The Pale Blue Sky
by Jack Lynch
Part 4 - Carey, Chapter 5
17 Years Old. Class Nerd.
Yet another humiliation: Trigonometry. Spring semester of his Junior year.
After the Biology fiasco, Carey was determined not to get crushed by another subject that made no sense to him. He had to take Trig and get a decent grade if he wanted to get into a good school.
As he struggled to figure out a confusing problem, Benjamin leaned across the aisle.
"Want some help?"
"I dunno. I think I'm helpless," Carey smirked.
Benjamin Blumkin. Class nerd. Shrimpy. Pimply. Horned rimmed glasses that were always dirty. Everyday was a bad hair day for Benjamin. Skinny. Belt pulled as far as it could go, to the last hole, so the end hung down in front of his faded jeans.
After the fall semester encounter with Cade, Carey had again pulled back from most social interaction. Outside of some casual friendships, he kept to himself. The questioning remained. Occasionally, he fantasized about girls. The rest of the time he dreamed about having sex with other guys. If nothing else, he'd developed a pretty good gaydar.
And his gaydar told him Benjamin Blumkin was definitely Gay.
Sitting across the aisle from Benjamin in Trig, Carey felt he was being checked out almost on a daily basis. Out of the corner of his eye, he could tell Benjamin was staring at him. When he tried to catch him doing it, Benjamin would quickly divert his eyes as if he was either studying his notes or looking out the window.
Just for the fun of it, one day Carey quietly opened the second button of his shirt. Putting his hand inside the shirt, he subtly cupped his left breast and squeezed his nipple with two of his fingers. When he turned to look at Benjamin, he was looking right at Carey, eyes glazed over and his mouth open. There was no pretense of trying to look at something else. Carey just smirked to himself.
On this day, Benjamin leaned over.
"Do it like this."
Using his pencil, with a couple of strike throughs and one calculation, Benjamin corrected Carey's mistakes.
Darn! Carey thought. I was that close.
"Grrrr!" Shaking his head, "I don't know if I'll ever get this."
"If you want, I can call you tonight. I'll show you a couple of shortcuts that will help you make sense of it."
"Gee, that would be great."
Shortly after Benjamin reached him on the phone that night, Carey knew something was up. After going through a couple of Trig exercises, Carey started to get it. Having nothing more to say, Carey was about ready to end the conversation. But, Benjamin kept trying to keep him on the phone by asking him random questions.
"Do you like any of the girls in class?" he wanted to know.
"Not really, no," Carey replied.
"Guys?"
"Benjamin, really!"
A huff and a sigh. A non-answer answer.
As Benjamin droned on and probed Carey for any tidbit of information, his voice began to sound jittery. Clearly, Carey thought, Benjamin was jerking off.
Grossed out, he was ready to hang up when Benjamin said breathlessly, "Hold on."
He muted the phone. Several seconds later, Benjamin came back on the line.
Sounding a bit tired as he cleared his throat, he said, "Well, thanks. Good talking to ya."
And ended the call.
Carey chuckled in disgust. The kid jerked off and then muted the phone when he came!
Authors deserve your feedback. It's the only payment they get. If you go to the top of the page you will find the author's name. Click that and you can email the author easily.* Please take a few moments, if you liked the story, to say so.
[For those who use webmail, or whose regular email client opens when they want to use webmail instead: Please right click the author's name. A menu will open in which you can copy the email address (it goes directly to your clipboard without having the courtesy of mentioning that to you) to paste into your webmail system (Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo etc). Each browser is subtly different, each Webmail system is different, or we'd give fuller instructions here. We trust you to know how to use your own system. Note: If the email address pastes or arrives with %40 in the middle, replace that weird set of characters with an @ sign.]
* Some browsers may require a right click instead
