There were two boys in the pool. Alex was fifteen. Gabriel was twelve. The opulence of the sun showered upon them. The water sparkled like blue diamonds. Violets created purple vistas broken only by patches of yellow lemon glow daffodils.

Both boys were beautiful. Alex with his dark curly hair, hazel eyes and tan skin. Gabriel was blond, with pale blue eyes, his skin a reddish color from the sun. Gabriel was like a flower, too beautiful, too fragile and small, easily broken. Like an angel. Alex was tall, sturdy, strong, already forming a muscular body from wrestling and soccer.

A dog barked in the distance. Alex counted black birds as they landed on the branches of a magnolia tree. Dragonflies hovered ominously in the air like fighter planes. Nothing new was going to happen. Nothing different. Today would be like every other summer day.

Alex wanted to leave. He wanted to get out of the pool and walk away. From his friend, from his parents and from the sun and the yellow lemon glow daffodils.

Gabriel was floating on his back, the soft curves of his belly collecting pools of shimmering, sun filled water, his pink nipples hardening under the caress of the breeze, his blond hair floating like a halo around his face. Alex hated himself for noticing these things. For the restlessness it caused inside of him. Alex pictured walking through the water towards his friend. He pictured leaning down and kissing his softly rose colored lips, biting at them. He could almost taste the blood from the tiny rips he would make before he placed his hands over Gabriel’s face and pushed him under the water, holding him there while he struggled against him, until he was quiet. Alex could see the way Gabriel would fall, drifting slowly downward through the spiraling blue.

“Let’s play Marco Polo,” Gabriel said.

“There’s only two of us.”

“So?”

“You go first. Close your eyes.”

Gabriel shut his eyes, soft lashes resting on flushed cheeks. He moved precariously through the water, as if not trusting the lack of resistance.

“Marco,” Gabriel said.

Alex looked up at the sun. He too closed his eyes. The sun’s reflection burned red against his lids.

“You’re supposed to say Polo!” Gabriel said, his voice shrill with impatience.

“Sorry,” Alex said, opening his eyes.

Gabriel stood in the shallow end watching him. “It’s a stupid game anyway.”

Their parents were in the house, which was down a path through a small wooded part of the yard. The pool was its own isolated country. Its own world.

Gabriel disappeared under water, resurfacing a moment later. A warm breeze blew, causing a rustling of green leaves.

“My mom’s going to marry Arthur,” Gabriel said, wiping snot from his nose. “She’s going to tell your parents today.” He moved through the water towards the edge of the pool, pulling himself up and out.

“I thought she hated Arthur.”

“She doesn’t hate him. She just wishes he were different. Or something like that.”

It was hard to know what Gabriel’s mother wanted. It seemed the thing she hated most was being alone. Everything else was just different shades of tolerable.

It was the third week of summer vacation and Alex was tired of being shuttled from one friend’s house to the other. On the days he stayed home he would lock himself in his room and jerk off to MTV videos and XTube using his mother’s Nivea face cream, thinking thoughts he tried to forget the minute he came. Because of what they meant. What they meant about him.

Gabriel’s orange and black cubed trunks pulled slightly, revealing the pale white of his ass. Alex turned away, his hardon was pushing painfully against his trunks. He pictured pushing Gabriel down. Holding him in the green grass, pulling the orange and black cubed swimming trunks off and shoving himself into that pale ass. He would wrap his hand around Gabriel’s mouth, stopping him from screaming out. He would push and push until he was done, cumming inside him.

Alex couldn’t talk about these thoughts or why he was having them. He wouldn’t tell anyone because he knew what they would say. What they would think. Exactly what his father thought.

“Do you think Arthur will make me best man?” Gabriel asked, lying back on one of the long yellow cushioned lounge chairs.

“Probably not. He must have his own friends or something, right?”

“Who knows? He’s a total loser.” Gabriel pulled his bathing shorts over his thigh, his hand scratching at the soft, blue veined skin. “I stole cigarettes from my mom. You want one?”

“Fuck yeah!” Alex pulled himself out of the water. He did it with ease and strength, not like Gabriel who struggled with everything.

Gabriel reached under the yellow cushioned lounge chair, grabbing a pack of Salems.

“Menthol?” Alex asked. He was aware of the way his voiced sounded. Deep and thick.

“Yeah.” Gabriel said, his voice was shrill, almost like a girls.

“Shit, I hate menthols.”

Gabriel put a cigarette in his mouth, lit it, inhaled and coughed. “You don’t want one it’s cool,” he said.

“Naw. Fuck that. I want one.”

Alex reached for a cigarette, his hand brushing against Gabriel’s thigh. There was a moment when Alex considered leaving his hand there. What would Gabriel do? What would either of them do?

“I can’t picture your mom fucking Arthur,” Alex said, removing his hand from the almost too soft, diaphanous skin.

Gabriel coughed again, then laughed. “What the fuck, man? That’s disgusting.”

“It’s true, bro. Shit, you know your moms is hot and he’s like this skinny little hairy shit. Makes no sense to me.”

Alex inhaled on the Salem, the stale menthol taste inhabiting his mouth, a burning sensation rising in his throat.

He didn’t cough.

“Yeah, well, I don’t think she fucks him anymore,” Gabriel said. He inhaled again, this time holding the smoke inside, his eyes shutting, his hand going to his mouth, a finger running along his lower lip, than exhaling. Alex watched those lips, glistening slightly from saliva and sweat, like sparking jewels in some buried treasure movie where he was the pirate and Gabriel was the prize.

Alex imagined the head of his cock resting against Gabriel’s lips.

“That’s a shame, man. Shit, if I were him I’d be fucking her three, four times a night.”

Gabriel didn’t laugh this time. “That’s seriously fucked up, man.”

“Why’s that?”

“She’s my fuckin mom, man.”

“So? She’s not my mom.”

The air was sweet with honeysuckle. When Alex was a little kid his mother showed him how to pull the flowers off, sucking at the sugary stems. He would close his eyes, lost in that swirling flavor, the warmth of his mother’s laugh promising to keep him safe.

“Anyway,” Alex said, “you gotta admit. Your mom is fuckin hot. Shit, I’d bet you’d fuck her if you could.”

Gabriel stood up, stumbling slightly, the cigarette held awkwardly in his fingers. “Don’t talk about my mom that way, man.”

Alex smiled. Gabriel was so serious. Trying to look so tough. Alex imagined lying next to him, their naked bodies pressed warmly, the pulse of Gabriel’s heart against his own chest. He imagined licking sweat from Gabriel’s pale-white flat stomach.

“Settle down, little man. I’m just fuckin with you.”

“Maybe I’ll fuck your mom,” Gabriel said, trying to sound as hard as Alex did.

“Shit, you can have that fat old bitch. I’ll fuck her with you. I don’t care.” The idea of Gabriel’s small, fragile body climbing on top of his mother’s heavy, rippling, bovine frame caused his dick to swell again. He was getting hard at the thought of helping Gabriel, at the idea of slapping his own mother across the face while Gabriel raped her. His dick was so hard it hurt.

There was a patch of sanguine roses by the chartreuse colored pool house. Purple winged hummingbirds fluttered manically over the blood red flowers. The dull hum of bees buzzing seemed to surround them for a moment. Pink heart shaped flowers hung heavily from green stalks that littered the yard behind the pool. The woods leading to the house seemed to grow, turning into almost mythical proportions. Anything was possible inside those trees.

“I hate him,” Gabriel said, sitting back down. Alex knew he meant Arthur. They’d had this conversation a million times.

“I still say we should kill him. Do a favor for everybody,” Alex said. This was the natural progression of the conversation. It always ended on killing Arthur and how they would do it. Elaborate plans were constructed around the idea. Gabriel favored the more hugely elaborate plans of torture. Once he concocted a plan that required a syringe filled with some liquid that would paralyze Arthur but keep him conscious. They would then force Arthur to lie there while spiders crawled over his body, stinging at him, than snakes would slither over him, into his mouth, biting at him, all ending with a rat which they would shove up Arthur’s ass and would tear it’s way out, killing him.

Alex favored simpler options like shooting the loser in the mother fucking face.

There was a tray table with cheeses and salami, pate and sliced baguettes, assorted fruits and vegetables and humus. Bottles of Orangina sat cooling in a bright cherry red cooler. Alex stood, watching the way the muscles moved in his stomach, the tensing of his thighs, his feet large and solid. He liked his body. Liked the way it moved and felt. Liked the power of it.

Black flies with alien like antenna sticking out from their tiny heads hovered around the food, landing on it. Alex cut a piece of the cotswald with pieces of sautéed onion in it and, using his thumb, smushed it onto a slice of baguette. He took a handful of grapes, throwing three into his mouth, and sat back down.

“I just wish something would happen,” Gabriel said, the fingers of his left hand picking at the skin around the nail of his right hand. Alex noticed traces of caked blood around the nails and bruised fingertips. “Like he’d just be gone or something. I wish I’d wake up and he had never been here. Never existed. Like I didn’t even know him. And I wouldn’t even remember him.”

Gabriel’s eyes closed, his long, black, almost girlish lashes resting against the soft pink of skin, and Alex wondered what life looked like through the lens of those lashes.

Gabriel stretched, rows of ribs showing through the thinness of his chest. In another world, a harsher world, Gabriel would be lucky to have lived this long, skinny and fucking breakable. Survival of the fittest and all that shit. In another world would Alex be his protector or his destroyer, or maybe both? Protecting what was his to destroy when he was ready?

“Shit doesn’t work that way,” Alex said to Gabriel. “Fucker’s here to stay. Nothing you can do about Arthur unless we really gonna do it.” Alex reached for the pack of cigarettes that lay between them. He put one in his mouth, holding it there for a moment, wishing he had a mirror so he could see how it looked hanging from his lips like that. He pictured it a moment. Pictured himself lying there, his body rippling with the muscles he was building, tan and sweaty, the cigarette dangling just like that, tilted slightly to the left.

He lit the cigarette and inhaled.

“You can’t just kill someone,” Gabriel said. “No matter how much of a fucktard they are.”

Alex laughed. He was beginning to enjoy the minty rottenness of the cigarette taste. “Of course you can. Why the fuck not? Who’s gonna stop you?”

“It’s not about being stopped, man. It’s just…shit…it’s not right.”

“What, and just wishing and praying him dead, that’s okay?”

“As long as I’m not doing it. If God wants to take him out God’ll take him out.”

“Then it’s okay?”

“Sure? Why not? God’s God, right?”

“Maybe God wants us to do it.”

Gabriel’s eyes opened, the cold pale blue startling Alex for a moment. “Maybe, but we’ll never know.”

“Fuck God,” Alex said. He exhaled a long thin line of smoke and threw the remaining four grapes into his mouth. “Fuck God and all that church shit. I’ll do whatever I want. If God’s got some kind of problem, shit, let him come and tell me.”

Gabriel laughed. He sat up in the chair, a tiny roll of flesh gathering at his stomach. “Truth is, he’s gonna marry my mom, sit around my house, eat the food my mom cooks and talk shit all day long and there’s not nothing that’s gonna change any of that.”

“That’s just cause you’re scared.”

“Whatever, man. I don’t see you carryin no glock ready to fuck the bastard up.”

“I’d make it look like an accident.”

Alex knew this idea would appeal to Gabriel. It appealed to his sense of elaborateness. Like shoving rats into someone ass or a slow torture by spider bite. The adventure in creating the kill more than the kill itself. But today Gabriel didn’t seem to want to play the game. Today he seemed resigned to what was coming.

Gabriel stood up. He walked to the edge of the pool. Alex found himself again watching as his trunks rose over that small but perfect ass. Set up a webcam featuring that ass and Alex could make a fortune. Nothing he’d seen on Xtube or any of the sites could match that shit.

“Whatever, man,” Gabriel said. “Shit’s gonna be what shit’s gonna be.” Gabriel dove into the water. He swam the length of the pool underwater. When he re-appeared above the surface his blond hair was matted to his head, his blue eyes sparking for a moment, accentuated by the blue of the pool and the sky.

Alex wanted to prove Gabriel wrong. To prove that he meant what he said. And to prove that it wouldn’t matter. Killing Arthur would mean nothing. At least as far as God was concerned.

“Put some of that cranberry brie on a piece of bread for me,” Gabriel said, diving back under the water. Alex watched him swim, his body contorted and elongated by the rippling pool. He looked almost inhuman swimming like that, pierced by fractured rays of sunlight.

Alex went to the table, brushing the black flies away from the food. A chunk of pate sat uneaten, softened by the heat. Alex was fascinated by the process of making pate, the slow torture of the geese, but he hated the taste of the shit. His father had told him how the French loved to slow-kill their animals before eating them. A life-time of being over fed until your liver and kidneys failed, making the perfect delicacy. Too bad it tasted like farts. Farts made by French faggots. He smiled at that. At the fact that everyone was walking around eating French faggot farts and talking about how good and expensive the shit was. People were such fucking idiots. If God cared about anything he’d probably be glad if he and Gabriel started killing some of the fucking loser idiots.

Alex spread cranberry brie onto a piece of baguette, the tiny purplish fruit mixing with the cheese, creating a rosy-white color. He walked back to the pool, where Gabriel was leaning on the edge, half his body submerged and dissipating in the fracturing water, the other half normal and human. Gabriel took the piece of cheese and bread and pushed away from the edge, floating on his back. He stuffed the whole thing into his mouth, chewing.

Alex turned from the pool, looking at the large magnolia tree that was in full bloom, large pearl white flowers inside huge elephant-ear-like green leaves. A swing was attached to one of the branches. Alex had spent almost every summer of his life swinging in that tree, climbing its branches. He had fallen once, landing on his right arm, breaking it at the wrist. Gabriel had laughed at him until he saw the twisted arm dangling unnaturally. Then he had begun to cry, screaming hysterically as if he were the one who had broken his arm and not Alex.

A splashing came from behind him. A frantic sound of hands banging against water. Alex hesitated a moment, breathing in the thick moistness of the summer air, the over-sweetness of it, before turning to see Gabriel kicking and flailing, a hand inside his mouth, trying desperately to dislodge something that was stuck. Gabriel’s pinkish-pale face was slowly distorting to a darker bruised night blue. Alex felt his cock thicken inside his trunks. He felt the weight of it, the size of it. He moved slowly to the edge of the pool, watching as Gabriel reached out for him, the sound of gasping coughs coming from his open mouth.

Alex stood there mesmerized by the pathetic helplessness of his friend. Sunlight softened as a passing cloud created voluptuous shadows across the grass and pool. For a moment Gabriel disappeared beneath the surface of the water, only his hands remained above, trying to hold onto something. It looked to Alex as if Gabriel were willing the water to become solid so he could pull himself up. As if he could actually force the water into something it would never be.

Alex rubbed himself through the soft fabric of his trunks, gripping his hard cock. He liked the way it felt. He liked how big it was. He had seen other guys dicks, guys his age and older, and he knew his was larger, the head fatter. He wondered how long Gabriel would be able to breathe, how long it would take for him to become unconscious. Would he float to the top or sink to the bottom? Gabriel re-surfaced, kicking and gasping, his eyes wide with fear and something else…something desperate…pleading. His face looked bloated with the bruised purpling color. His hands clawed at his throat, his feet pedaling in the water, desperately attempting to stay afloat.

Alex imagined the moment Gabriel lost consciousness. He pictured pulling Gabriel’s lifeless body from the bottom of the pool, throwing him onto the grass and fucking him. Fucking him hard, just shoving his fat cock up Gabriel’s skinny little butt. Maybe there would be blood. Gabriel would have to be alive for there to be blood. Yeah, Alex wouldn’t let him die. Of course not. It would be hotter to fuck him while he was unconscious. He would fuck him so hard maybe Gabriel would wake up, start crying. He would fuck him so hard the stupid bitch would probably never walk again.

Alex jumped into the water, making his way slowly towards Gabriel. With one hand jerking his dick he used the other hand to reach out and touch Gabriel, pushing him gently under water. Gabriel’s skin felt rubbery, smooth, cold. Like a manikin stuck in the freezer. He came almost instantly, letting go of Gabriel. He felt the rush of it pounding through his whole body. It took his breath away. He knew he must of cum gallons because it took forever for it all to shoot sticky wetness into his shorts. This idea made him feel a little sick to his stomach, all the sticky cum in his shorts like that.

He pulled his shorts off, twisting them, wringing them clean. He hated the sticky white stuff. He used his palms to scrub at himself, trying to wipe away any tiny bit of it that might be sticking to his balls or thighs. He almost jumped out of the pool. He hated the idea that now all his cum were swimming around in the water, like tiny microscopic piranha.

But Gabriel was under water again, drifting slowly downwards. One arm was slowly hanging above, as if waiving, the other was still at his throat, his legs kicked pointlessly in a final attempt to reach the top.

Alex slipped his now clean trunks back on and dove under. He grabbed Gabriel around the waist, feeling the slipping warmth of his skin against him. He pulled Gabriel to the surface, thrusting his body over the edge of the pool, so that again he was half submerged and half outside of the water. With his fists he pounded at Gabriel’s back, red welts rising and lingering where his fists hit. He used the ledge to add pressure at Gabriel’s mid-stomach. For a moment it occurred to Alex that it might not work. That he had waited too long and he wondered what that would mean. He wondered if it would mean anything. And he felt sad, which felt strange, because he wasn’t sure if he was sad at the possibility of losing Gabriel or at the possibility of not caring.

Gabriel was coughing, struggling against Alex and something gave, a chunk of baguette flying from Gabriel’s mouth. For a moment Gabriel leaned back, his body giving into Alex’s, resting there, and then he was pushing away, struggling to be free of Alex’s arms. Alex wouldn’t have let him go, not yet at least, if Gabriel’s elbow hadn’t of rammed into his stomach, catching him off guard and causing him to release Gabriel.

Alex moved away, back-swimming towards the middle of the pool. Gabriel pulled himself from the water, bent over, puked and pulled in air. When he finally stood up straight he looked impossibly small against the frame of the oak trees along the border of the yard and the large puffy white clouds that were in the sky. Like one of the tiny green soldiers they had played with endlessly once upon a time. Something that could be picked up or held down or thrown away, depending upon your mood and the ever changing rules of the game.

Alex floated on his back, looking up at the sun that shown brilliantly upon the little kings.

“Fuck you, man!” Gabriel said. “What the fuck is your problem?”

“What the fuck are you talking about, man? I saved your stupid life.”

“Yeah? What the fuck took you so long?” His voice was raspier now, harsher than it had been.

Alex righted himself, his legs dangling in what felt like the endless emptiness of the water. “I thought you were kidding.”

“Fuck you, you thought I was kidding.” Gabriel sat down on his yellow cushioned lounge chair and held a cigarette to his lips, lighting it. He inhaled deeply. He didn’t cough. “You’re such an asshole sometimes.”

Alex laughed. “Yeah. Sometimes.”

 

© 2008 Jeff Leavell

Jeff Leavell lives in Los Angeles with his dog Maggie. He is a screenwriter and is working on a new novel, Extinction. He was recently hired to write a horror script which is no in pre-production. He loves when people email him and tell him what they think of his stories, or just to talk about writing.