Don't Judge a Book by Its Cover

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Don't Judge a Book by Its Cover Page 4

by Robbie Michaels


  Sometime during the night he got up to pee. As he made his way back to bed I was surprised to see him slip off his T-shirt and briefs before crawling back into bed, naked. I wondered if he had consciously done that or if this was an act that was more second nature to someone who slept naked every night. He must have been warm, because he didn’t pull the blankets back up over his body, only the sheet.

  He again curled up facing toward me. It was all I could do to keep my hands from roaming one foot to my right to feel his dick, to rub his pecs, to stroke his abs, to gently cup his tender testicles. But such a move would be the kiss of death to any friendship and any future for me in any high school anywhere in the state of New York, so I fought down those urges and kept my hands to myself.

  Too bad he didn’t start snoring. Then I would have a legitimate excuse to reach out and touch him to get him to roll over or to carry out my threatened tickling. But I didn’t want the fleeting touch of a tickle from a body that was trying to get away. No, what I wanted more than anything else was to reach out and gently, lovingly caress his masculine body, to run my fingers gently over his torso, down over his gorgeous nipples. Then I wanted to lick and tease those nipples with my tongue and my lips….

  Crap! Now I really was hard! No! Couldn’t do this! No matter how hot the man was, I liked finally having someone act like my friend. I didn’t want to risk ruining everything after less than a week by doing something stupid. So I forced myself to roll over and to lie facing away from the hunk in my bed. Eventually I too fell back asleep.

  Sometime in the hours that came after that—I don’t know exactly when—my bedmate moved around in his sleep. When I woke up I found him cuddled up behind me with his arms wrapped around my body.

  Major, major warning bells were going off in my head. I went from asleep to wide awake nearly instantly. I drew in a deep breath and held it. I didn’t dare to even breathe. I was absolutely convinced that I was going to black out from lack of oxygen to my brain. Damn! But his hand felt good on my side, wrapped around my body.

  Oh! My! God! Bill was naked in my bed with his arms wrapped around me! I must have died during the night and gone to heaven!

  My mind was absolutely swimming with a thousand thoughts. This couldn’t be happening. Part of me wanted him to wake up, but another part of me wanted time to stop and for this man to remain wrapped around my body forever. It was with very mixed feelings a few minutes later that I noticed Bill was stirring. There was no sun that morning, but it was light outside, and the curtains to my window were open so my room was well illuminated.

  When I heard Bill mumble something—I couldn’t tell what—I decided that I needed to take the upper hand. He was snuggled up against me so tightly. I tried to make a joke in the hopes of not freaking the man out totally. The man with his arms wrapped around me was straight—there was no question about that fact—and I was assuming that any straight man would freak out completely when he woke up this close to another man, gay or straight.

  “Don’t you think you should buy me dinner—or breakfast in this case—first?” I asked, trying to set a light tone.

  The man behind me gasped and jumped. I didn’t know a man could move so fast, and I’m not entirely sure how he did it, but Bill was out of my bed and up faster than you could believe. His feet got tangled up in the sheet and blankets and the man went down—hard.

  “Bill!” I yelled. “You okay?”

  I moved quickly myself because I had incentive—the man who was on my floor was naked. This was my one chance to see the man in all his glory.

  “Crap!” he said, blushing several shades of red. “I’m so sorry.” Bill tried to grab hold of a blanket or something, anything within reach to pull over his crotch. Even in the midst of the moment, I noticed he was surprisingly not as big as I had imagined.

  “Bill!” I tried. “Dude! Take a breath. Relax.”

  “I’m so sorry. So sorry.”

  “For what?” I said, trying to minimize his upset. “You’re a guy. I’m a guy. Guys have dicks. Guys wake up with morning wood. It happens. The things don’t usually ask us for permission before they get hard. Nothing to get upset about. Relax.”

  “Why am I naked?” he asked.

  “You got up during the night to pee, and when you came back, you took everything off. I think you were too warm. I don’t really know. I wasn’t exactly awake enough to have a conversation.”

  I hopped out of bed on my side and went to my dresser, pulling out a pair of sweatpants, which I threw toward Bill. I also grabbed a T-shirt from a pile on my dresser and tossed that his way as well. The man pulled the clothes on quickly. I was able to get another really good look while he was pulling both the pants and then the shirt on. I grabbed some half socks as well from another drawer and passed them to my guest.

  “I think my mom’s baking something. You like cinnamon? She makes some really good cinnamon rolls.”

  Bill seemed incredulous that I was not freaking out as badly as he was. “You hungry?”

  The poor guy just stared at me. I looked right at him and simply said, “Bill. Please. Relax.”

  I didn’t think my words were registering with him, but I didn’t know how to convince him that he hadn’t done anything wrong, short of coming out and telling him that it had been a fantastic experience for me. And I wasn’t about to come out to him or anyone else. Nope. Not gonna do that. Not gonna happen. Nope. Not gonna do it.

  As I predicted, my mom had been up for hours and had been baking up a storm, something she loved to do on a stormy day. Her cinnamon rolls were out of this world, and I always liked it when she made them. She told me they were something her grandmother used to make years ago, and that’s where she got the recipe. If nothing else, when I left home I wanted that recipe to take with me, although I wasn’t sure I could ever pull it off like she did.

  I led a very quiet Bill to the kitchen, where my mom bustled about offering us seventeen different things for breakfast when she saw that we were up. Bill hadn’t said a word, which worried me. But then he sniffed—the air was filled with the scent of cinnamon. “Something smells wonderful,” he offered.

  “Fresh-baked cinnamon rolls—my grandmother’s recipe. I wanted you boys to have something nice and hot for breakfast.”

  We sat at the counter, where the smell of cinnamon was even stronger. We each took one of the piping hot items. It appeared that all problems were forgotten when Bill took one bite of the proffered rolls. “Oh my God. This is the best thing I have ever tasted!” he said. The look on his face matched the words coming out of his mouth. When he got silent a moment later it wasn’t because he was deep in angst, it was because his mouth was full of a roll. We seemed to have achieved something good.

  The man moaned with delight as he polished off several of the items as they came out of the oven.

  “I have never, ever tasted anything like that before. That has to be the best thing anyone anywhere at any point in history has ever created. Period.”

  Bill was happy. My mother was happy. And I’d seen him naked and hard—I was happy too. We were all happy, at least for the moment, although I had no confidence that it would all last.

  My mother kept pushing more food at the poor unsuspecting man. My mother liked to cook, and she was a good cook. We rarely had guests, so when we did she wanted to prepare everything all at once. I never understood why she didn’t invite people in occasionally, given how much she liked to take care of people, but she never did.

  So when an opportunity fell out of the sky and landed in her lap she was prepared to go all out. Fresh oranges appeared from somewhere—oh, right, I had sold them last month in yet another fundraiser. In no time flat, the oranges were halved and juiced before our eyes, and two glasses of fresh-squeezed juice were presented to us.

  Bill seemed to be in awe of the experience. She offered omelets, waffles, pancakes, and a number of other things. I was getting full just listening to her name off the options. Bill had mistakenly
assumed that the rolls were breakfast. Silly boy! Those were just the appetizer, the first course of a never-ending breakfast banquet.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever eaten so much fantastic food in my life!” Bill said when he was stuffed and unable to eat another bite. “I may never eat again, one because I’m so stuffed, and two because no other food could ever come close to measuring up to this meal.”

  “Aren’t you sweet!” my mother observed, impressed with Bill’s appreciation and his manners.

  Bill and I retired to the living room, where my father was sprawled out in his recliner. He was half-asleep or half-awake, depending on your point of view. I looked out the window, and as I guessed, the driveway was completely cleared of snow. And the snow had stopped falling from the sky.

  My dad had been watching the local news while we ate so he had the latest updates. “Well, it looks like the snow is finished, but now we’re gonna get some ferocious winds. That accident you mentioned last night was bad. They had some video on the news earlier. Four people killed and a whole bunch of trucks and a couple of cars destroyed. It’s not clear when we’ll get our roads cleared. The state is sending in some equipment and manpower to get the main roads open, but some of the back roads are gonna take a few days.”

  My father asked Bill where he lived. “I know that road—you might be with us another night or two before they get that one cleared. I hope this one didn’t hog the covers!” he said jokingly.

  “No, sir. I slept really well. Hope I didn’t snore,” he said.

  “Nope. You were quiet as a church mouse all night long.”

  My father retired to his workshop in the basement to do something (he was always working on something, even though we usually had no idea what). My mother was in the kitchen. I grabbed a book I had been reading. Bill retrieved his backpack and pulled out something (couldn’t tell what). Whenever I looked over at him he was busily at work on something. After twenty minutes I was getting really curious but didn’t want to be rude.

  At one point I left the room and came back a moment later, trying to get a glimpse of what he was working on. It looked like he had a sketchpad of some sort and was drawing something. Whatever he was working on, he was being very private about it.

  After another ten minutes I moved over to his side and asked him. He quickly closed his pad and said, “Nothing.”

  “You don’t have to tell me. I was just curious. I didn’t mean to intrude.”

  The guy looked chagrined or something—I wasn’t sure. It was so odd to see the most popular guy in the school be anything other than 100 percent in charge. Slowly he pulled his sketchpad back onto his lap and opened it up to the page he’d been working on.

  “Here,” he said, handing the pad to me. He turned his face away.

  I was absolutely blown away by what I was seeing. “This is amazing! Did you draw this? Just now? Holy crap! You did this?” I said again. “You’re… you’re really, really good. Wow!”

  What I was holding in my hand was a pencil drawing—a very detailed pencil drawing—of me. The detail that he had captured in just half an hour was beyond belief. The man had an amazing talent. Why had I never heard that he was an artist?

  I studied the drawing a bit more. “You drew me better looking than I am,” I observed.

  “No, I didn’t,” he answered.

  “This is how you see me?” I asked.

  “Yes. You’re a very good-looking guy.”

  “Me? Were you out in the cold too long last night? I’m not good-looking.”

  “You’re nuts. You look better than I do.”

  Was the man absolutely off his rocker? Had he lost it totally? He was one of the most handsome men on the planet, and here he was telling me that I was more handsome than he was. The man was bonkers. I couldn’t resist—I had to try to understand this a bit better.

  “Okay, I have to ask. What do you think it is that makes you less handsome than me? And you’re wrong, by the way.”

  “Seriously? My eyes aren’t even. My ears are too big. I’ve got a scar over my one eye and on my chin. I’m too hairy.”

  Before he could continue I interrupted him. “Okay. I hadn’t even noticed the scar on your chin. And it is tiny. The scar over your eye is 99 percent hidden by your eyebrow. Your eyes are perfectly even and very attractive. Big ears are a sign of virility and are very attractive. Face it, dude, you’re handsome. You probably have to beat the girls off with a stick. That cheerleader last weekend, for example, she was practically drooling over you.”

  “She’s been chasing after me for weeks now, trying to get me to go out with her.”

  “Why are you avoiding her? She sounds like a sure thing.”

  “I’m just not interested.”

  Strange. I would have pictured him all over her. The man had more layers than met the eye at first glance.

  “But back to this drawing for a minute. You are really, really talented. Are you going to study art when you go to college?”

  “No! I only doodle. I can’t practice at home.”

  “Why not?”

  “My dad thinks it’s too ‘fruity’. I keep telling him that that’s rude and inaccurate. He doesn’t agree. We just don’t talk about it anymore.”

  “Well, I think he’s wrong. You’ve got real talent, and I’m impressed.”

  He didn’t say anything else about the subject. I asked if I could show his drawing to my mother, and while he hesitated he didn’t refuse, so I quickly dashed into the kitchen to show her. She was as impressed as I was and immediately came in to tell him what a great job he had done.

  While Bill was distracted talking to my mother, I quickly flipped through the sketchpad. Holy crap! The man had been sketching some male nudes—some really fine male nudes. Interesting. There were no corresponding female nudes. I would have expected a straight male to draw boobs and vaginas, not penises and pecs. But this one seemed to go against the norm.

  I put the book back and said, “You do really good work.” I didn’t tell him I had seen some of his other work, since I didn’t know what it all meant and I needed some time to mull it over. Why was he drawing male nudes?

  The morning slowly passed. My mother stuffed us again for lunch. In the afternoon I remembered that Bill was having some trouble with calculus, so I asked if he wanted to do a little work on that. He did, which pleased me since I was a math nerd and relished the opportunity to do anything related to my favorite subject.

  We moved to the dining room table, spread out our books and a pile of blank paper, and started. It quickly became clear to me where he was hitting his brick wall. Brick by brick I helped him deconstruct that wall and get past his problem. After a couple of hours of talk and working equations, he seemed much more confident and relaxed about the subject.

  “I understand this now!” He sounded genuinely excited, which made me excited too. “Thank you! I was worried that I was gonna blow this test so badly! I owe you again.” He paused for a second before adding, “I seem to be saying that a lot lately.” He looked up at me with those beautiful big eyes of his and smiled as he said, “I’m just sorry I didn’t get to know you sooner. I guess I should be glad for this snowstorm and for my car dying like it did.”

  “No problem. I like this stuff, I like you, and I’m glad I could help.”

  “You absolutely did, more than I can possibly tell you.”

  “You seem like a nice guy, so I’m glad to get to you know you a little too.”

  “Seems like I’m the big beneficiary here. A warm bed to sleep in, the best breakfast any man has ever had, phenomenal lunch, personal calculus tutor who lifted the veil and showed me how it really works.”

  I decided to joke a little to lighten the moment. “And the truck. Don’t forget the truck last weekend.”

  “I’ll never forget the truck, trust me. I had my guys all lined up to help. They promised me they would be there, and as you saw, not one of them showed up. I was so pissed. If you hadn’t shown up I t
hink I’d still be working on unloading that damned truck all by myself.”

  “The girls meant well….”

  “No, they didn’t. They were just there so Sue could try to get me to go out with her again. That’s the only reason they showed up. When I wouldn’t agree they got more and more useless.”

  “She’s beautiful. Why don’t you want to go out with her?”

  “She’s not my type.”

  “What is your type?” I asked, but he studiously avoided answering my question.

  “Hard to say.”

  “Well, what are some of the girls like that you’ve had sex with before?”

  “Why do you think I’ve had sex?”

  “You’re Bill—you are a Greek God walking among us mere mortals. If any member of the male species is going to propagate, it is most likely to be one of the pretty ones. You’re the most pretty, so that makes you most likely. I’ve heard some of the much less attractive guys talk about having sex, so therefore if they’ve had sex then someone like you who is ten times more attractive must have had sex.”

  “Pretty?” he asked.

  “All right, handsome. Better?”

  “I still think you’re nuts. I just don’t see that when I look in the mirror.”

  “Well, then, you’re looking in the wrong mirror. Sounds like you need a new cheerleader.”

  “I told you I don’t want—” he started to say.

  “Let me finish! It sounds like you need a new cheerleader to tell you how handsome you are, how awesome you are. There is no reason that has to be someone with a vagina.”

  “Vagina?”

  “Yes, you remember health class? Vagina?”

  “Dude! Shut up! I don’t want to talk about such things!”

  Bill had to make a timely trip to the bathroom, which gave me a few minutes to reflect on the morning. I had been so sure that a god like Bill was straight, but he sure had been sending some mighty liberal messages. Didn’t he know that he was a jock and that jocks were by their very nature uptight and conservative and hated all the things that I was and represented? Jocks hated nerds. And jocks especially hated faggot nerds, and I had both bases covered.

 

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