. The first time that he gives anyone a blowjob is the day before New Year's. If he thinks about it too much, if he thinks about the fact that he has the heel of his hand pressed against his dick through his pants while he's got Horatio's in his mouth -- if he'll get dizzy.
...
In a way, it's not as difficult as Bush would have imagined. He'd been looking at websites for this, even snuck one of Patricia's magazines because of the promise on the front, and the hardest part is remembering to do all the things. Keep his lips wrapped over his teeth. Breathe through his nose. Keep his tongue against the underside, and then, Horatio touches Bush's face. "Teeth," Horatio says, sounding a little pained, and Bush feels his ears burn.
And the hand on the side of Bush's face moves down to hold him, gently, under at the jaw, to close Bush's mouth a little and lead him further down. Another half-inch, and Horatio's hand slides up and strokes Bush's cheek. Back down to the jaw, lightly, and then Bush moves his head down another bit, and Horatio's hand is back at his cheek. Three breaths, and more, all at a steady pace, until Horatio shifts position a little and sees -- looks down a little and sees that Bush has his right hand pressed, through his pants, against his dick. Bush has his eyes closed, and he's concentrating too hard to do more than keep his hand there, but in the spaces, he's rubbing, and his eyes are closed.
"Bush -- " When it comes out of Horatio's mouth, it's more of a sound than an actual word.
Things speed up a little, then. Bush recognizes his name, maybe. Horatio keeps his hands off Bush's face, but he wraps two fingers arond the base of his cock to keep Bush from going too far and choking himself, and he tries to get Bush to slow down, but Bush pulls away from the hand that Horatio that tries to put in his hair. The rhythm is wrong, too, because Bush can't quite get the hang of moving his mouth forward when Horatio moves his hips forward; they keep meeting each other at cross-purposes.
Horatio's breath grows shorter and shorter. He can feel Bush's breath on his thighs and stomach, and that surprised noise was Bush, adjusting to his first taste. He puts a hand on Horatio's knee, and Horatio reaches out and holds Bush by the jaw. Bush tries to pull away a bit because he has ideas of his own, but Horatio keeps his hand there, holds Bush still, makes him open his mouth wide, and angles his hips up. Two strokes along the top of Bush's mouth, against the palate, and Bush somehow puts his tongue along the underside so that it's trailing along the underside, three, four, Hornblower pulls out.
Two more strokes with his hand along the underside, and he comes.
...
The rec room was in the basement, and the basement had plywood walls over wood framing. Hornblower had been intending to sleep directly on the sofa, but now that Bush was sleeping here too, they pulled the bed out from inside the sofa, and along the side of the room, there were curtains that separated the rec room from the storage area. Bush mentioned, before falling asleep, that he had sewn them -- a home economics project in middle school. It was either that or a stuffed animal, and Bush chose the curtains because he could choose a football-themed print.
Patricia had done the pillows. The hook rug was Danielle, who contributed most of the softabll trophies on the wall. Bush had football ones, mostly, but there were some basketball ones and some baseball from when he was young, and it was quiet.
Hornblower listened to Bush breathe -- snore, actually, a little in the bottom of his throat -- and he listened to the furnace, working in the night. He moved the Kleenex off the bed; he turned the television off entirely, and when he lay back down on the bed, Bush moved so that there was room for him, and eventually, his arm and body shifted over so that he was lying against Horatio. Bush continued to snore in the base of his throat, and the furnace continued to work.
Otherwise, it was completely silent.
...
"Listen," Horatio says. It's morning, and they're standing in front of the house. "I'm not going to be at school next semester. I'm going to be in England."
"England?"
"Oxford. I got a scholarship. It's for two years, but I can stay a third if I want to, and I've been trying to make up my mind about whehter to go since November. Prestigious stuff."
They both have coffee in their hands. Bush doesn't drink caffiene during the season, but he lets himself have a few cups in the winter before things get really started again. Horatio has it year-round and sweetens it to the point that it's almost syrup.
"Congratulations," Bush says, after a moment, but can't manage anything else. He still thinks that he heard Horatio wrong.
"I thought I was going to be staying until May." Horatio looks down into the yard. There's a dusting of snow on the grass. "I've got the credits to graduate this semester anyways, so I applied. Magdalen said they'd take me early, and I'm flying out at -- at the end of the week."
"You'll miss football."
Horatio grins a little, but it drops off of his face quickly. It's cold this morning, and there's going to be more snow later in the afternoon. "I guess I will, but I want to be there for the Hilary term -- that's what they call their spring term. Trinity runs from April through June, and then, during the summer, I've got a job in London."
"A job?"
"It's why I've got to get out there now. Once in a lifetime chance with the, ah. Embassy. In London."
Horatio's smile is back; he can't quite control it, and Bush finds that he can't, no matter what he does, look at Horatio's smile.
...
"You should tell Ma. And Danielle. Otherwise, they'll be expecting you for Easter."
...
Bush asked Hornblower whether there was anything that he needed back at school, but Hornblower explained that he had taken everything out of his room. Maria -- a friend, a girl who he had volunteer tutored with -- had helped him take his personal furniture down to the Salvation Army, and at the end of the week, a shuttle came for Hornblower. He wouldn't hear of Bush driving him to the airport, turning around, and coming directly back, He had enough left over form his casino winnings for a one-way ticket, and thus, in the grey down on the day after New Year's, Bush rolled out of his bed upstairs and went down to see Horatio go.
Hornblower had his passport, his plane ticket, and a single piece of luggage. Bush had dressed, and he stood in his coat and shoes.
"Here," Hornblower said and held the shirt that he'd been sleeping in back at Bush. "Thank you."
"Keep it," Bush said and put his hands in his pockets. It was hard to look at Horatio, and everyone else had said their goodbyes the night before.
Horatio fumbled with the shirt for a moment, then looped it over the straps on his duffel bag. The shirt was one of Bush's high school football shirts, and it was strange to think that he had met Hornblower in the context of football. Bush loved football,
"No, thank you," Hornblower said, and now, he stuck his hand out for Bush to shake. Bush shook it, and Hornblower was looking at him. There were spots of color on his cheeks, and he actually looked relieved.
"Thank you, Bush," he said. "I couldn't have had a more perfect friend."
And then he was gone.