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| Part 2 by Castgimp |
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| I was depressed, and I was horny, which is a very unhappy combination. My meetings in San Diego were not going well, and the weather was awful, which was almost never the case in Southern California. I'd been sitting in air conditioned conference rooms all day and I had been looking forward to hopping into my rented jeep and zipping up to the state park in La Jolla. More than anything I wanted to walk on the beach under the cliffs to clear my head, but when I came out into the parking lot it was cold and windy and cloudy and damp. So instead of walking on one of my favorite beaches in the country, I was sitting alone in my hotel room having a scotch and moping. And to make matters worse, I couldn't stop thinking about Scott. Our plane ride out together had been one of the erotic highlights of my life, and now the prospect of never seeing him again-and worse, never seeing his beautifully casted broken ankle again-was enough to plunge me into the foulest and blackest of moods. I was sitting in the lone armchair in my hotel room, facing the sliding glass door that looked out over the gray Pacific Ocean and gray wet sky, nursing my scotch, and feeling sorry for myself. I was trying to recreate in my head every detail of every moment of our amazing plane ride together-trying to burn those details into my brain so that I would never forget them. I wanted to be able to jerk off for the rest of my life to images of Scott with his cast on my lap. After our little mid-air explosion of mutual orgasms, we settled down into easy, comfortable, almost intimate conversation. Having cum together 38,000 feet above Kansas had melted away any barriers or inhibitions we might have felt as strangers to one another, and we chattered away like old friends. I tried to convince myself we were chatting with the ease of long-time lovers after a Saturday morning romp in the sack. Sitting like that, with his cast on my lap, I'd have been willing to fly to Japan or Australia or around the world. And he seemed as comfortable with the situation as I was. And he was quite the talker. It didn't take too much probing from me for him to start in on the story of how exactly he'd broken his ankle in the first place. "I flew home for my little brother's wedding," he'd started. "I'm from Maine-little town up north of Portland. My brother Joe is two years younger than I am. Married his high school sweetheart. The timing was bad for me but I managed to get a short leave to go home-flew home Friday and got there just in time for the rehearsal dinner. The wedding was Saturday afternoon. I was supposed to fly back to California Monday morning. Technically my leave ended Monday at noon. Now here it is Wednesday and look at me. There's gonna be hell to pay when my C.O. sees me tonight. "Well it's not like I had a choice. I couldn't exactly miss Joe's wedding. Besides, he'd asked me to be in the damn thing. And it was just a small wedding party. His best friend Tim was his best man, and my cousin Joey and I were the ushers. We had a blast. Joey's still a kid-sixteen-but funny as hell. Tim's a great guy too. He's a year younger than I am and a year older than my brother is. The three of us went to school together. He and Joe were best buds, but I used to run track with Tim in high school. We'd run cross-country in the fall and the regular track season in the spring. He and I were pretty much the track stars for our little school-neither one of us could sprint but we'd always clean up on the distance events. We were both strong runners. And I loved the hurdles. That was something I could do that Tim was never very good at. I loved running with him, and I loved having something I could do better than him. The only reason we were stars was because our school was so small. Shit sometimes in the fall he and I would be the only two guys that would show up for cross-country practice. I remember those dark cold runs through the woods, following Tim for miles through the mud, and then afterwards, it'd be just the two of us showering up together, naked, trying to scrape the grime off and get home for dinner. Don't get me wrong. There was nothing funny between us. But I liked those times when we were alone like that. "Anyhow, this is all related believe it or not. So we got Joe and Denise married right on schedule. I'm not big on weddings, but this one was fun. I saw relatives I hadn't seen in years and people from high school-it was like a reunion for me. I hadn't really been home much since I joined the service, and when I did zip in on leave I usually just saw my folks and my brother and that was it. So it was nice catching up with everybody. People will tell you I'm pretty uptight, and maybe they're right, but I had really relaxed at the reception-had some drinks-did some dancing-talked till I was nearly hoarse. But I hadn't really had time to catch up with Tim. I mean we were in the wedding together and we sat at the head table together, but we hadn't really had a chance to talk, you know? I don't know what I wanted to say to him, but I felt like I wanted to spend some time with him, and the night was wasting away pretty fast. "So when my brother Joe came up to me towards the end of the night and asked me if Tim and I would be willing to worry about getting all of the wedding presents back to the house for them, I jumped at the opportunity. I found Tim, slapped him on the back, and told him we had a mission. Joe and Denise had been living together for almost a year before they got married, and they had an apartment on the top floor of an old Victorian house right in town. They were going to spend their first married night together in a hotel, and then leave the next morning for their honeymoon. I don't even know where they went-the islands somewhere I think. So anyhow Tim and I loaded up his Ford Explorer with all of the wedding loot and drove it all over to Joe's apartment. "Like I said their apartment was on the top floor of this big old house, and there was a narrow staircase up the back-two long flights of stairs without a light. For such a small wedding it seemed like there were a lot of presents. Tim and I must have made ten trips each up and down those dark stairs, passing each other silently, trying not to wake the other people who lived in the house, trying not to drop the wedding booty down the stairs. The staircase was so narrow that when we passed each other our hips touched. It was a funny thing, but each time we bumped into each other, it was like I could feel a little shock of electricity go through my body. I don't know if Tim was getting that shock too, but each trip up and down the stairs it seemed like he was almost trying to knock into me. Maybe it was just that the stairs were dark and narrow-maybe it was that he was getting a kick out of that electric connection between us-I can't say for sure. "Even though we'd both been drinking all night, we weren't really drunk, but I was feeling kind of giddy. On one of the last trips I was carrying a present in a big gift-wrapped box that was particularly heavy-it felt like a crystal punch bowl or something. I was going up and Tim was coming down and we bumped into each other again. I don't know if we maybe bumped harder than we had before, or if it was just the heavier box I was carrying or what, but I stumbled. My foot missed the next step and I started to fall backwards. I could see myself falling backwards down the steps, and the thing that was racing through my mind was-fuck, I'm going to break the fucking punch bowl. "Somehow, instinctively, Tim reached out and grabbed me. He caught the front of my shirt and pulled me up into his chest, the gift-wrapped punch bowl wedged tightly between us. There was a precarious moment when we teetered on the edge of catastrophe, both of us very nearly tumbling down that flight of stairs together, but in the end he managed to hang on to me and keep us both upright. My heart was racing but my panic dissolved into relief, and I sat down hard on the steps, still holding that frigging punch bowl, happy to be in one piece. My nervous energy gave way to a fit of giggles, and Tim began to giggle as well as he collapsed down onto the step next to me, our butts touching and our shoulders bouncing against one another as we laughed. "Sitting there like that together on the steps in the dark, I felt like I could just stay there forever with him. It was warm and safe and I was feeling very close to Tim, like the way I used to feel after we'd been out for a long run together in the mud. And this is where I made my mistake. I didn't want to let go. I wanted to somehow prolong that night with Tim. It's hard to explain what I was feeling, but I just didn't want to say goodnight to him yet. So when we'd finished lugging all of the presents upstairs, I convinced him we should drive over to the high school. I don't know what made me do that. I hadn't seen the high school in years, and it had once been our common ground. Anyhow, he didn't take much convincing. One of the things we'd hauled back to Joe's place besides the gifts was a partial case of unopened champagne. I grabbed a bottle to take with us just for good measure. "So we drove over there and he pulled his Explorer up into the back parking lot that overlooked the playing fields and the track and the gym. It was the part of campus where we had spent the most time together, and the part that felt the most like home to both of us. I held the bottle of warm champagne out through the open window and popped the cork so that the sticky foam wouldn't get all over the inside of his car, and we sat there in the dark and drank it, passing the bottle back and forth between us. We reminisced about high school and track and the girls we had dated, and the champagne put a crazy fire in my belly and in my head. I was having the time of my life, sitting there with Tim, reliving my adolescence. For the second time that night I felt as if I had found a spot that I wouldn't mind staying in for the rest of my life. There were worse things than getting drunk on warm champagne in the front of Tim's Ford Explorer in the old high school parking lot. "I was chatting away and staring off across the dark vista ahead of us when I focused on the hurdles that were still set up out on the track. Suddenly I was gripped with an overwhelming desire to be out on the track, running through the night sky, sailing over those hurdles the way I used to when I was a high school track star. I wanted Tim to see that I could still clear those hurdles with grace and speed. I wanted him to see that I was older, but not softer, and that if anything I was in even better shape now that I had been six years ago. I wanted to show off. I wanted Tim to admire me. I wanted to feel the track beneath my feet and the night air on my scalp through my short hair. By this time I was drunk and should have gone home to bed. Both of us were still wearing our tuxedos and dress-shoes, but in a flash I was out of the car and running down the embankment toward the track. I could hear Tim yelling after me. I know now that he was trying to stop me, but at the time it sounded to me like he was cheering me on. He was the crowd at the finish line yelling for me to go faster. "Well I'm sure you can see the end of this story coming a mile away. I had no business being on the track at all in the state I was in, let alone trying to run hurdles in a tuxedo and dress shoes. It was a miracle that I cleared any of them at all, but I did. In fact I very nearly cleared them all. It was the last one that got me. I didn't have the lift I needed and I smacked into it squarely with my ankle. Despite the fact that I was wearing dress shoes I'd picked up a fair amount of speed, but I lacked the push off for the height I needed to clear that last hurdle. I still can't recreate in my mind exactly what happened, but one minute I was running like a gazelle through the night, and the next I was sprawled in the cinders of the track. "At first I was too stunned to move, and too drunk to know I was hurt. But then the pain began to sober me up. I remember being aware of the sting on my hands, and then I remember Tim standing over me asking me if I was all right. And then he was trying to help me up. And that's when I knew. I rolled to my side and he grabbed my hand and tried to pull me to my feet. As he pulled me up it was like riding a wave of pain, and as soon as I tried to put weight down on my foot I collapsed back onto the track as pain seared my ankle. Tim said later that I was howling as I went down but I don't remember that. "I remember being back down on the track and cradling my ankle and trying not to move. I didn't know exactly what was wrong, but I knew I was hurt pretty bad. I'd sprained my ankle before and this felt a lot worse. The reality that I was not going to be able to walk away from the track on my own was just beginning to sink in, but I hadn't thought ahead to what that would mean. It was going to turn out that even just getting me up off the track and into Tim's Explorer was going to be a major ordeal. The pain was intense enough that there was no way I could bear to put any weight at all down on my foot. And as bad as the pain was, I hadn't yet figured out that my ankle was broken. "I needed Tim's help, but at that moment I was too ashamed to even look up at him. I couldn't believe I had been so stupid. Even worse than the pain was the shame. If I could have somehow disappeared down a dark hole I would have. I didn't want people to find out I'd been drunk and trying to run hurdles in the middle of the night like some pathetic has-been high school track star. I'm supposed to be the big strong Marine-the role model for all the guys in our town-not some drunk fuck-up. Shit I didn't want my parents to know and I didn't want my brother to know and most of all I didn't want my commanding officer to know how this had happened. In my muddled state I was already trying to formulate a story-trying to think of something a bit less embarrassing to explain how I managed to fuck up my ankle the night of my brother's wedding." At that point in Scott's story we were interrupted by the flight attendant who wanted to offer us a snack and a beverage before we landed. He didn't seem to be bothered by the fact that Scott was sitting with his leg in my lap. In fact, he carefully set the snack tray down on the tray table on the middle seat so that Scott didn't have to move. I knew we would be landing soon but I was hoping that somehow this flight would last forever. Scott was still wrapped up in telling me the story about how he broke his ankle. |
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