Title: I love You, Johnny Darling
Author: Jere' M. Fishback
Publisher: NineStar Press, LLC
Release Date: September 24, 2018
Heat Level: 3 - Some Sex
Pairing: Male/Male
Length: 73500
Genre: Contemporary Historical, college, coming of age, historical, farming, family drama, infidelity
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Synopsis
On his first day at state university, freshman Johnny Darling rues his decision to enroll. He’s 150 miles from his family and friends and terribly homesick. But when he’s assigned Ben Stonecipher as a roommate, Johnny’s life brightens. Ben’s a handsome guy from a wealthy family, but he’s emotionally troubled, and for good reason. He’s responsible for his twin brother’s recent death.A liquor-fueled night in the dorm room leads to personal confessions and intimacy. In the days that follow, an intense affair blossoms between Johnny and Ben, one that must weather the threat of a love triangle neither boy is prepared to deal with.
Excerpt
I Love You, Johnny Darling
Jere’ M. Fishback © 2018
All Rights Reserved
Chapter One
My freshman year of college was about to
start, and I felt certain I was screwed.
I lay alone in my fourth-floor dormitory
room that resembled a prison cell: cinder-block walls painted taupe, asphalt
tile floor, two twin beds, two Formica bureaus, two metal desks with chairs,
and two closets. The showers and toilets were down the hall. Outside, a misty
rain fell from a sky the color of dishwater. Weak light entered the room
through a pair of casement windows framed by plastic drapes. The windows
offered a view of a parking lot and a row of dumpsters.
I didn’t know a single soul on campus
nor in the city of Gainesville where my school was located.
I could have felt sorry for myself, but
what good would it do? I put myself in the situation—I made the choice to come
there. Instead of staying at home and attending community college, I enrolled
at the University of Florida, and now it was too late to change my mind. My mom
had left me there two hours before—that was right after we unloaded my things
from her car—and by now, she was probably halfway back to St. Petersburg Beach.
Great.
I’m Johnny Darling, and that’s not a
nickname by the way. Darling is my legal name, and you can only imagine the
shit I’ve taken ever since I reached seventh grade, and guys started getting
cruel about qualities that made someone different in any way.
“Want to suck my dick, Darling? I’ll bet
you’d love to.”
“Do you wear panties under your chinos,
Darling?”
“Hey, Darling, will you be my homecoming
date? I’ll buy you a corsage.”
And so on.
I was always slender, so it wasn’t like
I could stop the taunts by slugging some guy who outweighed me by thirty
pounds. I’d never even thrown a punch—I wouldn’t have known how to—so all the
way through junior high and into early high school, I endured the crap.
I am also queer as a flamingo; I figured
that out the first time I viewed a television show called Flipper when I was
thirteen. The series starred a bottle-nosed dolphin and a sinewy blond boy
named Luke Halpin who frequently appeared shirtless in the show. Mostly he wore
only a skimpy pair of cutoff blue jeans. Luke had a washboard stomach,
shoulders that bulged like softballs, and a chest that looked like it was
carved from marble. The first time I saw him I grew so excited I thought I
might bust through the zipper on my shorts. After that, I never missed an
episode of Flipper during the three years it aired because—and I’ll freely
admit this—I was insanely in love with Luke Halpin. He became my go-to fantasy
whenever I lay in my bed at night and touched myself under the sheets.
Oh, Luke…
But I digress.
This was 1969, and the world I dwelled
in was not kind to faggots. The only way I could survive was to hide my urges
and pretend to be straight. That way, I wouldn’t get my teeth knocked out. My
sex life—and this was pathetic—was a tube of jelly and my right hand. In high
school, I actually went on dates with girls to the prom and all, but never felt
anything sexual when I held a girl’s hand or put my arm around her waist. Even
then, I knew marriage to a woman wasn’t going to work for me.
Now, in the dorm room, I lay on the bed
closest to the windows and wove my fingers behind my neck. I stared at the
plaster ceiling, then at a cobweb waving in one corner. My hang-up clothes were
stored in one of the room’s closets, while my folded clothes rested in a bureau.
My manual Olivetti typewriter—it weighed twenty pounds—hulked on the desk I’d
chosen to use.
Cool air wafted from a ceiling register,
so at least the room was climate-controlled. I’d heard some dorms on campus
didn’t even have air-conditioning and I figured the rooms in those buildings
must have felt like ovens right then, so I had something to be grateful for. I
wasn’t sweating and—
Someone rapped on my door, and my body
jerked in response. Who could it be?
I turned my gaze to the door and
hollered, “Come in.”
When the door swung open, three people
stood in the hallway, peering into my room. Two were a middle-aged couple. The
third was a slender guy my age. All three carried cardboard boxes.
“Hi,” the younger guy said. “I’m Ben
Stonecipher, and I guess we’re roommates. Mind if we come in?”
I swung my feet to the floor and rose.
Then I shook Ben’s hand after he put down his boxes. His grip felt firm and
warm.
After I introduced myself, he pointed to
the couple behind him. “These are my folks, Will and Sarah Stonecipher.”
Will Stonecipher looked like a doctor in
a TV series: tall, with salt-and-pepper hair, a trim waist, and an easy smile.
He wore dress slacks, a Banlon shirt, and leather slip-ons.
After he set down his boxes, he shook my
hand. “Pleased to meet you, Johnny,” he said in a gentle baritone flavored with
a Florida drawl. Then he pointed at his son. “Don’t let that guy give you any
trouble this year, understand?”
Sarah Stonecipher looked at her husband
and pursed her lips while shaking her head. Then she took my hand in hers. “You
shouldn’t listen a word my husband says,” she said with a grin on her pretty
face. Her prematurely gray hair was cut short like my mom’s, and she wore
minimal makeup. Her yellow sleeveless blouse, white capris, and sandals
flattered her slim figure.
“I’m sure you and Ben will get along
just fine, as long as you don’t mind a little snoring,” she said.
When I glanced at Ben, he rolled his
emerald eyes.
Will asked where I was from.
“St. Petersburg Beach,” I said, right
after I released Sarah’s hand. “My mom drove me up here this morning.”
Will nodded while he looked around the
room. “We’re from Merritt Island, on the opposite coast. Ever been there?”
I shook my head. In fact, I’d never even
heard of Merritt Island.
“It’s not a tourist destination like
your town,” Will said, “but it’s our home.”
All three Stoneciphers left the room to
retrieve more of Ben’s belongings. They returned with clothing on hangers, an
electric typewriter, a desk lamp, and a tennis racket in a wooden press, held
together with thumbscrews. When they finished hanging the clothes in Ben’s
closet, I felt a little embarrassed that Ben’s wardrobe was twice the size of
mine. He even owned a navy-blue sports jacket with brass buttons.
Okay, I also owned a sports jacket, but
it was a houndstooth number my mom had bought at a church thrift store, and it
didn’t look good on me because the sleeves were too short.
Ben also owned a portable stereo record
player, a Magnavox model, along with an entire boxful of vinyl LP records. He
set up the player on a folding metal TV tray he’d brought. The player resembled
a small suitcase. When Ben opened it up, the player displayed two speakers and
a turntable.
“Well,” Sarah said to Ben with her hands
on her hips, “I think that’s everything from the car. We have a three-hour
drive ahead of us, so I guess we’ll be going.”
Ben nodded and his mom hugged him. Ben
and his dad shook hands; then Will shook mine too.
“I’m very pleased to have met you,
Johnny, and good luck in school.”
“You’ll have to visit us sometime,”
Sarah said to me.
I nodded, but then I asked myself how
Ben and I would even get to wherever Merritt Island was. Freshman at UF were
not allowed to have cars, so we wouldn’t have transportation. We would be, in a
sense, captives on campus for the year.
After his parents left, Ben started
unpacking boxes. Some contained books; others held things like toiletries,
socks, underwear, and T-shirts.
I sat on my bed, watching.
Ben was good-looking by anyone’s
standards, an inch or so taller than me, probably six feet, fair-skinned with
thick eyebrows, a turned-up nose, and full crimson lips. He parted his dark
hair on the side. His voice was deeper than mine, also flavored with a drawl
like his dad’s. He wore blue jeans, penny loafers, and a button-up shirt with
the shirttail untucked and the sleeves rolled to his elbows.
I rubbed the tip of my nose with a
knuckle. “When I picked up my room key, the lady behind the desk said we’ll
need to get our sheets and towels from the linen room downstairs. They close at
five.”
Ben nodded and glanced at his
wristwatch—a gold model with a band made from alligator hide. “I’ll be unpacked
in another half hour. Why don’t we go after that?”
“Sounds good,” I said. “Which bed do you
want?”
He pointed to the bed I wasn’t sitting
on, the one closest to the door. “I’ll take that one if it’s okay with you.”
“It’s fine,” I said while I cracked my
knuckles.
After Ben arranged his typewriter and
lamp on the desk I hadn’t selected, he fished a framed photo from a box and
placed it on his desk as well, a studio portrait of four people: Ben’s parents
and two boys who were dressed identical and looked like younger versions of
Ben, maybe age sixteen.
“Are you on the meal plan?” Ben asked.
“Yeah, are you?”
Ben nodded while he placed a few books
on his desk: a dictionary, a Bible, and what looked like a high school
yearbook. “I wonder if the food’s any good. I guess we can eat as much as we
want, so I hope it’s decent.”
After Ben finished unpacking, I helped
him carry all his empty boxes down a stairwell, where we tossed them into one
of the dumpsters we had seen from our room. By now, the rain had stopped, and
Ben checked his wristwatch again.
“It’s only two thirty,” he said. “Feel
like taking a walk around campus before we get our linens?”
I nodded. “My first class tomorrow
morning is in a building called Peabody Hall. I checked a school map; it’s
located in the northeast part of campus. Let’s see if we can find it.”
Our dorm was in the southwest corner of
campus, and the first buildings we passed were pretty austere, built of red
brick with awning-style windows and few architectural features. But everywhere
huge trees soared thirty or forty feet: longleaf pines, multi-trunked live oaks
festooned with Spanish moss, magnolias, sabal palms, and a Shumard oak with a
rutted trunk so wide two grown men couldn’t wrap their arms around it. The
sidewalk we trod on snaked through expanses of damp Bahia grass. Azalea and
camellia shrubs hugged the flanks of most buildings we encountered.
I asked Ben where Merritt Island was
located.
“Do you know the Kennedy Space Center?”
he replied.
I nodded. “Some friends and I drove over
there to watch the moon-landing launch, back in July. The night before liftoff
we slept in my car in Titusville.”
“The space center is actually a part of
Merritt Island, at its north end. Our property is close to the middle of the
island and a short drive from the Atlantic. My dad’s family has lived there since
the Civil War; we own citrus groves and also a beef cattle ranch. It was a
great place to grow up.”
I thought of the little two-bedroom
cottage my mom had raised me and my sister in, and the fact I had no idea where
my father was or even if he was still alive. Clearly, Ben and I had come from
very different backgrounds.
My last two years of high school, I’d
worked at a gas station. Four nights a week, five hours per night, I pumped
gas, checked engine oil levels, fixed flat tires, and performed oil changes. I
drove a rusty Ford Fairlane to school, one I bought from a station customer for
a hundred bucks. My cuticles, the free edges of my fingernails, and the whorls
on the pads of my fingers all stayed perpetually black no matter how much I
scrubbed them with Lava soap. My beat-up work boots looked like I’d dunked them
in a grease vat, and the coveralls I wore to work were oil and sweat stained.
I could only imagine what Ben would have
thought had he seen me back then. And what would he think of me in the days and
weeks ahead, when he learned I didn’t have a pedigree like his?
As we approached the northeast section
of campus, the buildings looked older and statelier, with mullioned windows and
pitched roofs rimmed by battlements. Some were covered in ivy. Peabody Hall was
a small building, really, just four stories with a gabled tile roof. Its
western flank faced a broad and grassy plaza shaded by longleaf pines.
I glanced at my Timex wristwatch and
realized it had taken us fifteen minutes to walk there from the dorm. My first
class the next morning was at 8:00, so I’d need to leave the dorm no later than
7:45, maybe 7:40 to be safe. I didn’t want to be late the first day of school,
now did I?
“Have you bought your books yet?” Ben
asked while he studied the buildings around us.
“Not yet; I guess I will after classes
end tomorrow. What about you?”
Ben nodded. “My mom drove me over here
last week to buy them from the campus bookstore, and get this: when I checked
out at the register, the cashier tried to sell me a beanie.”
“A what?”
“It’s a silly little orange-and-blue cap
that male freshmen are expected to wear their first quarter.”
I made a face. “I don’t understand.
Why?”
“So upperclassmen can pick on them—it’s
a tradition here.”
“Did you buy one?”
Ben shook his head. “It’s not required,
so why invite that sort of treatment from guys? I have more respect for myself
than that.”
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Meet the Author
Jere’ M. Fishback is a former journalist and trial attorney. He lives on a barrier island on Florida’s Gulf coast, where he enjoys watching sunsets with a glass of wine in his hand and a grin on his face.Website | Facebook
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