Marco parted his legs, hooked his fingers into the waistband of his shorts, lifted his butt off the bed and tugged the shorts to his feet, springing his thick, hard cock loose from its nest of wiry black hair. Bill had seen Marco’s cock hundreds of times before in the gym showers but always with a furtive glance and never when it was hard. Now he studied Marco’s cock and saw that the smooth head and veiny shaft and fuzzy balls were, like the rest of Marco’s body, beautiful.

Nervously, Marco said, “Let me see yours.”

The request startled him but then he understood. Marco had exposed more than his cock, he had exposed his desire for another boy, and he needed assurance that it was what Bill wanted, too. Bill pushed down his shorts and briefs to his ankles and stood naked before his friend. The room, so familiar that Bill no longer even saw the objects that furnished it, seemed suddenly different, strange, as if it belonged to another boy. A boy who collected baseball cards and pretty rocks, who was pictured with his dad in a framed photograph holding up his catch after a day’s fishing at the lake, who slept beneath a plaid coverlet and kept his baseball bats in an imitation elephant’s foot umbrella stand. Not a boy who now sank to his knees, wrapped his fingers loosely around his best friend’s cock and opened a mouth that had, until that moment, been used only for eating and speaking.

The slightly rancid smell of sweat and moist cotton and Marco drove him closer to the beautiful flesh, but then he hesitated. While he had often imagined himself in this very situation, about to take Marco’s cock in his mouth, he assumed he would have to steel himself to the task to overcome what he had been taught was the inherent nastiness of everything “down there” male and female. Taught by his parents and the nuns and priests who had guided his education from kindergarten to graduation, taught with words and gestures and expressions in a thousand ways that the openings and appendages that lay below the waist were disgusting and gross, the cause of man’s fall and the occasion for sin, and to be used only for excretion or, out of sad necessity, for the making of babies.

Marco’s fingers gently threaded his hair. Bill looked up and saw the uncertain grin and the soft, affectionate eyes.

“I want to do it to you too,” Marco whispered in a thick voice.