Page:Jay Little - Maybe—Tomorrow.pdf/325

 movement … watched the sun play over the dripping hair and hips. Rogers stood grinning, his hands on his hips, at him and there was a playful twinkle in both their eyes.

Well, Gaylord, he thought, you've got your wish. Take a good look … and he did exactly that. He started from the feet and ended at the grinning eyes. Then went back over the naked oven-brown skin, and the dripping water seemed to melt from its warmth. An undercurrent pulled at his feet and he braced himself to meet it. The stillness lay around him and the shadows made valleys between the brush ridges, deep and cool. Rogers broke the silence with a yell.

"Here I come."

Below Gaylord, in the obscure depth, something moved and touched his leg. He uttered a scream of delight and with strong movements tried to swim away. A burst of bubbles burst before him and Rogers' head appeared close to his own.

"Boo," Rogers cried.

"Glenn …" laughed Gaylord. And a sudden warmth shot through him on feeling the other's hands around his waist … They clung together a second laughing, and the warmth grew greater as their bodies touched. Gaylord's sides ached with pleasure under the other's strong hands and he wanted to kiss the grin so close and yet so far away.

Gaylord was afraid Rogers would read his eyes, and a strange new sense of shame, a hot flush, as though he had fever, swept through him. He pushed away the shoulders his hands had rested on.

Then Rogers laughed. He laughed and drew Gaylord to him again. "I didn't scare you, Gay, did I?" he asked.

Gaylord tried to laugh. "Course not."

And while Rogers talked, Gaylord listened … frightened, like a mouse in the paw of a cat.

"I sure didn't mean to … I'd never want to do that, Gay."

Pensive, Gaylord listened to the pulse of silence and the water. The water alone endured the same. The log still lay at the limit of the land and the creek ran on down its pathway to some unknown end, tracing a word of prophecy and recollection. But this was not a period for dreaming. It was time of awakening to the fact that if he and Rogers stayed in this embrace much longer, he would inevitably 315