As I ate my burger at the bear-becue, another one who caught my eye pretty soon was an unusually cute, younger man I hadn’t noticed when I first arrived. He was on the small, slim side, and had a large, dark beard and piercing dark eyes. His hair was parted in the middle but it still managed to flop fetchingly over his eyes. He was also laughing and talking a lot and I, being not all that talkative (I tend to be rather quiet, did I say?), thought, oh, great, I’ll never meet him. Talkative, energetic people usually prefer other talkative, energetic people. (I’d taken a Myers-Briggs seminar at work and knew an “E” when I saw one.)
But after I ate, I was hovering, looking for an opportune moment and when Cute Beard went into the house for a beer, I followed him in. He introduced himself as Grey (short for Greyson). As we came back outdoors, he indicated across the yard also to “that guy over there” as his partner.
Ah.
Grey turned out to be a happy guy, fun to talk to, and smiled at me a lot. We spent some of the afternoon hanging out on the lawn. His partner came by a couple of times to say hi and briefly join the conversation before wandering off again. We also realized that a few months before we had both been at Ross’ Christmas party though somehow we hadn’t noticed each other.
As the bear-becue began to wind down, I traded phone numbers with Grey, thinking maybe I found new friends in him and his partner. It was, after all, the reason I was trying to socialize more.
Over the next few months Grey and I met for bike rides around DC or went together on a couple of Adventuring day hikes out in the mountains. If it was a hot day, Grey sometimes took off his shirt to reveal quite a lot of wonderful, jet-black hair in pretty swirls on his chest, and which flowed around his nipples, tapering all the way into his armpits. I longed to trace it with my fingertips while listening to "Supermodel."
Later that fall there was an Adventuring “winter” backpacking trip into the mountains where it had snowed early. I asked Grey and his partner if they wanted to join me. Grey’s partner wasn’t interested, explaining that he couldn’t stand to be more than a mile from the nearest brunch restaurant. Grey however jumped at the chance. He said he had a backpack but no tent, so I invited him to share mine.
Our camping group met in DC and carpooled out to the mountains. We spent the first couple of hours hiking in to a remote spot the trip leader knew and set up the tents, then did a short hike a little way up to a rocky ledge with a pretty view of the surrounding countryside. I was looking forward to ending the day around the campfire with a fire-cooked dinner (OK, browned, apple-filled toaster pastries with chunks of melted cheddar; seriously, try it sometime) and a nightcap of Kentucky’s best gay bourbon cut with an icicle snapped off a dead hemlock.
When it was time for bed, Grey and I roped our food bag and lifted it high up over a tree branch, as I read once we should do to thwart literal bears. We said good night to the others and crawled into my tent.
In the narrow confines of the tent, we managed to get out of our winter clothes down to our long johns and wiggled into our sleeping bags. I was very aware of lying next to handsome Grey and leaned over to give him a quick goodnight kiss-kiss. He kiss-kissed me back and we fell asleep.
The next morning however I woke up with a raging hard-on and all these heavy things on me. Grey, still asleep, had rolled partway over in his sleeping bag, his arm across my chest and his knee over my legs.
Given we were half-way there, I decided not to be shy anymore and slowly opened my sleeping bag to struggle out of my long johns (not easy in a tent where you can’t stand up). Grey was awake by then and, watching me trying to strip off, started to pull off his long johns, too. I had previously asked Grey about his partner, but he assured me they played around separately on the side.
Oh.
It was still cold and it had snowed maybe an inch overnight so it felt very cozy just to cuddle in the tent, sharing Grey’s body heat. We didn’t have much space for a lot of fancy maneuvers, so we pretty much just held and felt each other up and made out, chewing on our beards. We managed to turn ourselves around each other in the tent for a little sixty-nine, but slowly, like playing Twister in a phone booth. Grey rolled his hot, wet tongue all around my cockhead as my mouth went down over his, my fingers buried in his chest hair. I thought I could really get into this winter camping stuff.
Finally we straightened around to take turns jerking each other off. When it was Grey’s turn, I got him stretched out on his back in front of me. He laid there, a sprawling mass of (speaking of a pretty view) beard, armpits, and chest hair, his ass up in my lap and his furry legs spread around either side of my waist, his cock stiff and begging to be touched.
Gently tugging on his balls, I slowly stroked him with the other, my thumb and forefinger slowly and ever so delicately sliding his paper-thin, brown foreskin up and down his shaft. The pink slit in the tip of his cock peeked in and out, wet and shiny with his pre-cum. He closed his eyes and got more and more quiet as I stroked him, until his face screwed up and he took a couple of deep breaths, delivering several hefty blobs of cum all over his front as his cock throbbed in my fingertips, his navel an overflowing cum pond. (Toilet paper, please. A very hairy front can be rather messy to clean cum off of, if you don’t have any running water.)
We ended up doing ourselves in that tent for a bit longer than was decent. When we finally emerged, in our long johns and pulling on our boots in the snow, the others in our group were already finishing their camp breakfast and looked at us, like, really?
I was friends with Grey and his partner for a few months, until Grey’s partner found out Grey and I had played around. Apparently, Partner all along had not been on board with them playing around “separately on the side,” and that was that.
Despite living in the same city and having a few friends in common, and a weekend chugging coffee drinks called Cappio, I never saw either of them again. It bothered me for a long time that I might have caused harm to their relationship, even if I hadn’t known.
Aside: Around this time, Grey and other friends and I saw Daddy and the Muscle Academy, a documentary about the great Touko Laaksonen aka “Tom of Finland” and the impact of his art on gay male culture, extant to this day. I’d appreciated men in leather (see “Brad Sir”) for some time, but the movie set it out really well—highly recommended.