My first marriage was simply a mistake. And as with many of the mistakes we make, it took a while before we owned up to it. After producing two kids, we decided we shouldn’t do that anymore and divorced. We stayed in touch so that the kids would know they had a dad who loved them, even though they got a stepdad. My second try at marriage turned out to be much better. I met Sylvia when I was twenty-eight and married her tw...

Sabra was twenty-eight and filled with a quiet panic every day. She was convinced that if she weren’t married by the time she was thirty she would be single for the rest of her life. It wasn’t that she hadn’t had suitors in the past, but that none of them had met her high standards. She was sure that her looks would fade and her body would thicken and sag and she would end up looking like her mother. That thought depresse...

Trevor was farther away from home and his loving family than he’d ever expected to be. He’d only left the small town of Winston, Oregon, where he was born, twice in the past: once for a high school field trip to Portland and the other to visit relatives in Eugene. Before his high school graduation he’d applied to a dozen colleges, but his GPA and SAT scores were very low. Time after time he received letters with discourag...

My sixteenth year was the most miserable of my life. In fact, I could say it was the only miserable year. I had just begun to realize that I was different than the other boys my age that I knew. There was a new boy in my class named Calvin, and I had a crush on him. Calvin was a country boy from Oklahoma who was a year older, having been held back a year. His family had had a farm that had failed, and his father had moved...

Casey and Emma had been married for thirty years. He was twenty-eight and she was twenty-five when they tied the knot, and it had lasted for all these years, through ups and downs, thick and thin. They had a daughter who, from age seven on, had been a handful. They’d never been able to control her. At the age of eighteen she had run away from home with a thirty-four-year-old man. That hadn’t lasted long, but she didn’t re...

  Andy wasn’t anyone’s idea of an Adonis. He was six-foot-three and exceedingly thin, and at the age of thirty-six it wasn’t surprising he also had a small paunch. His face was long and thin like his body. He had crooked teeth, a weak chin and bushy, black eyebrows. He wasn’t ugly or even homely. If he’d had only one of these negative characteristics it could have been overlooked, but the combination of them tended to def...

It was the middle of August and the summer heat hadn’t yet arrived. It was beautifully warm, and indeed, very warm if you were working, but the mind-numbing stifling heat that usually arrived toward the end of summer hadn’t yet made an appearance. Logan Ellison was a relatively young entrepreneur who believed in sustaining the past as he pushed ahead to the future. He’d bought this 1930 era house built in the style of Le...

I’d just entered high school when my mother died. She’d had breast cancer and hadn’t caught it in time. It had metastasized to other parts of her body, and although they fought it, there was no way there would be a different outcome. But no matter how prepared you are for the end, it is devastating. Both my dad and I were distraught, but each of us also tried to be brave for the other. I think that is what got us through...

      The house Elam had lived in all his life was built in a style called Craftsman, but it wasn’t a very good example of the true Craftsman style. Besides the living room windows that opened onto the wide front porch, there was a large picture-window on one side of the room. The only view from this window was the wall of the house next door. That was a two-story house clad in wood shakes, painted white. The wall facing...

My sister, who is a year older than me, always had good taste in boyfriends. I liked every one of them, but a few of them stand out. When I was sixteen she had one named Richard who was nineteen. Mom normally wouldn’t have approved because of the age difference, but she said Richard was a nice boy from a good family, which meant they had more money than us. Richard wasn’t nearly as nice as she thought, but he was gorgeous...

Many people said Abbott was a bad seed. Since he was a very small kid he’d gotten into trouble. He seemed to take pleasure in doing things he knew were wrong. His parents had given up on him, but that was probably a big part of the problem.They shouldn’t have been parents in the first place. They were ill-prepared to raise a child, and especially one who may have had some issues. Abbott himself, more than likely, didn’t k...

 When I tell people I’m a sailor they immediately think I’m in the navy. I’m not. The same thing if I call myself a seaman. I’m one of those thousands of guys who work on cargo ships. I’ve worked on freighters and more recently on a container ship.I’ve spent almost half my life now at sea, traveling all over the world - which means I’ve had my balls drained in almost every country that has a shoreline. Rubbers full of my...

In this instance, Buck couldn’t ask himself how he had gotten in this situation. He knew. When he came to this country he knew he was stepping into risky business. Any get-rich-quick scheme had its risks, but getting into the drug trade was almost begging for trouble. And when you were a foreigner becoming part of an established illegal enterprise, well, what could you expect?But he was in his late thirties and had nothin...

Alex was seventeen and he knew what he wanted. He wanted to suck a cock, but he had no idea how to go about it or where to start. And there was another wrinkle: he wanted to suck his best friend’s cock. He really didn’t know how to initiate that. He and Buzz had met the year before when they entered high school and had clicked. Over the next year the friendship had grown, and now they were best buddies. Alex knew Buzz lik...