On the Kalalau Trail

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER TWO

On the trail to South Kinsman, which was as rugged and rocky as any trail I’ve been on, I might as well have been hiking alone. Conroy took the lead immediately and didn’t relinquish it for the entire short distance to our third and final peak for the day. I had no trouble keeping up with him, though it did seem as though he was trying to see if he could leave me behind, or at least gain some space. Again, I felt a slight irritation; was he testing me? Was this his way of demonstrating how much more experienced a hiker he was?

The wind had picked up. It wasn’t enough to make me strain against it, but it lifted Conroy’s hair and ruffled it, and the loose ends of our pack straps whipped around, slapping against the nylon of the packs.

I reached the large cairn at the South Kinsman summit within seconds of Conroy and shrugged out of my pack, setting it on the ground beside where he’d put his. He stood on one side of that pile of stones and I stood on the other, each of us admiring the impressive view silently. There was no one else in sight. After a few minutes I took out my phone, stepped a little away from the cairn, and took a shot of it, carefully avoiding including Conroy on the shot. I slid the phone back into its pouch on my pack just as a group of three people, two women and a man, approached the summit, chatting and laughing. They greeted us with the standard, "Hi!" and we responded in kind. One of the women approached Conroy and asked him something about trails. I couldn’t quite hear what they were saying.

Each of the other two people added a stone to the cairn, and the woman who’d spoken to Conroy asked him to take a shot of all three of them around the pile. Then they headed back to the trail they had come from and disappeared.

Conroy wandered a short distance away, found a stone slightly larger than his hand, and brought it back to set onto the cairn. I’d been thinking of doing that, but I decided against imitating his action; I hadn’t enjoyed always being the follower on the last part of the trail, and I didn’t mind giving up the privilege of adding to the cairn if it meant asserting myself even this little bit.

He looked at me. "You should take another shot."

"Why?"

"It’s got my stone on it now."

I gave a short laugh as if that was slightly amusing and left my phone packed away. The way he’d looked at me after the comment about licking honey, and even the comment itself, had left me feeling off-balance. If he wanted to let me know something, he should do it. Or was he waiting for me to give him more of an opening? Maybe that was the off-balance feeling; I didn’t know what to do.

I wasn’t especially shy about letting a complete stranger know, in a setting where no one else would hear or care, that I was gay. It wasn’t any of Conroy’s business, though, unless he was gay and was trying to establish a connection. But what kind of a connection?

I’d had a few months of something approaching bliss with a man named Alden Armstrong my freshman year at UNH, and since then I’d had some number of very casual, very brief encounters with guys I met on campus, guys I mostly didn’t see again, guys I didn’t especially want to see again. I’d gotten pretty burned when Alden had disappeared from campus—and from my life— without a word. It hadn’t helped that I’d fallen for another guy after that, a guy who’d proved to be nothing like what I’d thought he was. So I was leery of letting anyone past some kind of outer perimeter. But surely I knew the danger signs well enough by now to avoid making that mistake again. Right?

Watching Conroy’s face for a reaction to my refusal to preserve an image of "his" rock on the cairn, I had to admit there was something about him that pulled at me more than any of those causal-encounter guys. Should I be concerned that he might be another mistake?

Fuck. I had no idea.

All I cared about right now, this moment, on this mountaintop, was whether he had come on to me, how I could figure that out, and what I might like to do about it if he had. And all I knew was that I wasn’t going out on a limb to find out.

So I tried a test of my own. "Think it’s time I headed back. You staying for a bit?"

I couldn’t read his face. He was silent for several seconds, and then he walked closer to me, slowly enough that it was evident he wasn’t headed for the return trail. He didn’t stop until his body was mere inches from mine. I didn’t back away.

Did I want this? And what was it? My brain felt disconnected from the rest of me. As for the rest of me, the chill of the wind was a fascinating counterpoint to the warmth that had started somewhere in my belly and was making me wonder if the glow was visible. Was this the casual s*x, the one-off-with-a-near-stranger that had been my diet since my sophomore year?

Sure. Why not?

Conroy tilted his head, one side of his mouth lifted in a slight smile, and he answered my question about whether he was leaving or staying. "Depends."

We were so close that I had no more doubts about his intentions. I lifted my chin a tiny bit. "On?"

"Are you enjoying my company as much as I’m enjoying yours?"

I dropped my eyes to his mouth and opened mine just a smidge. My message: I’m here. The next move is yours.

He moved. It was quick, and it was slow. Suddenly, and yet over the course of what seemed like minutes, he leaned toward me and oh, so gently placed his lips on mine and then pulled away. I heard myself gasp despite the sound of the wind whipping around us. In his eyes I saw lust, desire, and something that wasn’t exactly courage, just something that didn’t care that other people could appear any second.

His hands grasped both sides of my jaw, essentially claiming control of my head. I’m not sure what my hands did, but they hung onto some part of his body, kneading hard through the dark red synthetic clothing he wore. As his tongue thrust into my mouth, I lowered my hands to his ass and pressed him against me. It felt instinctive, perfect, natural. It was all of those things.

Oh, God! Why did Conroy feel different from anyone I’d been with, ever? For reasons I didn’t understand, my mind came up with an image of Alden’s tall, slender frame. Conroy was muscular, solid, overtly masculine without being bulky. I loved it. I wanted it. Badly.

I had a moment of hesitation in which my brain said, Really? You’re going to f**k a complete stranger, outdoors, on a mountaintop? The guys you’ve been with at school were not complete strangers. You know nothing about Conroy, and if that’s not enough you’re in full view of anyone who rounds the bend of that trail and heads toward the cairn on the summit!

Then: Why not? And: Is there a better place for this than a mountaintop?

Conroy pulled his head back, eyes half shut, breath coming in short pants. He took my hand and half-led, half-pulled me toward our packs. Without pausing, we grabbed our own packs with our free hands, and I let Conroy lead the way to a group of scrub pines a little distance from the cairn. In the dubious shelter of the spot, we nearly ripped open our packs and pulled out any extra clothing we’d brought.

Rain ponchos strewn with polar fleece vests protecting us from the ground, we lowered our shorts and then our bodies onto the pile. His body was as I would have expected: firm, compact, with subtle but definite muscle definition, and very little body hair above his waist—essentially, in my opinion, perfection. After a rather abbreviated (by my usual standards, anyway) period of kissing and stroking and squeezing, Conroy positioned himself so that he could take my d**k into his mouth.

Wow, I thought; he’s not wasting time.

His hard d**k was now practically in my face. As I got ready to wrap my lips around it, I noticed it had a particularly distinct curl to the right which I found charming; it was as though there was one thing about this man’s physique that wasn’t absolutely perfect, and only someone who saw him naked and hard would know about it. It gave me the odd feeling of having been let in on a secret.

In standard sixty-nine position we licked and sucked and kneaded and squeezed. This wasn’t the first time I’d had s*x outdoors, so I was ready for the amazing sensation of cool, fresh air flowing across intimate areas that had just been warmed by a man’s moist mouth. I did my best to make sure this was part of Conroy’s experience as well, moving from his belly to his balls and on to the end of his d**k, leaving a trail of warm moisture as I went.

Sex with Conroy, once he took me fully into his mouth, was hard, insistent, and immediate. Finesse had nothing to do with it, affection had nothing to do with it, and there was no time—or any inclination—to think.

When he lifted his head away from me, one hand massaging my balls and the other pulling on the end of my d**k, I followed his example. We came within seconds of each other.

With the salty, musty taste of Conroy teasing the sides of my mouth and the warmth of his c*m oozing onto my chest, I lay back onto our impromptu mountain bed and panted. There was a slight odor of mushrooms; was that Conroy, or had we made our bed on top of some phallic fungi?

As my breathing calmed, my eyes gradually focused enough to see dark evergreen needles on stiff branches overhead, framing a section of bright blue sky with whiffs of white cloud skittering across.

Conroy was ready to get up before I was. He wiped himself off with a paper towel from his pack, no doubt originally intended as a lunchtime napkin. Then he repacked the bits of clothing that were his, stood, and shrugged into the pack.

"Hope we meet again, Nathan Bartlett. I like hiking with you. Among other things." He grinned, turned, and was off. He disappeared quickly, and the sounds of his boots snapping twigs and shuffling through everything else underfoot faded into the distance.

I pulled myself together and sat up, elbows on knees. My mind wandered as I stared through the brittle pine branches at partially visible ledges of granite and at the sections of sky that weren’t obscured by trees.

Here’s where my wandering mind went. Nina is fond of musicals. A few years ago, I sat with her and watched a recording of Steven Sondheim’s Into the Woods. There’s a scene toward the end where a character known only as The Baker’s Wife is walking through the woods, and she comes upon Prince Charming, whose wife (somewhere far away) is Cinderella. He’s not a terrible fellow, just a terrible husband, and he seduces Baker’s Wife. Mind you, she doesn’t exactly resist, though she has moments of hesitation. When it’s over, he says, "I shall not forget you," and he disappears. She looks around at nothing, stunned, and says, "What was that?"

As I heard her words in my head, I nodded. Aloud, I said, "Exactly." And then I sighed, took a long swig of water, dressed, repacked my gear, and went to find the trail so I could retrace my steps, reconnect with the Hi-Cannon Trail, and make my way back to Gram’s car before it got dark.

I didn’t expect to see Conroy again. Certainly I had no way of contacting him; as far as I know, there is no listing for where house-sitters are at any point in time. Plus it wouldn’t be long before I had to return to campus for my final year at UNH, and although I was pretty sure El Speed and I would do some fall hiking, that "some" would not be a lot. And there were a lot of mountains. It was unlikely Conroy and I would find ourselves on the same one again.

Alone for the descent, I had a kind of conversation going on in my head, starting with a voice that thought what Conroy and I had done had been great.

Voice one: "That was a really wild thing to do."

Voice two: "That was kind of a dangerous thing to do, and not because of the mountain. When have you ever f****d a guy you didn’t know at all? Your encounters have been with college students. You knew where they lived. Or you knew their friends, or what their majors were, or friggin’ something about them!"

One: "Yeah, but—why not let it happen?"

Two: "Okay, but is that who you are? Really? Be honest."

[Silence for several seconds.]

One: [reluctantly] "No."

Two: "And what about the way he made you feel? Was that really as casual as you’re pretending?"

One: "Well…."

Two: "So…."

One: "Look, it’s not gonna happen again, all right?" [No response.] "All right?"

It went on like that for a while, with one version of me heady and excited about the encounter, and another version knowing something outside of me had taken over and allowed that to happen. I did my best to put it behind me by assuring myself it had been merely a romp in the woods à la Stephen Sondheim.

And I decided not to tell anyone, not even my best friend. As comfortable as El Speed was with my being gay, and far from prudish though he was, I wasn’t sure what he’d make of how I’d celebrated claiming three peaks in one day. In the trees. f*****g Conroy.

El Speed didn’t know much about my s****l encounters. For one thing, I didn’t consider them worth talking about. And for another, I’d never known him to be with anyone other than his girlfriend Ellie, at least not as long as I’d known him. If my encounters with any of the guys I’d f****d had been—or had turned into—something with some staying power, he would have wanted to know, and I would have told him. But I wasn’t sure what he thought of my casual approach to s*x, or what he thought of me for indulging in it.

Yeah, best not to test El Speed with Conroy.