"I don't understand." I was thoroughly confused. I couldn't imagine how I could fake a broken leg, and even if I could, I wasn't sure why I should do it. I didn't think Ben would come running back to Boston just because I had broken my leg.

"I mean I can help you fake a broken leg. I can call Ben and tell him you've broken your leg, and that you need him. I'll tell him that you came up to my place to do some skiing and you broke your leg. I'll tell him that you told me you don't want him to know, but that you're really struggling on your own in your apartment with your leg in a cast, that you're in a lot of pain, and that you really could use Ben's help. I'll tell him that I would go down and take care of you myself, but that I can't get time off from the Park Service. He'll come Mike. Trust me. He won't be able to stay away."

"You're getting weird on me Jasper. It would never work. And what if he did fly out here? Then what? He'd see in a minute that my leg wasn't broken. I'm not going to trick Ben into coming back. He'd hate me for that."

"Mike, he never has to know. You'll have a cast on your leg."

"How am I going to get a cast on my leg if my leg isn't broken? What am I supposed to do, just march into some doctor's office and ask them to put my leg in a cast? Jasper this whole conversation is ridiculous."

"It's not ridiculous Mike. Listen to me. My leg is not broken."

"What are you talking about?"

"Right now Mike. My leg is not broken. Nobody backed over me with a car. I have been faking this broken leg."

"I don't understand." I was bewildered. And I was getting angry. "You lied to me? All this time? Why? And how did you get this cast on your leg? I don't believe you." My voice was rising with emotion.

"Mike, calm down. I put this cast on myself. There is nothing wrong with my leg." I was getting up off the couch and moving away from Jasper. I felt like there was a stranger in my house, someone I knew nothing about.

"That's fucked up. You're fucked up Jasper. I can't believe you fucking lied about all this. This whole time together, everything has been a lie. Get out man! You're creeping me out! Why would you do that?" I was on the verge of tears and was struggling not to cry in front of Jasper. I felt like the rug had been pulled out from under me.

"I'm sorry Mike. I'm sorry I lied. I can explain. Come back and sit down and let me try to explain. I meant no harm. I did this for you."

"For me??"

"Sit down." Reluctantly I went back to the couch and sat down.

"What do you mean you did it for me?"

"For you. For me. For the two of us. To get your attention. To make your dick hard. To get you in bed. You're not the only one who's spent the last three months pining for someone he couldn't have."

"Oh shit."

Jasper took a deep breath. "When I first saw you in that tent that morning on the side of the mountain, I knew I had to have you. I fell hard. But you were with Ben. You were clearly in love with Ben. And in love with his broken leg. I could see that even if you couldn't. Taking care of him, the cast on his leg, the whole thing turned you on. And it turned him on. And it turned me on. Back at my house the three of us were in bed with Ben's cast and it was making us so humpy we could hardly stand it. When I grabbed Ben's crutches you chased me down the hallway and practically raped my ass. At breakfast when I was telling you guys about the time I broke my leg at Dartmouth I thought you were both going to cream in your pants. It's nothing to be ashamed of Mike. There are a lot of people who are turned on by this scene. Men and women. Straight and gay. There are recreational casting websites all over the Internet. I'm surprised you haven't figured this out yet on your own. I've been putting casts on my leg for more than ten years. And I've hooked up with a lot of guys who are into the same thing. It's just good clean fun. And I could tell that you were one of us even if you didn't know it. But I fell for you independent of the cast thing Mike. I'd have wanted you even if seeing me with a cast on my leg did nothing for you. It was a huge bonus to me that we're both turned on by some of the same things. But I don't need that to need you. I know the feelings aren't mutual. I know your real thing is for Ben. I never would have come down here to make a play for you if you and Ben were still together. But you're not Mike. He went home to his wife. So I came down here with a cast on my leg to see if I could interest you in falling in love with someone else. Clearly I've been able to arouse your cock, but it's also clear that your heart is still stuck on Ben. So I concede. He wins. And to show you what a good sport I am, I'm willing to help you try one more time to win him back. He'd owe you if you broke your leg. He'd owe you big time. But even more than that, I'm betting he wouldn't be able to stay away if he heard you had a cast on your leg. In case you hadn't noticed, he's in our camp too."

I sat there in stunned silence. I didn't know what to say. The flood of Jasper's words was slowly beginning to sink into my brain. Yes, it was true that a man with a cast on his leg had always made me hard. I had never thought of it as a sexual tick that might be shared by anyone else. And that Jasper loved me? This big hunk of a park ranger? Here he was offering himself to me. Could we live happily ever after, fucking each other's brains out and putting casts on each other's legs? I couldn't see it. I was still stuck on Ben, as crazy as that was. And as for trying to trick Ben by faking a broken leg? I couldn't see pulling that off either. If I was ever going to have Ben, I wanted him on honest terms and not by means of deception. And was Ben in our camp? Was it his broken ankle that pushed us into bed together? I couldn't say for sure.

"Jasper I don't know what to say..."

"You don't have to say anything Mike. This is my head-trip and not yours. I should have been honest with you from the start. You don't owe me anything."

"It's not a question of owing you. I love you Jasper. I love being with you. I love being naked with you. I love hanging out with you. I love sleeping with you. I love you with a cast on your leg. I love that you put a cast on your leg just for me. The problem is, I'm in love with Ben. And somehow that's different. That's my head-trip."

We spent the entire afternoon talking, and eventually ended up naked, making frenzied love on the living room rug. Later, after some dinner, we decided we would both head up to New Hampshire the next day, up to Jasper's house, and get him out of the cast. I agreed that I would let him put a cast on my leg, to see what it was like, but refused to commit, one way or the other, to whether or not we would tell Ben that I had broken my leg, although inside I knew I could never lie to him that way. I threw my skis in the car and figured that if nothing else I could get a few days of skiing in before I had to go back to work.

By Sunday afternoon we had cut Jasper free, using a special electric saw he had, a process I found fascinating. It turned out that he was right. His leg, in fact, was not broken, and as soon as his leg was free of the cast, he stood and jumped on it to prove the point. Then he laid me out on the bed and prepared to put my right leg in a cast. He had rolled the stockinet up over the whole length of my leg, and wrapped my leg in cotton padding, and was about to apply the first role of fiberglass when I told him to stop. For some reason I just couldn't go through with it. I was too self-conscious about the whole thing, and suddenly felt very foolish. I was embarrassed, and felt slightly humiliated, but somehow was convinced that I could never pull off the fake cast thing. I also had a kind of claustrophobia that crept up on me suddenly. The idea of having my entire leg encased in hard fiber and not being able to bend my knee or ankle or walk on my foot made me panic. Jasper was very good about the whole thing, and tried to make me feel at ease, but I felt stupid for having tried and failed at playing with casts, something that had so clearly been a turn-on for me my entire life. I wondered if maybe I really wasn't in Jasper's camp after all.

The next day was Monday, and Jasper had to work. I planned to spend the day skiing. Jasper said he could drop me off at the mountain in the morning on his way to work and pick me up that evening, and then we were going to grab some dinner together. The morning was bright, with blue sky and brilliant sun on the snow, and it looked like it was going to be warm enough to ski comfortably in blue jeans. It had been a year since I had been on skis, and I was anxious to hit the slopes. Somehow the prospect of having the entire day to myself, to ski, without Jasper, was suddenly very liberating. I had skied my whole life, and even though I had been away for a year, everything came back to me naturally, as it did every winter, and after about ten minutes, gliding down the mountain with my skis tight together felt even more natural to me than riding a bicycle. I felt strangely free, and uninhibited, and was enjoying showing off for no one in particular. I hit the mogul fields hard, jumping and cutting deep with my edges, taking risks I should not have taken, and loving every minute of it. I took some hard falls, and once, after lunch, caught an edge in some powder and went flying down the mountain head first, my skis splayed behind me, neither one of the bindings having released. I thought for sure that I had hurt myself, but when everything came to rest, and I had dusted myself off, everything was fine.

It wasn't long after that, about halfway down a black slope on the back bowl, that I witnessed another amazing wipeout. Two guys were racing each other down a straightaway, going like the wind, when one of them suddenly, and for no apparent reason, cart wheeled into the side of the mountain, sending up a huge cloud of snow before coming to rest motionless on the side of the course. His friend, meanwhile, had schussed down to the bottom of the slope at a hundred miles an hour. I skied over to see if this guy was all right, and when I got there, I knew immediately that he was not. His left leg was bent behind him with the ski still attached. His eyes were wide with panic and he was yelling "My leg! My leg!" I knew immediately from the position of his leg that it was broken, but I didn't know what to do about it. I knew I should probably ski down the mountain and get help, but he looked like he needed immediate assistance. I kicked off my skis and knelt down next to him. His eyes were still wide with fear and he gripped my arm hard screaming "I broke my leg!"

I knew enough not to move him, though he looked like he was in extraordinary pain with his leg bent back behind him. I tried to comfort him, and told him that help was on the way. We were in the remotest part of the back bowl, but someone else soon skied over to see what the trouble was and I told him to go for the ski patrol. I felt helpless, kneeling there, and just kept murmuring to him that he would be OK, and he just kept clutching at my arm and groaning "Oh god, my leg!" It was very upsetting, but also strangely arousing, and much to my dismay and discomfort, I found myself with a hard on in my jeans. I felt terrible about getting off on this guy's pain, if that in fact is what I was doing, but I had suddenly found myself in this situation and it was making my cock hard and there was nothing I could do about that. I tried to find out something about the guy, in case he passed out, and to pass the time for both of us by making conversation. He couldn't, or wouldn't, say much, but I learned that his name was John and he was Canadian and he was a college student at Dartmouth. It made me wonder how many Dartmouth men had broken their legs over the years, and whether they broke their legs more often than the graduates of other colleges. And it made me wonder where Jasper was and how he would handle this emergency if he were here, and whether or not his cock would be hard too. Eventually the ski patrol guys came, and I backed off to let them work. John's friend showed up too, and I tried to fade into the small crowd that had gathered. John was clearly in extraordinary pain, and he cried out when they moved him, but they were able to straighten his leg and get his skis off and splint his leg and strap him into the sled all in a very efficient and professional short-order. I wondered if any of the ski patrol guys' cocks were hard. It was none of my business and I should have left once real help arrived, but somehow I couldn't pull myself away. I even followed from a distance on my skis as they slowly brought the sled down the mountain. I was haunted by the whole event, and couldn't help but think that it so easily could have been me. And I wondered what he would look like with his leg in a cast.

I ended up deciding to stay with Jasper all week. I had time off coming to me and truthfully I couldn't face going back to my apartment in Boston alone, without Jasper or Ben, and the skiing was fantastic. Jasper was able to ski with me on Wednesday, and again on Saturday, and I skied by myself on the days in between. It turned out to be a lovely break from work, and a chance to clear my head and try for at least a little while to quit stewing about Ben. Jasper and I continued to sleep together, though we didn't talk about it, and neither one of us brought up the casting thing again. In fact, I never even told him about seeing that kid John break his leg. Somehow, after everything Jasper and I had been through, it just seemed too weird to bring it up. Saturday evening we were invited to a party at one of his fellow park ranger's house, up in Durham, near the university. Apparently Jasper was out amongst his colleagues, and they were very nice to me, making me feel welcome and not worrying too much about whether I was Jasper's boyfriend or just a friend. The party was in a big old restored Victorian house just on the outskirts of the University of New Hampshire campus. It turns out that the guy who threw the party was also gay, but Jasper hadn't told me that, and it wasn't something I found out until many months later. It seems that gay National Park Service rangers were out but not that out. Anyhow it was a wonderful party with lots of good food and fun people and lots of alcohol. I drank too much, of course, which shouldn't have surprised anyone. I was scheduled to leave for Boston the next morning, a trip I completely didn't want to make, and somehow drinking seemed to postpone the inevitable.

At some point fairly late in the evening I had gone upstairs for what was probably the second or third time to use the restroom. Whenever I drank beer, I always had to pee. As I was about to descend the stairs, I marveled again at the amazing grand stairway this house had, and the wonderful restoration job they had done with the wood. The big sweep of the curving wood of the banister was just calling out to be slid upon. If ever there were a banister to slide down, this one was it. Just at that minute I saw Jasper at the foot of the stairs. "Hey handsome!" I called out, horsing around, "watch this!" And I sat my ass on the banister and started to slide. Almost immediately I got going too fast, and I panicked. I tried to drag my foot along the rails to slow myself down, and somehow, my foot got stuck between two rails, but my body kept going. I fell hard, twisting my leg and foot horribly. And then I was lying on the ground, in agony, my leg twisted up underneath me, in almost exactly the same position in which I had found John on the side of the mountain earlier in the week. I was having trouble breathing, and even though I knew I was badly hurt, I was having trouble making sense of what had happened to me. There was a crowd of people standing around me and I was yelling "My leg! My leg!" over and over again. Suddenly Jasper was kneeling beside me and I was clutching his arm and screaming, "I broke my leg!" Jasper touched my face, and told me that everything was going to be OK. There was a fierce pain shooting through my leg, from my ankle right up through my knee. As Jasper and another ranger carefully moved my leg from underneath me, I could see that my ankle was bent and my foot was pointing in the wrong direction. The wave of pain that passed through me as they moved me was nearly enough to make me pass out. I remember groaning "Oh god my leg," and then, in a whisper to Jasper, "it's bad, isn't it?" I don't remember his response, or if he even made one. But I do remember wondering whether or not his dick was hard. For some strange reason I remember being aware that mine was. And that is about the last thing that I remember.

The next memory I have is waking up in the hospital with my leg suspended on a pulley in traction in front of me. I opened my eyes and saw my toes sticking out of the end of a cast that was hoisted up into the air, my toes pointing at the ceiling. After the shock of that initial visual awareness, I also became aware of a deep throbbing pain in my leg. Jasper, of course, was nearby, but it took me several minutes before I recognized that he was in the room with me. It turns out that I had done quite a number on myself. With my foot caught between the two rails, and the twisting motion of my fall, I had managed to dislocate my ankle, tearing several ligaments and fracturing my medial malleous in the process. I had also fractured my tibia, and had hyper-extended my knee, tearing cartilage and ligaments there as well. My leg was elevated because of the swelling. The cast they had me in ran from my toes all the way up to the top of my hip. The good news, Jasper pointed out, was that, miraculously, I did not need any surgery. The tibia had a spiral fracture, but there was no displacement, and while I had torn ligaments in my ankle and knee, none of them were severed. I had also had the good fortune of being knocked out while they had manually manipulated and re-aligned my ankle.

For all of the time I had spent with Ben when he had his leg in a cast, I had never fully appreciated how completely debilitating a broken leg and a long leg cast really is. For the next several weeks I was wholly dependant on Jasper. They released me from the hospital after only two days, but the swelling was still significant enough that I had to keep my leg elevated almost all the time, which basically meant that I was stuck in bed flat on my back with my leg propped up on a pile of pillows to keep my foot higher than my chest and head. Unlike Jasper and his make-believe broken leg, I was not mobile and agile. I found the crutches awkward to use and they hurt my hands and ribs, and when I was upright even for short periods of time, my leg and ankle would start to throb and I would have to lie back down and elevate my foot. I found sleeping on my back difficult, and woke often during the night uncomfortable and unable to roll over to find a better position. I complained, often loudly, about the pain, and the frustration of being laid up in bed with my leg completely immobilized. I worked hard to try to find a sexy silver lining to the whole stupid mess, but mostly I was too uncomfortable and irritable to feel very sexy at all.

Jasper was patient and wonderful to me throughout my long convalescence. He worried about me and tried to anticipate and take care of every need I might have no matter how intimate or how embarrassing. During that first week at home he had to help me in and out of bed, and on and off the toilet. He helped me bathe using the sink and a wet cloth, and washed my hair for me in the sink. He brought me meals in bed and helped me into the living room so that I could lie on the couch in front of the fire. He rubbed my toes and my back and helped me in and out of the loose hospital pants that I was able to pull up over the cast. He also kissed me and hugged me and sucked my toes and sucked my cock and finger-fucked my ass-hole and told me I was sexy and generally tried to keep my spirits and my libido up as much as he could. He also called Ben and told him I had broken my leg.

I didn't ask him to call Ben and he didn't tell me that he was going to do it, and I didn't even know that they had spoken until two days later when Ben rang back and asked to talk to me. I was annoyed that Jasper had told him, but on some level I was also secretly pleased. It was wonderful to talk to Ben again after so many weeks of not communicating. He and I slipped almost immediately, as we always did, into an easy and light banter back and forth, teasing and cajoling, two friends from college, like former fraternity brothers, making small talk and poking fun at each other. He called me a copycat, and told me I never had had an original thought in my life, and only broke my leg in the first place to be like him. Beneath the banter, though, Ben was concerned, and the longer we spoke the more tense he became, his sentences dwindling to short staccato phrases and single words. Finally we arrived at silence. The dead air lingered in my ear until finally he spoke again.

"Listen Mike, I really...oh man...I really want to come see you..." I hadn't expected that.

"I'd like that Ben," I said, trying not to sound too eager.

"It's only that..."

"It's only what?" I questioned, bracing now for disappointment.

"It's only that..." Ben was struggling. His voice was ragged with emotion. "It's only that Jill is pregnant. I mean she just got pregnant. We just got pregnant. And she's having a really hard time. You know. With morning sickness. Only it's like it's all day. She's mostly in bed, or throwing up, and I...I have to be here Mike...to take care of her...I can't...I can't leave her...not now...not like this...I'm sorry Mike..."

"It's OK Ben. I understand...Jasper's here and I'm...I'm fine...I'm in good hands..." And what I understood was that I had lost Ben...that he would not be coming to New Hampshire, or Boston...that he would not be leaving Jill...that he would not ever be my lover again.

And over the phone I could hear Ben's muffled sobs. "I'm sorry Mike...I love you buddy."

"I love you too Ben. Listen. I gotta go. Say hello to Jill for me. And congratulations. Really. You guys are lucky." And I hung up the phone. I wasn't going to let him hear me cry.

Jasper had brought me the phone when Ben called, but he'd left the room to give me privacy. Now, alone in the room with the dead phone in my hand, I wished he'd come back. But I didn't call him, because I didn't want him to see me crying either. I fell asleep that way, lying on my back with the phone on my chest. Several hours later I woke up to find Jasper lying next to me. His eyes were open, and he was watching me.

We never spoke about Ben's phone call. He didn't ask me anything about it, and I didn't bring it up. There seemed to develop an unspoken rule between us that we would not talk about Ben at all. Nearly a year later we received a birth announcement, addressed to both of us, that noted the delivery of Michael Benjamin, a healthy baby boy, and even that sat on our mail table near the entranceway, read but un-remarked upon by either one of us. By that time I was living full-time in New Hampshire with Jasper, and had been cast free for nearly three months.

In the weeks immediately following Ben's phone call, I began to feel stronger and more confident on my crutches, and the residual pain and throbbing in my leg gradually resolved, so that I was left with just minor aches and pains as the bones and ligaments slowly mended and knit. I was back at the doctor's office frequently for check-ups and new casts, and each one seemed to become more comfortable, and somehow even more comforting. With Jasper's help I came to appreciate the experience of having a real medical cast on my leg. In time I let myself enjoy the experience erotically. It was clearly a huge turn-on for Jasper, and even as he tried to suppress it and play primary care-giver rather than seducer, I could see that my having a cast on my leg made him crazy horny almost all the time. He would come home from work and race into the back bedroom and jump in bed with me, smothering me with kisses and groping at my crotch like a sixteen year old kid. I loved the attention, and the sex, and his good company, and learned over the many years we have been together since to value his loyalty and steadfastness in his love for me, and have learned to love him back in a way that is fierce and powerful and so much healthier and stable than any partnership I could ever have envisioned with Ben.

My leg took a long time to heal. I spent three months in a long leg cast, and then nearly two more in a short leg cast before the doctors decided I really did need some surgery to correct the ligament damage I had done. After another hospital stay I was back into a cast again, starting over with the complete immobilization of a long leg cast and then working my way into a short leg cast, a walking cast, and eventually a boot that I could take off and on to shower and bathe and sleep. I had grown accustomed to having a cast on my leg, and to moving about with crutches, and missed them both when they were gone, but appreciated the freedom and independence that two working legs gave me. I gave notice to my employer after about the first six weeks of being laid up, and took up instead as a free-lance writer, something I could do on my back from bed, and something that I do even now, usually from the kitchen table in front of the wood stove. Jasper and I travel when we can, to places far and wide and most often warm, but always return to our cabin in New Hampshire, happy to be home. Every once in a great while he will ask me if I mind if he puts a cast on his leg, and of course I tell him I don't. And I don't mind. He looks as hot to me in a cast now as he did that day he climbed off the train in Boston. I have no desire to wear a recreational cast myself...I've had my fill of casts I guess, but a cast on another man's leg will always turn my head, probably for as long as I live, and I like nothing better than bending Jasper over the bathroom sink and fucking his park ranger ass while he balances on one foot and holds his long casted leg carefully up off the floor, careful not to put any weight down on his immobilized limb. And sometimes out of the blue he'll crutch into the living room with his ankle wrapped in an ace bandage and guaranteed, every time, it leads to a fuck-fest on the living room floor in front of the fireplace. That's the same space where he and Ben and I first slept together when Ben broke his ankle on our camping trip all those many years ago. Sometimes when I dream I'm still in that tent with Ben. But most often, it's Jasper I see crawling into the tent after me. Clearly he and I are in the same camp now.