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  103

  A Forest of Corpses

  by P. A. Brown

  According to Jason, one person could assemble the tent we bought. Good thing too, since I'm not sure how much help I was. We ate a cold supper that night, which included splitting a banana and a peach he had sliced up and stored in a baggy.

  Neither of us had the energy left to build a fire and cook anything. After making sure no traces of food remained out to tempt prowling wildlife, we slipped inside the tent that was barely as big as our bed at home. He insisted we strip and put on the long johns he had brought against my will. I'd never even owned a pair of the ridiculous things, but he said it wasn't smart to sleep nude like we did at home. So I pulled them on and grumpily climbed into the sleeping bag, only slightly mollified when he joined me and we spooned.

  I had forgotten all about reasserting my position and found sleep overcoming me almost immediately. A crescendo of crickets and tree frogs followed me down into darkness. But it was the soft sound of Jason's breathing in my ear that comforted me most.

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  104

  A Forest of Corpses

  by P. A. Brown

  Jason

  I woke to the delicious feel of Alex's cock pressed between the crack of my ass. At some point he had pulled my long john's down. His mouth slid over the back of my neck, nuzzling and licking me behind my left ear.

  Fingers twisted my nipple ring hard, sending a jolt of pure pain and exquisite pleasure straight to the root of my cock. I groaned and arched against him, letting him know I was fully awake.

  Without a word he pushed his fat dick past my tight anal ring, slamming up my channel with a grunt. He rode me hard and fast, rocking into me, skimming his fist around my cock and bringing me to a numbing climax seconds after he came inside me.

  After he withdrew and I rolled over to look up at him, he gave me a lazy, sated grin.

  "I see a good night's sleep agrees with you," I said.

  "Slept like a baby." He reached for his glasses.

  I looked down at his limp cock. "Sure don't wake up like one."

  He ran stiff fingers through my short hair, tilting my head back so he could study my face before kissing me soundly.

  "No, I don't. What's for breakfast, boy?"

  I scrambled into clothes and climbed out of the tent. Alex was at my heels, tucking his pant legs into his boot tops like I had told him, to keep out bugs and prickly seeds. He left his plaid shirttail out and his sleeves rolled up over his muscular 105

  A Forest of Corpses

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  arms. I stepped into the woods to take care of business after warning Alex to watch out for poison oak. It was barely dawn.

  The crisp morning air was cool and alive with bird song.

  Without even trying, I heard an orange-crowned warbler, and a mountain quail, along with the usual complaining jays. The air carried a bevy of odors from all around us. Pine resin from upslope, sage, creosote and mulch from the meadows beyond the riparian woods we were in. Somewhere, the smoke from a fire. We weren't alone on the mountain. Like you could actually be alone anywhere in California these days. As long as they weren't parked next to us, and they didn't make a stink about two guys sharing a small tent, I didn't care.

  I saw Alex with the camera, taking candid shots of me as I got things ready for our breakfast.

  I pulled my backpack down from the tree I had stashed ours in and rummaged through it. Digging out the battered cooking pot I'd hung onto even after years of not using it, I got a fire going and soon had coffee brewing; if you can call dumping a mound of coffee into the pot and covering it with enough water to give us each a cup brewing coffee.

  Dehydrated eggs and the last of the fresh fruit we had carried in with us was breakfast.

  He made a face when I served him the coffee. "Sorry, no Starbucks up here." I waved toward the slope we had climbed up yesterday. "Before we strike camp we can go down there and splash water on our faces."

  He grimaced.

  "Get used to a whole new level of clean." I grinned. "Good thing I like the way you smell."

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  He grimaced some more and buried his nose in his tin mug. But I could tell he was pleased. I hoped he liked the way I smelled, too.

  Packing up took at least fifteen minutes longer than it would have taken me on my own, but I knew better than to make Alex feel helpless or incompetent. Once our gear was on our backs and I made sure everything we'd brought in was coming out with us, I did something I should have done from the beginning. I scoured the forest floor until I found four walking sticks. When I handed two to him he looked at them, then at me dubiously.

  "They're improvised Nordic walking poles. If I'd been thinking I'd have picked up the real thing." He demonstrated how to use them. "Trust me, climbing up and down hills will be a lot easier with these. Gives you better balance. And they're a great all body workout. Get those lats and core muscles in shape."

  He tested his like I'd showed him, seemed satisfied and waved me to go ahead of him.

  "I'd like to follow the water, if that's okay with you." I hefted my brand new Nikon binoculars that Alex had bought for me. "See a lot more around water."

  He nodded and flexed his legs a few times to stretch what were no doubt sore muscles from yesterday's hike. I added an incentive.

  "I think there's a pool further up. We can stop and do a quick cleanup if you're interested. Just no hanky-panky.

  Chances are we won't be alone for long."

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  "I'll save the hanky-panky for tonight, then." And there was dark promise in his intense look. I got hard just thinking about it.

  "Well, Sir," I said softly. "Let's get on the road so tonight comes sooner, why don't we? We have a long way to go today. I'd like to try for at least ten miles."

  Our time was slow in the beginning. I knew Alex was probably stiff from his unfamiliar workout yesterday and face it, I was too. What with school and the demands of taking care of Alex and our home, I hadn't done as much hiking lately as I would have liked. We both needed to get our sea legs.

  I paused frequently, ostensibly to scan the overhead limbs and nearby bushes for elusive birds, but also to give us both a break. At one point, I followed the chattering call of a mountain quail and found a female and her newly hatched brood. When I pointed them out to Alex he gave me a big dopey smile as a reward. Even hardened police detectives can be charmed by half a dozen one-ounce balls of fluff scurrying after their more sedate black and gray mom.

  Ahead of us, golden sun streaked through a break in the trees. Dust motes and flying insects danced in the still air while nearby, something croaked. As the day lengthened and the heat mounted, cicadas began their electronic singing.

  It wasn't long before I cracked open the bug lotion and we paused long enough to cover each other in the gel. My hair was plastered to my scalp. Even Alex had sweat collecting under his armpits and trickling down his face.

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  "Almost there," I muttered when I heard the change in pitch from the steady whisper of moving water to our left.

  "Want to head down?"

  He nodded and I led the way downhill. A gangly, brown shape flew across our path, darting under a dense cluster of gray-green brush. Twigs rattled, then quieted as the rabbit passed. Then just as we started down again the most God awful scream rent the air.

  We both froze, hearts trip hammering behind tense rib cages. The sound was not repeated. Belatedly, I realized what it was.

  Alex started off the path toward the sound. "What the hell was that?"

  "The rabbit. They scream like that."

  "A rabbit? You're telling me that was a rabbit?"

  "I know. It spooked me the first time I heard one. Thought s
ome kid was being murdered. But trust me, it's nothing."

  Alex came back, grumbling. I thought I caught something about cities being a whole lot safer. There the only thing screaming were people, and he knew how to deal with that.

  It took us another twenty minutes to find the pool, a collection of water ranging from a few inches to several feet deep. It only took another five to get down to our skivvies and plunge in to the icy bath. I shuddered and braced myself to duck my head under, holding it for the count of ten, then lunged to the surface and shook myself like a dog. Alex did the same, gasping for breath when he came back out of the water. We ended up sitting side by side on a large boulder at the head of the pool, dangling bare feet in the water. Sun 109

  A Forest of Corpses

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  reached us through breaks in the leafy canopy. A faint breeze danced over our bare skin, cool at first, then as we dried it grew pleasantly warm. Across the pool a scattering of rushes and cattails swayed in the soft, gentle wind. A frog croaked and dragonflies buzzed the smooth surface in search of lunch.

  Alex lay back on the rock, hands laced behind his head. His eyes were half closed.

  I rolled onto my elbow to stare down at his sculptured chest with its dark, jutting nipples. When he lay on his back, the extra flesh around his middle was less obvious. I stared at his navel, and the line of hair there. Glancing around quickly to make sure no one else was around, I followed the swirl of reddish hair covering his chest with two fingers and arrowed down to disappear under the waistband of his jockeys.

  Knowing what was under there in no way dampened my desire to see it again. I swallowed against the sudden rush of desire.

  He grabbed my hand before I could go any further.

  "No hanky-panky, remember?"

  "This isn't hanky-panky," I murmured, lightly stroking the outline of his swelling cock with the hand he still held. "This is." I leaned over and pressed my mouth against his pubic bone where a pulse beat and quickened under my lips. I licked his water-cooled skin before straightening. "See the difference?"

  The swollen head of his erection poked out of his underwear. A single drop of fluid leaked from the slit. Before I could take it any further and damn the consequences, he scrambled to his feet and without warning, cannonballed into 110

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  the deepest part of the pool. A geyser of ice cold water erupted, covering my newly dried, and sun-warmed skin.

  "Cool your jets, mountain boy," he said when he returned to the surface.

  I wiped water out of my eyes and squinted through a prism of water droplets at him. Rainbow drops of water sculptured his body. God, he looked good. I don't care that he thought he was getting soft. I didn't care that he didn't look like a swimsuit model or that he thought he had to wear his shirts untucked to hide his growing love handles. I just wished I could prove that to him.

  Well, maybe this week, away from the distractions of home and work, would give me a chance to convince him. We weren't going to have any other diversions but each other.

  Things were still so tentative between us. I always sensed Alex held back, afraid he would lose control again like he had in the beginning, when his jealousy had boiled over into violence that he still hadn't forgiven himself for. It didn't seem to do any good to tell him I wasn't afraid of him, that I craved his touch, even his pain. He gave me some of both, but in the end, always held back from giving me all of what I needed.

  I hated that. I wanted the Alex I had fallen in love with back, unafraid, sure of what he did and knowing it was the right thing. The Alex who never had to second guess his actions.

  But how the hell did I convince him of that?

  * * * *

  111

  A Forest of Corpses

  by P. A. Brown

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  112

  A Forest of Corpses

  by P. A. Brown

  Spider

  Jason had no idea how much I wanted to drag him into the water with me and fuck him hard and rough, screw anybody who might stop us. But I held back. Like I held back a lot these days. I wanted to release the fever that burned in me whenever Jason hung from my sling or my leather restraints, but when I thought of reaching for the lash or the strap or the candle, a spark of fear flared in me. What if I couldn't stop, like had almost happened that day so long ago when I had beat him black and blue, and all for something he hadn't even done. I had discovered that day I was capable of stupid things, at least when it came to this man. Things I never wanted to visit on him or me again.

  I knew he wanted my lash, just as he craved the pain of my domination, and I gave it to him, to a point. It was that point that was driving a wedge between us. I knew it. Jason knew it. Could we fix it? I knew I wanted to. But the fear was still there, untapped and unexplored. Unacknowledged in most cases, since I refused to admit the weakness of fear to anyone, even Jason.

  Wading through the frigid water, I scrambled up on the rocks and grabbed my clothes. Jason followed. He pulled the bug repellent out and slathered more on both of us. We were silent as we dressed and hefted our packs onto our backs. I shoved my Tilley over my still wet hair, grabbed my walking sticks and headed, first along the banks of the fast moving stream, then climbing back up to the forest floor. We paused 113

  A Forest of Corpses

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  frequently while Jason scanned the trees for something he saw or heard. He would point out and name a bird, and I would try to catch a glimpse of it. Even when he passed me his binoculars, I never had much luck. All I could see was a richness of green, in every shade. I couldn't tell one tree from the next. All the green clustered around the trunks and covering the ground looked the same. Occasionally, a flash of color would blur across my field of vision, but never long enough for me to really see it.

  Jason would give me a name—yellow warbler, house wren, plain titmouse, which made me wonder, were there fancy titmouse—or was it titmice? And what kind of name was titmouse, anyway? None of it was familiar. Where were the gulls or the pigeons or even the black birds that were ubiquitous in the city? Instead of becoming more familiar with time, everything grew more and more alien to my city trained eyes. Even in Kansas City I'd stayed inside the urban zone until my ill-advised marriage led us to California. My wife, Barbara, had never been an outdoor girl either. So even then we had rarely gone beyond the city limits, unless it was a trip to L.A. where she could shop and have dinner out somewhere down on Melrose, or someplace else trendy that she heard about in L.A. Weekly. "In civilization," as she'd often said.

  I pretended enthusiasm for what Jason loved, hell I pretended to see what he was pointing out. My eyes just didn't work like his. But it was fun to listen to him chatter away, even if I didn't understand half of what he said. Jason had been a shy, very unsure, undisciplined sub when I'd first 114

  A Forest of Corpses

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  met him. He had blossomed since then, taken control of his life, even as he handed control of his body over to me.

  When he stopped talking and moving I almost plowed into him. I had to grab his hips to keep from knocking both of us over, losing one of my walking sticks. He barely noticed. He had his glasses to his face, staring intently into the area above us. I tried to see what he was seeing. I might have seen a flicker of movement but that was all.

  Finally he lowered his binoculars. He glanced back at me, his face aglow.

  "A Northern Parula. I've never seen one before."

  "One for the life list, then." I knew all about the life list he'd been building for years. A list of every bird he'd ever seen. I guess birders got pretty excited over those things.

  Personally I couldn't see the attraction, but I didn't need to. It was enough that it made Jason happy and lit up like it did.

  The discovery seemed to give him renewed energy. He scrambled to the top of the ravine leading us through the t
rees over what he said were trails, though I couldn't always see them. All through the trees we heard jays screaming.

  They had to be one of the most vocal birds I've ever heard.

  Bad tempered too, it turned out.

  Memories of our cool dip faded as the strain on my overworked muscles grew. Even with the walking sticks I was losing my balance more often on the uneven ground. Finally I called for a break. I leaned the sticks against a massive oak trunk. Gulping down mouthfuls of cool water, I wiped the sweat off my brow and began doing stretches to loosen up my muscles, knowing our hike wasn't over.

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  A Forest of Corpses

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  I barely saw a flash of movement out of the corner of my eye. I've got fast reflexes—to be a living cop in a city like Santa Barbara you have to—and I ducked and looked for what was attacking me, damning myself for not carrying. For being out here unarmed. The shadow came back, screaming, and I barely had time to recognize the jay before I had to duck again. Cursing, I grabbed my walking stick and swung it through the air. This time instead of attacking me the damn bird landed on a branch above my head and scolded me.

  It didn't help that Jason was bent over, barely holding in his mirth.

  "What?" I growled, not sure who I was maddest at, him or the bird. It seemed like they were both having a good laugh at my expense.

  "She must think you're getting too close to her nest."

  "Well I have no interest in eating her or her fucking eggs—