Hot Valley Read Online Free Page B

nothing I could dream of doing that he was not already expert at. His cock was always hard, always ready for me. And, more than that, we became friends. We talked. He advised me, warned me, encouraged me. When he wasn’t fucking me, he was like a father to me. In return, I helped him out with money when work was scarce, and, to keep him in town, I even found a job for him at the spa. He impressed my father with his knowledge of boilers and water-heating systems, and he replaced the old chief engineer, whose idea of modern technology was a coal fire. Mick moved out of the White Horse and took a cabin in the woods, where we could fuck as loudly as we wanted, with only the occasional moose or bear to hear us. I do not know if my family wondered about this unlikely friendship, or if talk reached their ears of my inappropriate associations; if it did, they were far too polite to mention it.
    Reluctantly, I took a job myself at the Bishopstown Hydropathic Establishment and Mineral Spa Center, largely to silence the mutterings about “earning my keep” and “preparing for the future” that were becoming far too frequent for my liking around the family table. I was placed in the accounts department, apprenticed to Jasper Windridge, my father’s “right hand,” as he liked to call him, an unlikable man of middle age who took great pleasure, I thought, in pointing out my shortcomings. I suppose I cannot blame him, as I was an unwilling student, interested only in the clock, my mind on my next debauch. It was all I could do to add up a column of figures without error; the complexities of double-entry bookkeeping were a mystery to me. The only double-entry I was interested in took place in the White Horse, when I managed, with concentration and a hell of a
lot of butter, to accommodate both Mick and the barman in my painfully stretched asshole.
    I worked with an ill will, doing as little as possible, antagonizing Mr. Windridge to the point that he would threaten, once or twice a week, to “speak to your father.” I dared him to do it, and went back to doodling winged cocks on my notepad. Somehow or other I learned the basics of accountancy, but it was more in the way that a tree soaks up rain than by any positive effort on my part. In years to come, I would thank Mr. Windridge for that grounding he gave me in dollars and cents; at the time, however, I regarded him as little better than a troll from a fairy tale, barring the gate to the garden of delights.
    And so I might have continued, wasting my youth in pleasure, heedless of the future, burying my head in a book (or a hairy crotch) every time there was talk of politics. When Abraham Lincoln was elected in 1860, the town was alive with talk of trouble to come, with cheers and boos and rallies and counterrallies; the papers carried nothing but stories of secession and abolition and constitutions and conferences. It meant nothing to me—a background hum, the wind in the trees, the gurgling of a stream.
    Even Mick was shocked at my lack of interest in current events. “This is history in the making, Jack,” he said to me one Sunday afternoon when we had headed off for a walk in the mountains, looking for secluded places where he could fuck me in the open air. “You should pay attention.”
    â€œThere’s only one thing I’m interested in,” I said, hauling his half-hard cock into the dappled light of a forest clearing. The subject was quickly dropped as I sucked him to a full stand, and wasn’t resumed until his dick plopped out of my ass an hour later.
    â€œThere’s going to be trouble, Jack,” he said, as we washed ourselves off in a clear, fresh pond. “Not just for you and me, but for the whole country. Father against son. Brother against brother. Friend against friend.”
    â€œGloomy old man,” I said, splashing him. We wrestled ourselves dry on the forest floor.
    Â 
    But he was right.