Excerpt from "Gifts of the Season" by Jenna Hilary Sinclair

Excerpt from the short story "Gifts of the Season" by Jenna Hilary Sinclair, published by Dreamspinner Press

Danny and his mother have been rescued from a car wreck in a blizzard by Mike, one half of a gay couple who live on a ranch. Danny is sixteen and still coming to grips with the fact that he's gay. Here, it's the middle of the night, and Danny is in the bedroom next to Mike and Harry's bedroom, staying the night until the weather clears. Poor Danny has a vivid imagination....

A lot of hours later—hours spent in Mike and Harry's home, eating with them, watching TV with them, spying on them every second—the storm is still going strong outside, but it's even stronger inside me. I'm in a big boat of a bed in one of their spare bedrooms. On the other side of the wall next to me is their master bedroom. Damn, this is torture. I've been tossing and turning for what seems like forever, listening, my face hot because I'm listening, wanting to hear…. But I haven't heard anything except the snow hissing against the window and the wind rushing up the side of the mountain. Once I heard voices, I think, past midnight, but maybe not. Not what I wanted to hear, anyway.

I've never been this hard. An hour ago I touched myself for maybe three or four strokes, and just that almost brought me off. I don't know how I stopped myself, but I slapped the sheet with both my open hands. That made a big noise—at least to me it sounded loud—and I cringed to think that maybe they heard me.

I'm still hard under both the heavy blankets Mike threw on the bed when he showed me the room, leaking I'm so excited, and I can't make it go away. If I do it here in this bed, they'll see the sheets, won't they? Know what I did. I bet their sheets are stained all the time, bet they get soaked with come, bet they have to wash the sheets every day. Bet they do it every morning and every night. Bet they do it more than once each time. I know I would, if I had a brown-haired man next to me in bed.

I give up the fight, and my hand grabs my naked dick sticking out through my briefs. I skim out of them and put them to the side before grabbing myself again. If I can't hear, I can still imagine what they're doing in the room next door. I know they're doing it.

They're coming together in the middle of their mattress, fumbling down their pajama pants, their big, big cocks springing up. I know they're big, men like that filling out their jeans, hands on cocks, lips on cocks, but I don't know what a mouth on me would feel like even though I want to know so bad, so it's got to be hands on cocks, and one of them, Harry, oh, yes, Harry, Harry is crying out here I come, I'm close even though I haven't heard him cry that out, but just the same I know what his deep voice would sound like. I imagine he's in the bed right next door and Mike's hand is jerking him off strong, and it's more than he can stand, that man's hairy arm moving so fast, the man's fingers that I saw over the beef stew dinner curled around Harry's fat, purple-headed cock, and Harry presses his head back against the pillow, I can see it, his eyes are squeezed shut and he gasps and jerks his hips up and comes all over Mike's hand.

I shoot right after Harry does, right up against the sheet, soaking it through to that nice blanket because I can't think of anything but that man's cock spurting like a volcano, and I forget to grab my briefs to soak up the spunk.

Did I cry out when I did that? I never do at home, can't with my whole family around. I don't think I did, but even so I listen while I gulp in air and my heart pounds for a while. Finally I calm down, my heart isn't going like a jackhammer, and my cock gets soft at last. I feel … I don't know. Not like I normally feel after I jerk off. I feel like it isn't enough, that I want more. But what more is there for somebody like me?

I roll over in the bed and tuck my hands under my cheek. I'm gay. Can I still be gay when I'm alone? I wish I had somebody so I could find out what kissing feels like and what a mouth on me would feel like.

Wish I had somebody to fuck, too. I've figured it out, what they do, cock up an ass. I don't know which I want more, to screw somebody like that or to be screwed. Does it hurt, to be screwed? How am I going to find out? I can't talk to anybody about this, can't pick up magazines in a place like Elk Ridge, for sure they aren't sold in a Podunk town like this. And I don't think there's anybody in my school who's like me, not many kids there anyway. If we'd stayed in Denver I might have had a chance, but not here.

Half an hour later I give up, because I know I'm not going to sleep, not with everything swirling around in my head, visions of cocks and cocks and cocks and questions about cocks. And asses. I get up as quiet as I can, put on my clothes, pick up my shoes, and crack open the door. There's a nightlight on in the hall, lighting the way down to the stairs, and I frown at that. Seems sort of pussy for two men to have a nightlight. But it helps me find my way downstairs.

I put on my shoes while sitting on the bottom step, and then I wander through the rooms, not touching anything, just looking. It's a ghostly light that's coming in around the edges of the windows, but my eyes adjust pretty quickly. I go through the living room that looks like it isn't lived in much and next to an office where there are two desks. I stand in the doorway and wonder if they've fucked there, Harry leaning over the papers with Mike behind him….

There's a Christmas tree in the big back room with all the windows, and they're open to the dark bulk of the mountain and the hint of full-bellied clouds. I can make out how the drifts have come up even higher against those windows since everybody went to sleep hours ago. We'd watched TV on the side of the room where there's a sofa and one nice recliner and one ratty old chair. The room's so big it runs the whole length of the house, plenty of space for where the pool table stands.

I flick on the light between the chairs because the embers from the fireplace aren't near enough to see by. I go over to what I'd been curious about all that evening as we'd sat around making conversation. Under the tree there are some gifts. Not that many. I go down on my knees and pick one up; the light is enough to read what the tag says.

To: Mike

From: Harry

That doesn't sound very exciting. I shake it, and there's the sound of cloth moving, and that's pretty disappointing. Damn, do they get each other shirts?

I pick up another one, a big, heavy one that clunks. Maybe it's a toolbox inside? That isn't any better. What would I get a man I lived with, somebody I fucked morning, noon, and night? The tag has some stupid-looking elf on it.

To: The Light of My Life

From: Mike

"Ahem," comes the sound of a throat being cleared from right behind me. I drop that box like it's caught on fire, jump up, and whirl around to see Mike standing there.

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Information on all gay romances by Jenna Hilary Sinclair, including five star rated novel Admit One, here

Excerpt from ADMIT ONE by Jenna Hilary Sinclair

A flashback from ADMIT ONE

In April of our junior year, Sean and I drove to New Orleans. We’d only been more or less together a few months, everything casual, nothing any-big-deal, but he had a car and got us fake IDs, I had some money my folks had sent me, and New Orleans was only eight hours away. That was nothing for us. We were young and dumb and full of come, and the whole world was before us. Even though we were faggots, back then we still thought the world was before us. Or at least I did.

We left San Marcos at mid-afternoon on Thursday and pointed the car toward Bourbon Street. I’ll never forget that ride, the high point of my time before manhood, though I’d been convinced at the age of twenty that I already was a man. We rolled the windows down, all four of them, and the air swept through Sean’s clunky old Oldsmobile like some magic carpet that was transporting us to heaven. Heaven. Three days of drinking, finding the gay bars, and sex. Nirvana.

Sean laughed at everything, the dumb billboards and the corny music on a country music radio station and how we were skipping class, and he pulled me right along with him until everything seemed funny and I couldn’t help but laugh with him. We made our way across Texas and then across Louisiana as the sun set behind us, rocketing like maniacs across the long stretch of elevated highway that was Interstate 10, not inching our way over the posted speed limit but blasting through it. When we stopped to take a piss at a McDonald’s outside Lake Charles, we tossed the empty six pack of Bud. We didn’t stay to eat, because we were only two hundred miles from the fabled city on the bayou.

Before we got to Lafayette, Sean grabbed me around my neck, pulled me close, and kissed me while we were going eighty-five. His lips were hard against mine, first and only man so far for me. “I love doing this,” he told me straight into my face, not even seeming to care about the road or being seen. Who cared? “Let’s keep driving forever.”

The road went on and on, and I could not imagine any other way, any other time, any other me.

As we left the outskirts of Baton Rouge, I stuck my head out the window and howled at the moon like a dog. The car behind us suddenly decelerated; I watched its headlights retreat. Sean said, “That’s my man.”

We rolled into New Orleans at eleven-thirty, got to only a few bars before closing time, and staggered down the streets of the French Quarter until past four. The ships trolling the Mississippi let loose their foghorns as if we were actors in an old Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes movie. Sean and I liked to watch those late at night with our hands down each other’s pants as we lounged on his bed.

On Friday night we found the bars that were filled with men like us. I got blown by some dude wearing leather in a back room. Sean dared me into it—Go ahead, it’s why we’re here, you know you want to—and the fear and the strange lips on my dick and the sounds of the other guys doing the same thing as we were in the nearby shadows gave me my most intense shooting ever. Then a cop pushed aside the curtain that pretended to shield us from the outside world, growling, “Everybody back up front, let’s keep this place legal.” My instant fear and then relief erupted in a small hysterical hiccup of a laugh; the cop shoved me on the back as I walked past him.

Back where he was leaning on the bar, Sean wanted to know what it’d been like, and half an hour later he disappeared, returning with a smirk and a case of the clap we both had to get treated for two weeks later.

But we didn’t know that then. I changed that weekend from virgin-except-with-Sean to experienced-gay-man, a rite of passage we both had felt we needed. When we drove across the river to our motel, swimming in booze up to our eyeballs, we sang “YMCA” at the top of our lungs, convinced nobody else knew what it really meant—really, really meant—except us.

On Sunday we slept until almost noon and were awakened by the housekeeper banging on the door, shouting, “Get out in thirty minutes or we charge you for another day” in an accent so thick we could barely understand her. We untangled ourselves from each other and then rolled back to the center, me toward Sean, him toward me, each of us suddenly on fire. He climbed on top of me and we humped until I was almost rubbed raw, but seeing him when he came was worth it.

We drove back with everything casual, still nothing-any-big-deal, with the sun shining down on us and everything right with the world.

Copyright 2009 Jenna Hilary Sinclair
From the novel ADMIT ONE by Jenna Hilary Sinclair, published by Dreamspinner Press as eBook and paperback
Find information about all my published gay romance Here