If you understand anything about rural life, you realize that acceptance is a combination of being from a long-standing family, willing to be a part of that history, and, regardless of your actual likes, being seen as the result of a combination of knowing your place, accepting and being just another "country cousin," fitting in and having little or no ambition to escape it. Being gay means you have a natural aversion to being noticed, standing out, or making waves. To do so pretty much lands you in the lasting category of being a "pervert," and holding claim to "queer" and any number of childish insults and insinuations. My life was no different, being part of the actual fabric of the community since the 1830's, and also belonging to a family which I jokingly said "Came to America following a Hooker, meaning Reverend Thomas Hooker, of England, whose colonial Pilgrim settlers lived in Hartford, Connecticut. My family endured the Hartford Witch trials, had one member convicted in the legal courts as a witch, who was later buried in unhallowed ground, and staked with a piece of wood, which later grew into a tree, a fact only verifying her guilt and proving it later when the tree was struck by lightning in the 1970's. Yeah, my family was both ancient,...and weird!

  My own branch of the family moved to Indiana, sometime in the 1840's or earlier, after being members in the Revolutionary War, and taking Native wives, just adding to their self-distancing from the norm. Like all my family, I grew up on a farm, with all my early friends being pets and farm animals, as actual people lived more than a mile off. This fact led to my not really having much interest in talking, much to the dismay of my parents, who actually believed I was slow, initially, despite the fact I taught myself to read before Kindergarten, and using full sentences on there rare occasion when I actually had something to say. My feeling like a total idiot was only supported by the fact when our IQ tests were given out, mine was retained, and so, on being called to the office, my Mom was there to take me home for the remainder of the day. On the way home I had to ask the inevitable question if I had done badly on the testing, to which my Mother laughed, said that I had done so well, they did not wish me to brag about it. However, the damage was already done, just another evidence of my feeling different, and outside of the norm! Since that time, so long ago, have had neither desire to discuss nor find much value in my intellect. Chances are, this mistrust of my notably prodigious brain led me to find my friends in school among the less scholarly, as my first actual crush was the boy, Randy, who had more than a few difficulties in schoolwork, but was, like me, part Native, and as such, still considered the only "minority" in our tiny community. Randy was probably the most athletically gifted boy in my class. We nearly always sat near each other, as our initials were the same, and many teachers placed our seats alphabetically. More often than not, Randy was usually leaning over to me for answers, or to explain things. In Physical Ed, while he was usually picked first for dodgeball, baseball, or other sports, he always made sure I was on his team. This closeness, and the lack of showers in those early classes, brought me in direct notice of another fact about Randy, his musky boy odor was extremely both pleasing, and familiar to me. More than once, I found myself, alone with Randy, not talking, but sitting a bit too close, touching either at the shoulder or knee, and just spending some time touching, talking about stupid stuff, or with Randy winding up unbuttoning my shirt, something I should have found disturbing, due to my shyness, but instead was drawn to and fascinated by.

  "You always button your shirt all the way up?" Randy asked, as he undid the top three buttons of my shirt.

  "You always have your shirt off." to which he took his off, thumbing his nipple as he dropped the shirt on his lap. we looked at each other and laughed.

  Randy picked up his shirt and threw it at me. "Ya Queer, stop lookin at me!"

  " Who's a queer, you undo my shirt all the time!" I picked up his shirt and felt it. could smell his scent on it.

  "If I was a queer I'd undo your pants, too, fucker!" he grabbed his shirt out of my lap, and came close to touching me. I did not move away. Randy's hand lingered a moment, and he rested it on my leg, touching my skin at the bottom of my shorts. At that moment, the bell rang, and we went back in to class, Randy snickered at my obvious hard-on.

  In summer, the norm was to be outside, climbing trees, riding bikes or my favorite, when I was not reading, hiking in the woods. By the time I was fifteen, I had found a secret hideaway, maybe three miles from my home, which was totally isolated in the woods, it had a wide, fast-moving stream maybe ten feet wide and four feet deep, with a huge crescent sandbar on a bend, shaded by the trees, but also half exposed to the sun in a deep ravine, wider than a football field. At the far end of the sandbar, an old rusty fence separated the stream, which grew smaller into a creek, with a field that contained the remains of a barn, that opened onto the edge of the creek, and had the stone foundation of an old, burned-down farm house, at the end of which was a fireplace with a spring-fed cooling area near the stairs leading into the stone foundation. I took some time to dismantle the end of the dilapidated barn, and put up a makeshift timber frame roof over the old foundation, took me most of the summer to get it cozy and private, roofed it with tin from a shed, and had a substantially weatherproof shelter with windows, a fireplace, a small refrigerated area fed by a cool flow of water into what used to be a basement spring house. The whole thing resembled a short Hobbit-style house, with half of the building below ground, and a windowed end which could be raised up to allow entry, or closed to let in light in winter.

  Spent most of the entire summer there after building it, never even realized that my disappearances were seldom noticed for up to 1-3 days at a time. From time to time, I created furniture at home, stealing designs from books or making them up, and even spent a few days there in winter, after saving up some firewood in warm weather. Closed it up, as best I could, for the winter, and in spring returned to find it mostly intact, needing just a few repairs.

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  After school started up, the transition from Grade School to Middle School went well, aside from PE, where required showers and the locker room, which placed you in an entirely new world of nudity and sneaked glances at other boys. Once again, I was usually placed near Randy, and we got to see each other naked three days a week. and this made things a bit more comfortable, except for the day I was standing near my locker, and overheard guys laughing and remaking on Randy's "boner" sporting itself in the showers. I skipped the shower that day, due to feeling that the same might happen to me. I had begun to drive to school, and saw Randy out waiting on the sidewalk, shirtless, after school, so I offered him a ride home and carefully tried to avoid the discussion of the incident, but Randy didn't.

  " I forgot my towel today," was Randy's only remark about it. he sat down in my car, still shirtless looking down.

  "What, you expected me to share my towel, and shower next to you, so you could hide the fuckstick? I've seen you hard before." I stammered out

  " When?" Randy looked at me sideways.

  "On your bike, Saturday, boner boy, you had no fucking underwear on when we were talking." I laughed.

  "Seen you hard more than you seen me." Randy put the shirt between us.

  "In your dreams, queeb!"

  "Yer the queerboy, queeb!" Randy picked up his shirt and pitched it at me like a pillow at a sleepover.

  Not sure exactly what made me do it, but I picked up the shirt and put it up to my face, took a deep breath.

  "Perve!" we both laughed, and Randy reached over and undid all my shirt buttons, and pinched my nipple.

  There seemed a bit of tension between us, which made things pretty quiet on the drive home. For half the trip, the only sound from Randy was a purposeful fart, which I knew meant he could not come up with much to say, followed by his somewhat characteristic giggle, which could be either endearing, as it was to me, or annoying, since it was a bit girlish and generally used to cover his lack of small talk.

  "Keep it up, laughing boy, and you can ride the bus home!" I said in a mock gruff tone.

  "Yeah right, and lose a chance to oggle my hot bod?" Then the giggle repeated and the casual thumbing of his nipple. "So, how do you rate being able to drive without the Driver's Ed class, anyway?"

  "Simple, I drive farm vehicles and this is one. Advantage of being on a farm." Looked over, and Randy was adjusting himself through his jeans, obviously for my benefit, as he was looking right at me while he did it. Of course, I looked down as he did it, as he undid the top button on his jeans.

  As I looked he pulled the top apart, and the worn buttons slowly popped open to the bottom, he looked at me while he slowly buttoned them back up, after just a brief glimpse that there was nothing worn under his jeans. The last button was left open at the top. There were times, in the past, this almost casual teasing had seemed a bit too lewd, but given the times we had spent together during summers, the teasing had slowly grown from schoolyard glances to outright homo-erotic foreplay!

  "So that means you get off watching the cows get fucked?" Randy sneered, "I get that, free cattle porn, sexy."

  Since it was Friday, and no rush to get home, I let Randy out at his front door, which we both saw had a note on it, so instead of just dropping him off, I waited until Randy read the note. He ran back to the car, and said that his Dad was gonna be out of town, so he was going to be alone for the next week. The note also said money for eating was on the table, and since I knew Randy's only skill at cooking was Pop-Tarts and soda, he asked if I could take him to get a pizza, and also that his bike had a broken chain, so he needed a ride to the hardware store to get links to fix it. I took him to get pizza, and stopped by home to tell my parents I was going to eat with Randy and then probably stay a bit at his place since he was alone. While there, I grabbed my camping pack, as I had planned to go out to my self-made camp, mentioned earlier, which was the stone foundation of a house that had burned down in the 1850's, and had neither a driveway, or even more than a rutty path to get to it. I debated telling Randy about the camping weekend I had planned, as I was a bit embarrassed by the crudeness of my cabin structure, mud, stone, sticks and old salvaged windows, and also kind of afraid that such an opportunity might lead to things I felt we both knew about each other, and might get out of hand.

  Randy, who was still shirtless, and also had kicked off his shoes in the car on the way to get pizza, was now leaning on the side of the car, as I went in to get pizza and soda. By the time I got back outside, Randy was playing basketball across the street with guys from school, which they allowed, despite him being younger, because he was better than most of them at it. Randy was still the only person I know who would play basketball barefoot, half-naked, and move faster, enough to easily win more games than he lost. About the time I came out with the pizza, Randy had proved himself ' better than many of the other players, and so they lost interest in the game and took off to go scrounge beer from someone's uncle's stash he hid from his wife in the garage, purposely leaving Randy alone and looking forlorn and bouncing the basketball.

  After kicking the basketball onto the nearby garage roof, Randy half ran back to the car, and we drove to his place, eating pizza and sharing the 2-liter bottle between us, a sign of real friendship, "spit-sharing" from the same bottle.

  When we got back to Randy's we grabbed the pizza, remaining soda and Randy's cast-off clothing and went into the house, dropped much of it on the kitchen table, as Randy struggled to let go of a huge belch, which rumbled out of him dryly, in a forced "scuse me" sound, as he put his hand on his chest and then giggled in his silly fashion, again. Immediately after, Randy again popped his buttoned jeans open, revealing himself fully and skinning out of them , saying, "Gonna shower" as he dropped the last remaining clothing he had on, displaying his ass as he walked beside me and into the hallway towards the bathroom. I watched the show and the slight ass wiggle he performed as he looked back at me, and headed for the shower stark naked.

  I picked up the soda, swigged a bit of it and my gaze followed Randy to the shower. Yep, I was gonna tell him about the camping in the woods, determined to see what happens, hell or high water. I pulled up the final guts I had to let loose a small bit of trapped carbon dioxide from the soda, then walked to the still open door of the bathroom, where Randy was soaping himself, making sure to wash himself openly in the vital areas.

  Randy looked up, saying, "Join me?" Followed by a wry smile, as I slid off the shirt he had unbuttoned in the car, let it slip to the floor, and set the soda on the bathroom sinks, shed my shoes, pants and underwear, took a deep breath and stepped into the shower and Randy's waiting hands, as well as an almost immediate kiss, the first we had ever shared.