The Front Runner

breast, kissed my nipples, nuzzled his face in my thick, chest hair. Something in this mute act of worship made me think that no other lovemaking had ever stirred him so deeply.
    I lay back down, putting one arm around him, and he lay against me with his face buried in my neck, his fingers playing slowly in my chest hair.
    "You're hairy," he said in that low voice I could barely catch. "I like hair." Suddenly he raised his head and smiled at me drowsily. "The first time I saw you in shorts, your hairy thighs really turned me on."
    I stroked his head, picking the leaves out of his hair.
    "Mr. Brown, you're very well hung."
    I laughed a little. "You're good for my ego."
    "Really. You have a great body. I hope I look like you when I'm your age. You look more like thirty-three, thirty-four."
    He wasn't going to lie and tell me I looked like twenty-three. I couldn't have accepted that, and he knew it. Thirty-three I could accept. It made me feel relieved. I wondered how I could have panicked in front of the mirror earlier.
    "How did you manage all these months?" I asked.
    He laughed softly. "I got very depraved. My dharma was a mess."
    "Now I suppose you'll tell me you slept with Vince or something."
    "Christ, no," he said. "I just thought of you like mad and jerked off."
    He sat up slowly, blinking in the bright light. We were both a sight. That book of photographs hadn't shown the cruel realities of screwing in the woods. Our sticky buttocks were stuck with bits of leaf and bark and moss. Our knees and elbows were black with dirt. The carpet of leaves was somewhat torn up. All around us, the silky fiddleheads of ferns were pushing up—we had rolled on some of them and crushed them. Our clothes lay in soggy disorder where they had fallen.
    "You're jealous," said Billy.
    "Sure," I said. "Would you want me to be otherwise?"
    "I'm jealous," said Billy. "I know Vince tried to cruise you when we came. And you told him he was a very attractive kid." He smiled blissfully, picked off a broken fiddlehead and threw it at me. "But there's no reason for either of us to be jealous."
    I was gently, sleepily brushing the leaves off him. It was not a tense conversation—we were both too limp for that. But suddenly we were saying things we had to say.
    "Does that mean you won't get tired of me too soon?" I said, trying to say it as casually as possible.
    He looked at me steadily. "Yeah," he said, "my dad is anxious like that. He puts up a good front, but . . . Anyway, you don't have to worry. I'll be loving you for the rest of my life."
    "That's a long time," I said. I didn't want to remind him of his own observation that gay relationships seldom lasted that long.
    He shook his head. "I never wanted to love anyone that long before." He laughed a little. "It's funny. You're the first thing that I can project into the future, after Montreal. The rest just goes up to Mon-
    treal and stops. Even running somehow . . . stops there. I don't mean that I'll stop running afterward. But . . . you know what I mean. Right now, I'm just running and loving you, and that's all I want to do with myself."
    He lay down on the leaves again and stretched luxuriously beside me. I felt that same ease, that same slackening of the months of hurt and tension.
    "I want to sleep," he said.
    "Nothing doing," I said. "We both have classes. We have to get back"
    We both got stiffly up. We moved so slowly that we might have been drugged. Suddenly Billy started laughing.
    "What?" I said.
    He pointed down at our feet. We were both still wearing our shoes.
    We stood by the little waterfall and cleaned ourselves off. Then we pulled our clammy clothes back on. We were shivering a little, even in the warm sun.
    "Speaking of Montreal," I said, "there's something we ought to agree on. For the moment, this has to take its place in what we're trying to do. If it interferes, it might cause you to fail. That might spoil our feeling for each other too."
    "Yeah," said Billy. "I was thinking of that. Actually, the pressure's off us now, so it'll be easier. We can both just relax and get on with it."
    "The pressure is going to be coming from other people from now on," I said.
    Suddenly I had more questions. I wanted to talk to him about being married and about living together. But he'd already said he disapproved of ceremonies, and anyway I knew it was not the moment to come out with our relationship. I wanted to keep it secret as long as I could.
    I decided not to spoil that moment