Poor Man's Son - 17. Chapter 16

July 20, 2000

Paris, France

Will

I thought I’d figured out how to arrange the curtains to block out the light in the room, but evidently I’d missed a corner. Through that corner the morning sun blared, as bright as a 300-watt bulb, or at least that’s how it seemed. I rolled over onto my side and took in the sunlit view of John’s form. Damn, he was hot. I ran my hand across his chest and down his abdomen, smiling at how he moaned and squirmed under my touch. I pulled down the sheet, exposing his cock, rock hard which was the norm for the morning.

I stroked it gently, enjoying the sound of the moans that came out of his mouth, even though he was still sleeping. I grinned at that, and moved down, engulfing his dick with my mouth. I moved up and down just a few times before I heard him moan loudly, and then he blasted his morning load down my throat.

“What a way to wake up,” he said, smiling down at me.

“Happy birthday,” I said.

“Your turn,” he told me. He gave me one amazing hand job, and then we got up, took a shower, and headed to the kitchen for breakfast.

“It is you two,” Cecile said dourly as we arrived. She was the cook Stef had hired for us while we were here. “It is a good thing I bought more food.”

“You’re not making one of those wimpy French breakfasts, are you?” I teased. I’d trained her that American men weren’t happy with that, and she was settling into more substantive meals than a croissant and coffee.

“Now I know why most American men are fat,” she said. Robbie came walking into the room.

“Like him?” I asked.

“What?” he asked as well.

“She said most American men are fat like you,” I extrapolated.

“I am not fat,” he insisted. We giggled and sat down to eat. The smell of bacon woke up Darius and Dad. “Look who’s up bright and early,” Robbie said to Darius, who was notorious for sleeping in.

“Weren’t you supposed to be arrested by now?” he asked, cracking us up and pissing Robbie off.

“It’s not funny,” he stated, and he was right. At first, it had been pretty comical. Every time we went out in Paris, Robbie was looking around, as if the gendarmes would just lunge in and capture him in public. But I’d been awake last night and heard the screams from their rooms as Robbie had battled a nightmare. Dad must have woken him up pretty quick, but I’d heard it.

“So what’s the plan for today?” I asked.

“I believe John has made plans for all of us, since it is his birthday,” JP said as he and Stefan came into the kitchen.

“You’ve made plans?” I asked him. Dad and Robbie even looked surprised, so clearly I wasn’t the only one who was out of the loop on this decision. Stef and JP sat at the table smugly.

“I did,” he said. “And since it’s my birthday, everyone has to do what I want.” He sounded like a bratty kid, which, coming from him, was pretty funny.

“Right,” Darius said sarcastically. “We’ll see about that.”

“John has decided that today is couples’ day,” Stef announced. “We were worried about you,” he said to Dad, “until your partner opted to join us.”

“You mean grew a pair,” Darius said, jabbing Robbie again.

“There are often multiple ways to look at things,” Stef said, smiling at Robbie.

“Whatever,” Robbie said, acting all pissed off.

“So what are we doing?” I asked John.

“Dude, we’re going to Disneyland,” he joked. “Or Disneyland Paris, to be more specific.”

“Who else is going?” I asked.

“Just us,” John said. I looked over at Stef and my dad, and they were much too calm.

“No security?” I asked, more of them than of him.

“Nope, just us,” he said. I stared at the “adults” around the table. My dad wouldn’t make eye contact with me. JP had that glassy look that said he knew more than he was saying. Stef had a slightly devious look in his eyes. There would be security. I went with it anyway.

“Sweet. When do we leave?”

“Whenever you are ready,” Stef said.

Wegot high up on the patio, and then hopped into the limo for our drive to Disneyland Paris. “Check this out,” John said excitedly. “We got VIP passes!”

I smiled. “No waiting on the rides!”

“We have to hit the cool ones before the buzz wears off,” John said, cracking me up. “I brought a stick so we can do a booster in the park.”

“Dude, we so cannot smoke a ‘J’ in the park,” I said.

“We can if I say so,” he joked. “It’s my birthday.”

“Do you want to give Robbie a heart attack? What do you think would happen if we got busted?” I normally didn’t worry about shit like that. I saw his face get sad. “I have an idea. Maybe we can take a break and sneak out to this limo.”

“Just to smoke the joint?” he asked with a leer, cracking me up.

We got to Disneyland Paris and it was pretty weird, since it was like Disneyland, only in French. That didn’t bother John or me, since we could slip into French seamlessly, but it did seem weird to see this American icon adapted to a foreign country. We had a blast looking around and finding differences between this park and Disneyland.

“It’s kind of like Disney-lite,” John said, pronouncing judgment.

“Yeah, I guess Americans are bigger thrill seekers,” I joked. “Still, their Pirates of the Caribbean ride rocks. Makes ours look like shit.”

“Word,” he said, cracking me up. We went through the Haunted Mansion next. “Did you notice that wild west thing? We don’t have that.”

“We don’t?” I asked.

“No, there’s that funky graveyard scene instead,” he said.

“Dude, how do you remember all this shit?” I didn’t get that until he mentioned it.

“I’m smarter than you,” he said. He probably was.

“Let’s go on ‘It’s a Small World’ and make out in front of all the tourists and their kids,” I suggested.

“Dude, we’ll get our asses kicked,” he said.

“No way.”

“Oh yeah. Like you’re this big tough guy that’s gonna take on all these big Euro guys.” There were a lot of hunky guys here.

“Security will intervene,” I told him.

“We don’t have any security today,” he said.

We stopped and bought an ice cream cone. “See that guy over there,” I said, gesturing off to my right. “Don’t look obviously!” I said, as he made to stare.

“OK, I see him,” he said. “So?”

“He’s been following us around for the past two hours. There was another guy before him.” Just then another guy came up and said a few words to him, and then they both looked directly at us. Then the original guy left. “Shift change,” I said smugly.

“Fuck. They said we’d be alone, just us, no security, nothing like that.”

“We’re in a foreign country. There’s no way they’re going to let us go wander around without an escort. They set this up to make you happy.”

“They lied to me,” he said obstinately. He seemed so petulant, especially about something so obvious, that it kind of made me think that’s what I must look like sometimes. I slid that mental note into the back of my brain to think about later.

“Dude, don’t go there. It’s been fun, and it’s cool that they’re not in our face like they usually are. I’m having fun. Aren’t you?”

I watched him mellow. “Yeah. Let’s go make out in front of those tourists.” We laughed and wandered around some more, then went out to the limo, got high, blew each other, and then went back into the park. We spent our last hour and a half there running around, trying to lose our guard, and really winding the poor guy. Too funny.

      

July 21, 2000

Paris, France

Gathan

“If it’s couples’ day, how did we get stuck with them?” I asked Kristin as I gestured rudely at Darius and Ella.

“They’re a couple,” Kristin said. “They put all of us heteros together.”

“Almost,” Darius said, and then freaked out since he’d almost outed me.

I glared at him and changed the subject. “So where do you want to go?”

“Let’s go to the Musée d’Orsay,” Kristin proposed. “Some culture for you.”

“Thrill thrill,” I said sarcastically. We took the limo to the museum and had to put up with a guard that kept an eye on us. “If we didn’t have Darius with us, would we need this guard?”

“I don’t know,” Kristin said. “Let’s ditch him.”

“Very funny,” Darius said. “If you did, here’s what would happen. You’d get in trouble, then you’d get your own guard, then we’d have two of these dudes with us.”

“Good point,” I agreed. We wandered around, looking at art that really didn’t resonate with me. I was looking at Kristin, she was looking at art. She was so beautiful, so perfect; it was hard for me to believe we were actually together. I guess all those workouts and all that homework had paid off big time.

“I’m bored with this place,” Darius finally said.

“You might not want to take art appreciation in college,” I teased.

“Fuck you.”

“I think we’ll walk back,” I said, inspired. “You, Ella, and your guard can take the limo.”

“Go ahead. I’ll get some bandages ready for you. You’ll need them when you get your ass ripped up,” he said.

“I’ll risk it,” I said. “Let’s go,” I said to Kristin. We left an unhappy Darius, Ella, and a nervous guard and breezed out onto the Parisian streets unescorted. “I feel so free,” I said to Kristin.

“They just want us to be safe.”

“You nervous? You want to get the guard?”

She smiled and gave me a nice kiss. “I know you’ll protect me.”

“Damn straight,” I said. We wandered along the left bank of the Seine, looking at the people as much as the city. “This city is incredible.”

“It is beautiful, isn’t it?”

“Have you been here before?” I asked her.

“I have been, but you know, they say that to really appreciate Paris, you have to visit with someone you love, so I’d say this is my first visit.”

“You love me?” I asked her, raising an eyebrow.

“Well of course I love you,” she said, playing it off. “I’m not sure if I’m in love with you, though.” She’d slipped, and now she was trying to backpedal, saying that she loved me as a friend.

“Oh,” I said, acting disappointed. Truthfully, I wasn’t sure if I was disappointed or not. I guess I thought that saying you loved someone was a big step, a big commitment, and I didn’t feel comfortable being there with her yet. I analyzed that as we walked, and decided that my feelings for her were advancing really fast, and that I’d be there soon enough. She was just moving faster, super fast.

“Do you love me?” she demanded.

“I love you the same way you love me,” I told her, pissing her off.

“I don’t think I love you anymore at all,” she said.

“Then I’ll just jump in this river and kill myself,” I joked, even though suicide wasn’t funny, but when I lunged for the river it freaked her out.

“No!”

I stopped and grinned at her. “So you do care?”

“You’re an asshole,” she said, with a certain degree of affection.

“Probably.” We strolled along, talking about the people that we saw, the sights we passed, and friends we knew from high school, until we suddenly found ourselves back at the Ile.

We stopped at a café near the condo and ordered some drinks. Before our conversation could continue, my cell phone rang. Stef had gotten each of us a cell phone for our time in Paris, and we had to swear we’d keep them with us always. “Hello?”

“And just where are you?” a very irritated Stefan asked.

“We’re at that café around the corner from the condo,” I said calmly.

“You are trying to give me a heart attack?” he demanded.

“Stef, we’re fine. We just walked along the Seine, and just from the Musée d’Orsay,” I said soothingly and logically. “Besides, no one wants me.”

“You are the six million dollar man,” he joked, referring to the lame-ass TV show from the 70s. “And your girlfriend is worth a lot as well, although I do not have a specific value.”

“Stef wants to know your net worth,” I said to Kristin.

“Do not be crass,” he said on the phone while she giggled.

“We’ll be home in a while. Don’t worry about us.”

“We are going out to dinner for John’s birthday. Do not forget.”

“We’ll be there,” I told him, then hung up. “Damn, he’s worse than Clara.”

“You haven’t talked about that,” she said. “Are you OK?”

I thought I had talked about it, but I was learning that males ‘talked’ about things differently than females. Women required extensive verbalization. “I’m not sure what I can do about it. I owe them everything, so I can’t be upset with them. I think over time they’ll come around.”

“You think so? You’re going to be moving in a different world from now on,” she said. I was about to utter some nonsense about how I could go back to being the same guy, but her look challenged that, and I knew she was right.

“I think that they’ll get used to me in this new place, and I think they’ll ultimately see what an asshole Zach is. He’s stupid enough to screw around with his brother, and then it won’t be so easy for them to take his side.” It seemed so obvious to me that Zach was toxic; I didn’t get why Wally and Clara were blind to that.

“People don’t see the flaws in their own kids,” she said. She was probably right.

 

July 21, 2000

Paris, France

Will

We were finally back at the condo after a dinner that seemed to last for-fucking-ever. We’d gotten back from Disneyland Paris and barely had time to get cleaned up before we were due at the Eiffel Tower for dinner. We’d eaten at the nice restaurant there and it had been a lot of fun. Gathan and Darius were super animated, and Robbie had even seemed to calm down a little bit.

John got some really nice presents. It’s not like he needed anything, especially since my Uncle Jack was like a big teenager himself. Their house was like a freaking arcade. The coolest thing was a watch, from Stef and JP. It was a Patek Philippe, 14-karat gold, with this incredibly intricate face design and movement. He probably wouldn’t wear it much since it was the kind of watch you only wore on dressy occasions, but it was still pretty sweet. So I sat there while John opened his presents and had a good time, forcing myself to be patient, and to get into it as much as I could.

My problem is that I wasn’t interested in a long, drawn-out dinner. I was anxious to give John his present, and to do that, we needed to be alone. Finally, we finished eating and opening presents. Finally, we herded everyone into the limos. And finally, we arrived back at the condo and managed to escape from the rest of the group.

“Dude, check this out,” John said as we lugged his presents into our room. “This is awesome.”

“Is that one of those new thumb drives?”

“Yeah. Who needs disks? I can put my files on this and carry it around in my pocket.”

“What else you got in your pocket?” I asked him with a leer, cracking him up.

“Wanna see?” he joked.

“In a minute,” I said. I went into the bathroom and really cleaned myself up. Fortunately, this was France, and all of our bathrooms had bidets. I went back into the room to find him lying on the bed stark naked. I cracked up as I pulled my own clothes off.

“What? You think I look funny?”

“No, I think you look horny,” I told him.

“True that,” he said.

“You ready for your present?” I asked.

“What do you mean?”

I climbed in bed with him and we started making out. I loved the way he tasted, and the way our lips moved together perfectly. I pushed him on his back and climbed on top of him, thrusting against him, rubbing my throbbing hard cock against his. Then I adjusted myself forward and felt his dick slide up my crack, grazing across my hole and forcing a moan from my mouth. “I want you,” I said, and probably sounded like some soap opera actress.

“Are you sure?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said, and swallowed hard. I’d been planning this for a while now, planning that on this day, John’s birthday, I would lose my cherry. I felt his hands stroking my ass and I reached over onto the nightstand where the lube was conveniently positioned, just as I’d planned.

He pushed me off of him and made me lie on my stomach, which kind of threw my plans off, but I went with it. He began to work my hole first with his fingers, then with his tongue. That almost sent me into orbit. Then he started probing with a purpose, using lots of lube and pushing his finger in. It hurt a little bit, but I forced myself to relax and I tried to enjoy it.

“Does that hurt?” he asked.

“A little,” I answered honestly.

“Let’s stop,” he said nervously.

“No,” I told him emphatically. “I want to do this.”

“Alright,” he said, but he was still nervous. I could sense it in his touch, and his approach, so I took over and got him on his back again. I blew him, but only for a bit, just to get him really hard, and then I greased up his pole.

“I just want you to know that you don’t have to do this. I’ll love you just as much, either way.”

“I love you too, but I want this, I really really want this,” I said. He got a big grin on his face, and I lined his dick up with my hole and started to lower myself down, just like Stef had told me.

I felt his dick press against my hole, and I willed myself to open up and let him in as I pushed harder. Pain shot through my body, but I tried to overlook it and take him, but I couldn’t. I pulled off of him and looked down to see him looking at me worried. I felt a tear slide down my cheek, and that told me and him how much that fucking hurt.

“I don’t want to do this,” he announced.

“Why?”

“Because it’s hurting you, and I don’t want to hurt you. I’m fine with what we’ve been doing,” he said authoritatively.

“You know how this works. It takes some practice. One more try,” I said.

“Alright,” he agreed reluctantly.

I did it again, lowering myself down onto his dick, but if anything, the pain was worse than before. I stared down at him, sad and dejected. I’d had this vision that I’d swallow his dick up without hesitating, and I couldn’t help but think that’s probably what Zach had done, but it wasn’t working. I’d failed. “I’m sorry,” I muttered lamely as I lay down next to him and buried my face in his chest.

“I’m not,” he said.

“Why, you don’t want to fuck me?” I asked.

“Dude, now you’re being a drama queen.”

I kind of chuckled at that. “Alright, why are you glad you’re not pounding my ass right now?” He laughed at that.

“I like what we do. It’s fun. I don’t need to fuck you.”

“I like what we do too. It’s just that it seems like guys who get fucked really like it, and it creates this cool bond between them. I wanted that.” And I wanted to give him the same thing Zach had given him, but I didn’t say that.

“Those are pornos. Real life is different. Well, except you have a bigger dick than most of those guys,” he joked.

“You’re the one who’s big enough to split me open.”

“That’s the other thing. I want to do this together.”

“Well I can hardly do it without you being there, can I?” I asked.

“I meant that I wanted us to lose our cherries to each other, together. I wanted you to fuck me, and then I wanted to fuck you, or vice-versa.” Only he’d already lost his cherry to Zach.

“I get that,” I said, even though I wasn’t entirely convinced.

“I’m not ready to do that yet,” he said. “It’s not because I don’t love you. I do. I just don’t think I can handle your monster yet.”

“So you’re going to make me wait until you feel up to taking me?” I teased.

“We’re on my time schedule,” he said, mimicking his mother. She was renowned for being on time and organized.

“I just wanted to show you how much I love you,” I said, sounding dejected.

He sighed and moved so he was looking at me. “Will, I know you love me, and I love you, but it goes way beyond sex.”

“What do you mean?” Now I was really confused.

“I like what we do. No one gives head better than you,” he said, and I felt myself blushing.

“You have a good tool to work with.” Now it was his turn to blush.

“We’ve been friends our whole lives. You’re the most important person in the world to me, along with my parents,” he said. God, he could make me melt. “I have just as much fun hanging out with you and doing things as I do when we’re in bed.”

And then I got it. For John, fucking around was an extension of our friendship. It didn’t necessarily mean that I was his one true love; he didn’t look at it like I did. I felt that pain sear through me, but I used every fiber of my being to control that emotion. I reached down and stroked his dick, getting him hard again. “So you don’t want me to do this?”

“I didn’t say that,” he said, more of a moan. He was still slick from the lube, so it took me almost no time to get him off, and then he returned the favor. We turned off the light after that, said goodnight, and went to sleep, both of us lying on our sides, turned away from each other.

I used sleep as my excuse to bottle myself up in my shell. I lay there, feeling his ass rubbing against mine from time to time as the bed moved, but still feeling completely isolated. I lowered my internal shields and let my emotions wash over my body, and I was repaid by being subjected to this wrenching pain, a pain so intense that it felt like I was going to puke. I heard him snoring softly so I got up and went into the bathroom, locking the door, where I could cry and vomit alone if I needed to.

He wasn’t where I was. He wasn’t head over heels in love with me, not like Darius and Ella were. This thing that I’d built up in my head was one-sided. To me, he was my world, my partner, the guy I’d live the rest of my life with. I gave my pity party full rein, and told myself that he’d all but broken up with me. I cried and cried, safe in the bathroom where no one could see me, for what must have been hours. I tried to think of something to ease the pain, but I’d even left my one-hitter in my pants in the bedroom, so I couldn’t even get high. Instead, I just sat on the toilet, bent over all balled up, thinking that between my aborted fuck and this new revelation, I’d never experienced such a painful day in my entire life.

At some point, I finally pulled myself out of the fog and tried to analyze what this meant. To him, I was his best friend, his buddy that he fucked around with, and as important as that was, he wasn’t planning his whole life around us being together. It was like Stef was trying to tell me: he’d probably fuck other people, men and women, and he’d probably even have relationships with them. I thought about that and decided that if he dated a girl, I wouldn’t be nearly as upset about it as if he had a boyfriend. Maybe a girl wouldn’t be able to replace me; another guy might.

But that led me to the place that finally let me regain my sanity. I wouldn’t always be his partner, but I’d always be his friend, and I’d always be in his life. Zach could give John his ass, but he could never give him that kind of a bond. That bond of friendship that John and I had was so deep and strong it could weather various lovers. It was beyond the scope of what he’d find with anyone else.

I dried my eyes and snuck back to bed and got in, taking the same position I’d been in, and went to sleep; much less happy than I’d been that morning, but much more together than I’d been for the past few hours.