I woke up early that morning, around 8:30 on a warm and wet Saturday.  It rained all night long, leaving the soccer fields particularly soggy, and it was supposed to keep raining throughout the day. I wasn’t on a team at the moment, but Paul and Jess both were. Looking out the window, I could see that it wasn't raining right now, and I knew their coaches would want to squeeze in a practice if at all possible.  So, I decided to make the walk to the fields to see how Paul and Jess were doing.

I also wanted to find out whether the two of them were invited to this Gathering thing that Jen invited me to.  It sounded pretty wild, a private event for both girls and guys, playing sexy games, and maybe even making out with each other. But it would mean doing stuff with guys as well as girls. Messing around with girls was one thing, but with guys? I  don't know.  But I figured I'd give it a try and play along. If I had to kiss a guy or something it wouldn't kill me. But I don't know about Paul and Jess. Jess, maybe, but Paul? I'll have to talk him into it. But that may be hard because of what happened between the two of us a couple of years ago.

When we were younger, we played soccer whenever we could, and relentlessly competed with each other for hours on end. It wasn't so much a matter of who won or lost. No one really kept score. It was just what we wanted to do when we were younger and hanging out, kind of bonding with each other as only boys would. It was all fairly simple, just friends, free of the complexities of later relationships, sexual and otherwise, that we would have to deal with for the rest of our lives.

When it rained and we were stuck inside, we would wrestle instead, kind of roughhousing.   We were pretty equal, me and Paul. He was a little bigger, but I was quicker.   It would go on until one of us pinned the other and then demanded payment, something to let the other go.  Once Paul had me from behind, twisting my arm and shoving my face into the carpet.

"Tell me you're gay!" he demanded.

“Fuck you,” I replied.

"Say it!” he demanded.

"You're gay," I said, and chuckled.

"No. Say 'I am gay!'" Paul again demanded.

"You are gay,"  I said and again chuckled.

This would go on until I could squirm out of Paul's grip, or until his parents couldn't take in any more.  We wrestled like this right up to high school, when, well, let me explain.

A couple of years ago, when we were sixteen, Paul had just come back from an overnighter with his cousin Andy and three of his friends, Bob, Joe, and Greg.   All of them were camping out in the backyard. It was still an all-boys affair, no girls allowed.  Girls wouldn’t enter the scene for a little while.  

After they set up our sleeping bags and settled in, they were all looking for something to do.  It was getting late, but no one wanted to go to sleep yet.  Andy said, “Let's play strip poker.”  Paul was kind of shocked, but that was what all the rest of them really wanted to do.  And even though it was just guys, he was still really nervous (but admittedly excited) having never been naked in front of anyone else before. It was all totally new to him.

"The game ended," Paul said, eagerly telling me the whole story, "once everyone lost all their clothes and we all jumped on top of each other in a great big pile-up.  Andy was at the bottom, face down,” Paul continued, “and Greg landed on top of him, with his face buried in Andy’s rear.  Then,”  Paul said, barely able to contain himself, “Andy farted.”  Paul and I  just broke out laughing. Leave it to teenage boys, on the verge of having their first youthful, homoerotic orgy, and all they could talk about was who farted.

“You want to play?” asked Paul.  I was as nervous as Paul was, but excited as well. Just like Paul, this was all entirely new, and kind of thrilling.  

I lost most of my clothes in the first few hands and was down to just my underpants. Paul had only lost his sneakers and a sock.  On the next hand, I drew three of a kind and felt pretty good, but Paul somehow drew a full house.  He just grinned.  “Take it off!” he demanded, “and don’t chicken out.” So off they came and for the first time in my life, I was totally naked in public, even if it was just Paul. 

I felt both completely embarrassed and totally excited at the same time. It was incredible. After a few more hands Paul was naked too. And so there we were, sitting right across from each other, with our completely exposed bodies in full view. Both of us were just now emerging from puberty, and our youthful figures, now on the verge of full development, were so… let's just say it, beautiful. I know we don't normally talk about boys' bodies as beautiful, but they both were.

Our legs and arms, chests, bellies, buttocks…everything, was so incredibly seductive, with the sensuous skin of an adolescent, soft and supple, and just the beginnings of very fine body hair. And we marveled at how much our cocks had grown, which were just then stiffening, and getting larger still. We were both getting erections, a sure sign of our own sexual arousal. This was also the beginning of my own love affair with nudity, and it was wonderful.

But it wasn't just our exposed bodies that excited me. It was also something about Paul. He somehow seemed different to me, and I wasn't sure why. It was kind of confusing. All the fears and inhibitions both of us initially had about nudity, seemed to just melt away under each other's gaze. They were replaced, almost instantaneously, by erotic pleasure arising from the uninhibited joy of being naked with each other for the first time.

It seemed so foreign to both of us, as if we were sharing some kind of crazy erotic dream. This was now more than just the common bonds of boyhood friendship that we were experiencing, which is all we had ever known. Neither of us fully understood these sensations, but for the first time, we both really felt them, physically, sexually, and emotionally.

Then Paul, again grinning, said “Wanna wrestle?”

"What, like this?" I said.

"Yeah," Paul said, still grinning. "Why not?"

 I was already so turned on, and now this! I didn't know what to say.  Paul locked the door to keep his parents out and then put down his comforter for cushioning.  At first, both of us were hesitant about touching each other, especially in places that we never dared touch before, but that didn't last long. Our soft, warm, exposed skin was so irresistible that soon we were frantically groping each other, totally caught up in the erotic excitement of our first nude match. 

We landed on the floor, my right arm in a half nelson, wrapped around Paul’s neck, while my legs squeezed around his waist and my cock, now fully erect, pushed up against his side.  Paul wriggled free. He reached for some way to pull me over, grabbed my rear, and inadvertently pushed two of his fingers up my ass.

“Whoa!” I said, and laughed.

“Sorry,” said Paul and also laughed.

“What's going on up there!” his mother yelled.

“Oh, nothing,” Paul said, and we both snickered.

The match quickly turned into a stalemate, but by then, we could care less, as the groping, humping, and grinding only intensified, bare skin against bare skin.  Paul's smooth, powerful thigh moved up between my legs as I slid my cock and balls on top of it.  I had never felt anything so wonderful in my young life.  At the same time, Paul was thrusting his own dick on the soft parts of my belly, and against my side. It was all so incredibly erotic,  

Neither of us wanted to stop, and we somehow convinced ourselves that this was still just wrestling, because... because I guess that's what we wanted to believe, we had to. We were both athletes, and this was just another competitive match we were having, right? That's what we told ourselves anyway. How could it be anything else?  In a few more minutes we would have climaxed and creamed all over each other, had Paul not done what he did, which of course changed everything.

He kissed me.  Not just a peck on the cheek, but a full-blown kiss, right on the lips.

I'm not sure why he kissed me. Maybe at that moment, he just wanted to show he could do anything he wanted to me, like when he tried to make me say "I’m gay" earlier when we wrestled.  Or perhaps he got caught up in the craziness of the moment. Or maybe, secretly, Paul really is gay, and just never let it out before. Or maybe, it's some combination of all three.  I didn’t know… and I still don’t.

I sometimes wonder what would have happened if I had kissed him back, not lightly or inadvertently, but forcefully, passionately, and for a long time. I sometimes think, maybe, I really wanted to. I just didn’t.  Would we have given ourselves over to the overwhelming passions of young teenage lovers, a homoerotic version of Romeo and Juliet, hiding our desires from everyone else, except each other? Would we have sucked each other’s cocks and fucked each other with reckless abandon, right then and there? Oh, how glorious it would have been.

But… I didn't kiss him back. In fact, I did the opposite.

“PAUL!” I yelled. "WHAT THE FUCK!”

“Sorry,” Paul said. “Sorry.”

 “GET THE FUCK OFF ME!"

Both of us were totally freaked out by that kiss. We were no longer able to pass off what was going on as just wrestling, and no big deal. We both knew it kind of was. Something else was going on here.  

Only gay guys kissed. That much I knew.  Admittedly, I didn’t know much else (I wouldn't know about getting fucked up the ass or blow jobs for a while). I figured being gay was just kind of being girly, or nerdy, like a wimp or a wuss.  That didn’t sound like Paul, or me. After all, we were both athletes.  We couldn’t be gay (could we?). 

But we did kiss each other, Paul kissed me, and, yeah, I did kind of kiss back, a little.  And, yeah, there was all that other stuff going on, the groping and the grinding, and all naked too.  Oh my God!  It’s like…sex, kind of like masturbation (I definitely knew what that was) but together, with each other.  Were we gay?  Paul was probably wondering the same thing.

 We both got dressed immediately, and I headed home. “Jeff,”  Paul’s mother called out, “Do you want to stay for dinner?  I’m making spaghetti.” 

“No thanks, Mrs. Jackson,” I said.  “I have to get home.”

“You want a ride?” she asked, but I was already out the door.

Paul and I stopped hanging out as much after that. Maybe if we could have gotten past that one isolated incident, things would have been different, but I loved it too much, craved it, and wanted more. Never had I experienced anything like this, and I wouldn’t again until that late-night swim I would have two years later with Callie.  I found myself reliving this thing with Paul over and over in my head when I jerked off late at night.  I wanted to do it all over again for the sheer erotic pleasure of it all.

But of course, I couldn’t, even if Paul agreed to (and he wouldn’t).  The fear of being found out, and the stigma of being gay was too much for a sixteen-year-old soccer player to handle. Of course, only Paul and I would know about this, but that was enough.  It was stuck in my head and I couldn’t get rid of it. The only thing more powerful than the sexual desire I was feeling, was the fear of having that desire outed, for all the world to see, including myself.   Paul probably felt the same way. 

And, of course, we never wrestled again.

So, after a dozen or so years hanging out, it seemed like we were beginning to drift apart. Paul and I still played soccer together, cautiously, and we were still on the same team, but it wasn’t the same.   There was, perhaps, only one person who could have gotten us through all this, and she didn’t even know it.  In fact, she wasn’t even in town, yet.

 I got home, angry, worried, and depressed.  “Jeff,” my mother called out.  “You're finally home.  Do you want some dinner?”

“I ate at Paul's,” I told her, which of course was a lie.  I was hungry, but didn’t care.

“Did you hear the Thompson house finally got sold?”  My mother said.

“Great,” I replied, not caring in the least.

“I met the family who purchased it.”  My mother continued.  “They’re moving in next month.  They seem very nice, with a girl about your age.”

“Wonderful,” I said sarcastically, and under my breath.  “Just what this block needs, another girl to annoy me.”

“The girl likes to play soccer too, just like you,” my mother added, unaware that I wasn’t really listening.  “Maybe you could show her where the soccer fields are.”

“Mom!” I said, “Can we talk about this later?”  The last thing I needed was some girl tagging along after me.

“Her name is Jessica,” said my mother. “But she likes to be called Jess.”