GENRE: Gay Erotic Romance
LENGTH: 3,308 words
RATING:

A return home to the deep south puts these two old friends, all grown up now, on a collision course once old memories boil to the romantic and steamy surface.

NOTE: This story appears in Rob Rosen's best-selling collection, Short Spurts.

EXCERPT:
Note: may contain sexually explicit scenes of a homoerotic nature.

I hadn’t been paying much attention to my driving. No point, really. The road was fairly straight, and I was the only one on it. My mistake. The deer probably saw me coming; I hadn’t seen it. My tires skidded for some twenty feet, loudly, the sound stabbing at the silence. I missed the deer. The water oak wasn’t so lucky. Neither was my car, for that matter. The Beemer was barely ten months old.

“Fuck,” I cussed, lumbering out of the car and kicking the still-smoking rear tire. The deer stood in place, staring at me. “Asshole,” I screamed, causing no discernable reaction.

I looked up to where I’d come from and down to where I’d been heading. Nothing. Not a car, not a house, not even a telephone pole. My backroads route was not such a keen idea, after all.

“Now what?” I asked, after I tested my cell phone. “Fucking shock, no reception. Two tin cans and a mile of string would’ve been a safer bet.”

I plopped my ass down on the weathered asphalt and watched as the deer disappeared into the woods, bored finally with my sudden appearance. “Send back some help, Lassie,” I shouted after it, my voice lost in the thick copse of trees.

Exhausted, I stretched out behind my wreck of a car and stared up at the trees, the branches and leaves so dense I could barely see the sky. A woodpecker chiseled out a techno beat somewhere nearby. Other than that, eerie silence. Well, save for my zipper sliding down, soon followed by my semi-woodie popping out, beating off seeming to me a better option than fretting about my stuck-in-the-middle-of-nowhere situation. A temporary diversion, to be sure, but a pleasurable one at least. The warm breeze flowed over my stiffening cock as a bead of precome slid down my pulsing dick-head. I rubbed my finger across the piss-slit and took a lick and suck.

“It was then I felt the rumble, heard the clacking off in the distance. A car was approaching. Hallelujah. I popped my prick back in and jumped up. Minutes later, an ancient truck pulled up. It was rust red, or perhaps red with rust -- hard to tell. A country-western ballad seeped out of the open window, then went dead as the driver hopped out, his boots crunching the dead leaves along the pavement.

“Right nice car you had,” he drawled, his smile wide on his scruffy face, the teeth tobacco stained.

“Deer, one, BMW, nada,” I informed. He looked familiar and yet not.

“Gets ‘em every time,” he added, reaching out a calloused hand. “Chet,” he said, by way of greeting.

“Luke,” I told him. “Don’t suppose you’re with AAA, are you?”

“Nope, hadn’t had a drop of whiskey in nearly five years,” he replied.

I grinned. “Wrong club, but close.”

“Yep, that there was a joke. Figured you could use one. You know, what with the ...” He finished his train of thought by pointing to what had only recently been my car.

I laughed, despite the dire circumstances. “Thanks. I, um, don’t suppose there’s an auto mechanic with a tow truck just around the bend, is there?”

“There’s a bend just around the bend, as a matter of fact. Then another one after that. But you’re in luck.

Not so strangely, I didn’t feel that lucky, all things considered. “Is there a tow truck just after that bend then?”

He laughed, a big belly laugh that shook the sinewy muscles in his exposed, farmer-tanned arms. “Oh, hell no, friend. You’re in luck ‘cause the nearest mechanic who can tow you is my cousin Jeb.”

“And Jeb is just after the bend that’s just after the bend after the bend?”

“Give or take twenty bends,” he informed, the smile fairly intoxicating.

“Which one is it, give or take?”