The Front Runner

wind shaking the house and rain lashing the windows. Spending an entire night together was still such a luxury. We went to sleep pressed tightly together, lying on our sides, Billy fitted into the curve of my body, his back against my chest, my arms around him. He was certainly not passive in our relationship, but I definitely had a fierce protec-tivist feeling. Even in sleep I had to shield him from the fury.
    The next morning, we woke before the others. It was still storming heavily, but the rain and wind were heady and warm. We pulled on T-shirts and bathing trunks, and went out.
    The long beach was deserted, all footprints washed away by the rain. A lot of drift lumber and seaweed
    was washed in. Huge breakers were rumbling in from far out. When they broke, they made incredible geyser-bursts of foam.
    We ran east along the shore, our bodies streaming with the sweet rain. Patches of fog drifted over us. We were half-blinded by the rain blowing in our faces. Sometimes the wind hit us so hard that we staggered. But we kept pushing along, laughing.
    Finally we were two miles up the shore. There were no houses here. All along the lonely dunes, the grass blew flat in the wind, and glittered in the rain.
    We stopped there and Billy circled back to me. His curls were plastered to his head and neck, and his wet glasses blurred his eyes. He was laughing, and the rain was running down his thighs. I could see every bone and muscle in his torso through his wet T-shirt. He caught me by the shoulder, and I grasped his hips and drew him against me.
    "You're the sexiest drowned rat I ever saw," I said.
    We kissed with the clean rain lashing us, and our mouths tasted like rain. I peeled his trunks down around his thighs.
    Billy started laughing. "Do you think there are photographers skulking around behind the dunes over there?"
    "Listen," I said, "even if they get pictures in all this rain, where are they going to sell them? Ladies' Home Journal?"
    We put our clothes on the wet sand and lay on them, so we wouldn't get too gritty. His supple body was bent double under me, and after the cool rain, the heat of his entrails was a shock. On my hands and knees I cradled him under me. He was impaled, but safe there—I took the slashing rain on my back. Pressed hard into the curls between his buttocks, I looked down into his face. His eyes were shut against the rain. The tendons in his neck stood up whitely, and sand stuck to his hair as he rolled his head back and forth in a puddle. I wanted him to feel that hot gush clear up under his heart. The noise of the waves deafened us—I couldn't hear him moaning.
    Then he had me on my back and took his sweet re-
    venge. Straddling my torso, smiling pridefully a little, he jerked himself off over my face. That image of him stays burned in my memory: He was kneeling with knees spread, the rain streaming down him, his hair full of sand, and behind him the white boiling bursting waves. The roaring deafened us. I scarcely felt the warm spurts on my face—the rain sluiced it off right away.
    We'd scarcely finished when a monster wave sent a flood of swirling foam extra far up the beach. It caught us cold, and in a second we were drenched, foamed, freezing, stung with sand. It nearly swept us back down the beach into the surf. We grabbed our clothes frantically and got up laughing so much we could hardly speak.
    "Talk about boys in the sand," said Billy.
    Endless gay films feature love scenes on the beach-he was alluding to this.
    "The boys in the sand are a mess," I said. "They get clamshells up their ass."
    We threw our clothes farther back on the beach, and Billy left his glasses there. Then he waded a little way into the icy surf. It wasn't very romantic swimming. The enormous waves were crumpling down with terrifying force, and every time the sweeping foam came up, it all but sucked us off our feet. Billy, with typical recklessness, started out to dive under the waves, but I held him back. So we just waded around thigh deep in the foam, watching each other dive and come up, the foam draining down over pur genitals.
    Billy waded over to me and embraced me. Then he shoved me, so that we both went over in the water. We wrestled there at the edge of the surf, laughing, rolling over and over, being really rough with each other. Another big wave went over us and we nearly drowned.
    We crawled out plastered with seaweed and sand, still laughing, and lay gasping safely away from the surf.
    "We have to