Summer of Good-Bye

"Courtney will drive you," he said briskly, referring to the office secretary who was still trying to land me even knowing I was gay. "It's either you or me who has to hire a decorator and you're not doing anything at the office at the moment. The opportunity is too good to pass up. Then when you come back to Charleston, I want you to go out to the beach house until you can walk without the crutches."

"Yes, Joseph," I answered. I felt too overwhelmed to demure, and I knew now that another cantaloupe trip to the outdoor market wasn't going to make Kyle materialize.

But then he appeared at the convention, and I was exhilarated by the second appearance. That meant the first one wasn't an anomaly. And that, surely, there would be others. Either he would come more often and stay longer each time or I would sink into madness. At that particular moment I didn't really care which it would be.

I was standing in the Savannah convention hotel lobby they'd set aside for business talks and impromptu job interviews, getting close to offering the decorator's job to a young man whose flamboyance and toss of his head of golden curls reminded me a bit of Kyle, when I heard the sound of a throat being cleared.

I knew in an instant it was Kyle. It's just the way he did it—delicately as if embarrassed he had to do it—and then had to do it again because he hadn't been forceful enough the first time.

I looked up into his eyes where he stood across the room, by a set of French doors. He was bathed in sunlight coming in through the doors to the point that he didn't look solid. But it was Kyle. I knew it was him. I smiled and he gave me a tight little smile and turned his head several times to his left. I turned my gaze to where he seemed to want me to look.

She must have been in her late fifties and couldn't have been dressed more out of style and color coordination. She was downright dumpy and was looking around the room with a scowl. I realized I knew of her. It was Frieda Fischer, who was conducting one of the interior design seminars later that day. I'd overheard at lunch that she was looking for a job change—that she was interested in warmer climes. Boca Raton had been mentioned. She was a New York City designer, which I knew from an Architectural Digest article she'd been mentioned in some time back and that Kyle had nearly had an ejaculation over as he described the article to me. Another New York designer, just like Kyle.

When I looked back at the French doors, of course Kyle no longer was there.

Joseph was absolutely delighted when I returned to Charleston with the news that I had hired Frieda Fischer. I, of course, didn't tell him that I had done so at Kyle's direction. And not only that, but that telling her I'd known and worked with Kyle had been the clincher for her in accepting the position. She worked out a charm in the position, and Joseph almost treated me as an equal partner at the firm thereafter.

* * * *

I sensed I was being watched as I ate breakfast in the gay B&B Kyle liked to go to on Sullivan's Island. In late August, my crutches discarded, I gave into Joseph's demands to take a vacation on the island. But I didn't go to the family's beach house. I knew Kyle wouldn't materialize there, and I ached to have contact with him again. It had been nearly two weeks since I'd last seen him.

It wasn't a painful ache now, though. The summer had moved on. I didn't cry most of the time I thought about Kyle as summer drew to a close. Now it was more a bittersweet experience when he lifted himself up in my mind—which, thankfully, still was often. It was more sweet than bitter now.

But Joseph was still saying I was moping around too much, so, to get out from underneath his well-meaning badgering, I removed myself to Sullivan's Island. But it was to someplace Kyle might appear to me that I retreated.

And I proved to be right.

I looked up and across the B&B's breakfast room to see a young redheaded man, who I'd exchanged smiles with the previous afternoon when I checked in. There was no one sitting with him in the breakfast room. Everyone else there was blocked off in couples. He was almost embarrassing alone. He looked more alone than I felt. I was still having discussions with Kyle in my mind, discussing with him previous visits we'd made to this B&B.

The redhead gave me a shy smile. He was quite handsome and well formed. A good four inches shorter than I am—about the same height as Kyle. And about the same musculature too. Twinky, but not skinny by any means. A good build for a smaller guy. And the red hair came naturally—somewhat of a surprise at a gay hotel where most of the guys were bottle blonds. He had freckles on his face, which were charming on him, and on his forearms as well. His skin was white as alabaster, which raised a parental concern in me immediately. If he went out on the beach too long he'd be burned to a crisp. This mildly proprietary concern pulled me into slight arousal too.

But I wasn't here for sex. I had decided to give that up. I couldn't see wanting any other man after Kyle. I would swear off men, maybe even marry Courtney and try to lead a normal life. I was finishing my breakfast and he had just started his, so, with just a slight nod of recognition and another smile, I rose from my seat and went up to my room and changed into a bathing suit.

I had been out on the beach for nearly an hour and was ready to come back into the B&B when I moved into a half doze. Of course I dreamed of Kyle. Of the two of us making love on the beach. Kyle on his back on the beach towel, his legs bent and spread, his pelvis rolled up to me, and his hands digging into my bare buttocks, as I sank deeper and deeper inside him. No one had been able to take me as deep as Kyle could.

I felt his hands on my knees—a strange sensation, he could not have done that from the position he was under me in my dreams. I opened my eyes, and discovered that I was the one on my back on the beach towel. My legs were bent and spread, and Kyle was kneeling between my feet, which were dug into the sand on either side of the towel.

He was smiling down at me, capturing my eyes with his blue orbs, his long eyelashes fluttering. His sensual smile that always told me we were going to fuck. I shuddered as his hands slowly glided down the inside of my spread thighs, meeting at the center of me. The fingers of both hands moved under the waistband of my Speedo, and he pulled the material down to underneath my cock—fully erect—and my balls.

Still holding my eyes captive with his, he encircled my cock with one hand and began to stroke me. His other hand entered my right leg hole and his fingers found my hole and teased it open and sank inside as he stroked. I moaned and ran my fingers through his spiky platinum-blond hair, as, after I heard him speak for the first time since the accident, he lowered his mouth on my cock and sucked me off while his fingers penetrated deeper in my ass and found my prostate.

I exploded in ejaculation, as his words, only murmured but echoing through my mind, ran over and over again. "I don't want you to give this up. Just give me a thought every time you have sex."

I lay there, panting, after having cum. I was staring up into Kyle's face, which was becoming blurry because the sun was behind his head, not just giving him a halo, but also making his features fuzzy.

When I had cooled down, he stood and reached down with a hand, taking one of mine in his and coaxing me to stand and then to follow him into the B&B.

At some point, I don't know when, his eyes had turned from cornflower blue to hazel and his hair from platinum to red. His skin was an alabaster white with a smattering of freckles.

We went to my room in the B&B, where he gently pushed me onto my back, hand-stroked me into another erection, and then mounted my cock, facing me, with his hands working my pecs and nipples, as he rode me to a shared ejaculation.

The redhead from across the breakfast room spent the night in my arms, punctuated by fuckings in various positions throughout the hours of darkness. I had not had sex since the auto accident, and had plenty of cum to give. He drained me dry, though.

When I woke up in the morning, he was gone. When I checked with the B&B manager, he couldn't quite place who the redheaded guest had been.

* * * *

I resumed my periodic cruising jaunts to Savannah thereafter, content now that it was what Kyle wanted me to do. There was still a bit of reticence in resuming my cruising, though, and a feeling of guilt each time I hooked up with and fucked a man. I wasn't sure that this was the lifestyle Kyle wanted me to have. This was the type of flamboyance he would enjoy for himself, of course, but surely he had chosen me—I could never claim I chose him—because of who I was, which was different from him. I was still reserved, probably more now than before I had been with him and had been wounded by his abrupt and violent departure.

I used sex now as a release rather than an act of pleasure. I had no trouble hooking up, given that I was in great shape for my age and because of how well I was endowed—so many men in the Savannah gay bars and clubs were size whores.

I purposely moved to rougher trade on my Savannah visits just so I wouldn't be tempted to compare everyone I was with to Kyle and maybe falling into the painful habit of trying to favorably compare the men I fucked to Kyle. I don't want anyone to compare to Kyle. I wanted to wallow in my grief for him.

For that reason, it was a total surprise to me when Kyle next appeared to me. I was in a party room behind a bar on East Perry Street, not far from Savannah's waterfront but on the seedier eastern side of the famous system of parks. It was a workers' bar—manual and construction workers mostly. Lots of Hispanics and what had been called Crackers, rural Southern poor whites, back before the era of political correctness. I was covering a young, short, but muscular Hispanic man, who was on all fours on the carpeted floor, fucking him doggy style as he was crying out in Spanish. I could figure out enough of what he was moaning to know that he thought I was especially big—and that he was especially enjoying himself.

Kyle took that moment to appear to me from the shadows across the room. There must have been a dozen guys in the room, all coupling and changing partners, having a real go at it. This was the third guy I'd had my dick in during the impromptu party. There was a swirl of young men around me bidding to be next.

All I wanted to do was to get my rocks off and to go home to Charleston exhausted so that Kyle didn't come to me so many of my nights and tantalize me. Earlier in the summer we'd fucked in my dreams. But as the season moved on, my interaction with Kyle, even in my dreams, was progressively receding. I was afraid that before summer was over—which would happen within a little more than a week, as we already were into September—I would lose my sexual connection with Kyle altogether.

And I would have nothing to replace it except for this animal need to ejaculate, not caring all that much whose hole I came in.

But there, among all this primitive rutting, the groans and grunts and "Fuck" and "Shit, yes," and "Spike me" moans, Kyle appeared in the shadows, preceded by the smell of lemons and a soft, tinkling laugh.

As he did at the design convention, he smiled at me, but he nodded his head off to the side, pulling my attention over to a couch, where a young dark-haired, well-muscled, but slender man was draped over the arm of the sofa, his legs stretched over the sofa cushions, and his arms dangling down to the floor from the sofa arm at the side of the couch, as a big black man with a cock to rival mine covered his back and fucked him fast and hard.

The young dark-haired man was intently watching me, his eyes blazing, his tongue licking his lips. His facial expression was almost one of pleading. I assumed that he was just feeling taxed to the limit by the black guy. It was too bad I hadn't seen him earlier in the evening. I definitely found him fuckable. But, no, maybe not. I didn't want to hook up with anyone approaching Kyle in desirability.

I looked back at Kyle, who was beginning to fade back into the shadows. He nodded in the direction of the dark-haired young man again.

The Hispanic man under me picked that moment to collapse onto the floor, and I followed him down, giving him five more thrusts of the cock before filling the head of my condom with cum. He was whimpering and sighing and turned his face to mine for a kiss. I wasn't interested in anything romantic with him, but I obliged.

When I looked up, across the room, Kyle was gone. And when I turned my head the big black was pulling the dark-haired man up off the sofa and carrying him toward the back of the room, where a corridor led off to smaller, more private rooms, all with slings and couches with restraints for more adventuresome pursuits.

I gave a little sigh of regret. Who knew if the dark-haired honey would even survive the night with that big, black brute?

* * * *

"His name is Ryan."

I woke with a start—in my bed in the Tradd Street mews house. Or I thought I was awake. Later I wasn't sure at what point I woke.

It unmistakably was Kyle's voice. It was night, but I hadn't pulled the drapes and the street light from up the alley at the corner of Tradd cast enough light into the window that I could dimly make out what was in the room.

What was in the room included Kyle. But not just Kyle. There was another young man there with him in the shadows. The dark-haired young man from the Savannah gay club party room. Both of them were naked, their lightly muscular bodies achingly beautiful.

Never before that summer since the accident had Kyle felt so real to me as he did then. He was holding hands with the other young man. I heard him murmur "This is Ryan" again and then they were moving toward the bed, becoming more substantial, both of them, as they approached the bed. I too was naked and had been asleep on my back on top of the sheets—if indeed I wasn't still asleep.

Ryan—for this surely was who the dark-haired young man was—was smiling at me shyly as they reached the foot of the bed. Kyle nudged Ryan up onto the bed and, cooing at both Ryan and me, coaxed Ryan to crawl on his knees up the line of my legs. When his buttocks were over my pelvis, Kyle reached between us and held my erect cock straight up as Ryan sank down on the shaft. I opened my arms, Ryan's chest came down to my torso, and his lips lowered on mine. I felt Kyle's hands on my shins, and he was bending my legs up. His hands then spread Ryan's buttocks wider so that my cock could sink farther into him.

The young man moaned deeply as I began to pump his channel.

That was the last time I was visited by Kyle ever. I realized it would be, as I felt him pull back into the shadows, the lingering smell of lemon dissipating. Ringing in my ears as he left me was the repeated word "good-bye, good-bye."

It had been the last day of summer.

I woke up to the first day of fall with a very real and present Ryan still in my bed, his buttocks cupped into my groin, my cock still inside him, engorging again. In a few more minutes I would be wakening him well into a fuck. We had already fucked several times during the night. Like Kyle, he could take the whole length of me.

As I woke, I realized what I had done earlier on that last day of summer. Something had sent me wheeling back to Savannah in the early afternoon. I did the rounds of the gay bars and clubs, giving up at last in finding what I sought. Not really knowing then what I was looking for.

Until, as I sat in Oglethorpe Square, near the club with the party room where I had fucked four manual workers in one night, I looked up at some construction workers on the scaffolding of a Victorian house that was being saved just in time and saw him. It was only then that I realized that I had come back to Savannah to find the dark-haired young man the black brute had carried off to the private rooms that night—the one that Kyle had drawn my attention to.

Somewhere in my subconscious I had realized what Kyle had been trying to tell me that night. He had picked someone out for me. Not only had he told me earlier that he wanted me to continue fucking men, but he also had selected one for me. I just had been slow in understanding that.

It was all part of his summer of the good-bye. He could move on now, now that I understood the gift he wanted to leave me with. And now so could I.

The young man saw me sitting there, and he slowly descended the scaffold and walked over to me. He had the grace of a dancer. And he had Kyle's twinkling smile.

"My name is Jeffery Madison," I said. "I own an architecture and construction firm in Charleston. I'm hiring construction workers. Are you interested in a job?"

"With you?" he asked. "My name is Ryan." The voice was the same as Kyle's. Despite the physical difference between the two, I could clearly see Kyle in him.

"Yes, with me. I'm interested in you in other ways too."

"You want to fuck me?"

"Yes. But more than that, I want to take you home to Charleston with me. I want you in my bed. Are you interested?"

"That's what I wanted the first time I saw you," he responded in a hoarse whisper. Then he laughed, a soft, tinkling laugh. Kyle's laugh.