In the early hours

At 3:53am, the lovers in the rearmost bedroom were approaching another
climax. After more than four hours making love, their limbs were heavy and
their breath heaving and their hearts and heads soaring somewhere beyond
the definable boundaries of the room. The couple had by this time
perfected the art of making love silently. Or so they believed. A
makeshift mattress and sleeping bag lay unused on the floor next to the
bed, which for the sake of appearance would have to be ruffled up in the
morning.

In the bedroom immediately next door to the left, a younger sister lay
silent, listening intently, her head only a couple of centimetres from the
wall, as she had listened since sometime after midnight. She fingered
herself again, wondering desperately when it would be her turn to make love
all night to a beautiful boy whom she loved. She squeezed hard on the
pillow between her legs and on the one she clutched to her chest, and wept
a little as the tiny but increasingly frantic noises percolated through the
wall and into her own fantastical hormonal world.

At 3:54, the dark headed one watched by the light of two tiny candles set
to one side of the bed as his fair-haired partner's chest rippled and
spasmed with the onset of a powerful orgasm, his fourth since they had
retired that night. The blond one panted quick and shallow and held on
tightly to his partner who reached for the blond's raging hardness in order
to assist at the precise moment. The blond's eyes closed involuntarily in
exquisite pleasure and his head lolled back in a loss of control, even
though he tried so hard to keep eye contact with his lover at these
moments. The dark one smiled the smile of the pleasure-giver.

In the bedroom next door to the right, the blond's brother turned another
page in his book. He also smiled. He was pleased for his brother, who had
only just reached the end of a period of great worry and anxiety. He
suspected wrongly that he was the only one in his family who had guessed
that his brother's acute unhappiness could only be eradicated by the
freely-given love and physicality of another young man. As he heard his
brother approaching another orgasm, his own penis itched in the heavy
readiness of pre-erection. He smiled again, put down his book and flicked
off the light, and let his hand descend into his boxers and his mind into
the lowest sewer of his imagination.

At 3:55, the blond gasped aloud as his body gave up the struggle of
delaying this latest perfection. His lover sensed the moment had arrived,
and eagerly brought their mouths together, partly to emphasise the love
that their bodily rutting was rooted in and partly to stifle the blond's
muted moans of passion. As they kissed, the dark haired one enforced his
grip at the root of his lover's aching bone and, with a young man's
well-practised hand, sent the blond over the edge and into the place where
his senses collapsed and his soul collided with euphoria.

In the bedroom immediately above, the blond's oldest brother reflected upon
the nature of sex and desire. He knew that what his youngest brother was
experiencing was born of the first flush of sexuality; that the insatiable
appetites his youngest brother seemed to possess would diminish; that the
intensity of making uninhibited love with your first partner is rarely
surpassed in terms of emotional satisfaction; and that the days -- or
nights -- of such physical possibility, making love non-stop for hours
with a perpetual erection and a constant succession of climaxes, do not
last for ever. Sexuality matures, it grows, it alters. His youngest
brother was on the first rung of the ladder, and maybe the best. He
himself was so many rungs higher up he had lost count of the number of
perfect and imperfect experiences he had sought and found, and the number
of perfect and imperfect women he had sought and lost. But the need for
orgasm never fades, and he gripped himself harder as he stared at the
silent, flickering hardcore in the corner of his room, giving in to the
inexorable effect the writhing women were having, and sighed deeply as for
the ten thousandth time he started the final ascent.

At 3:56, the blond's young sphincter muscle, jolted by the surge of an
orgasmic current frying the nerve endings seemingly throughout his body,
clenched the dark-haired lover's desperately hard erection in a series of
sharp, involuntary contractions. In equally involuntary response, the dark
haired lover's body froze in unbearable and complete rigidity and his own
climax peaked suddenly in an uncontrollable shudder and a boiling rush of
semen deep inside his lover's beautiful body. His orgasm merged with the
blond's and they grappled furiously, kissing in an ecstatic, gasping,
disbelieving frenzy; the deep, desperate kisses stifling the cries of both
the lovers.

In the bedroom across the hall, the blond's parents lay on their sides
face-to-face, not talking but with their eyes wide as they heard the muted
sounds of their youngest son's fourth orgasm since he and his "best friend"
had gone to bed. With acutely inflamed sexual organs lying unacknowledged
between them, radiating heat and desire even as their son's moans of
complete and delirious satisfaction crept softly into their room, the
worries that a gay son might be unhappy and depressed, or promiscuous and
defensively arrogant, or uneasy and introspective, or prissy and camp
receded for the first time in several months. Perhaps a gay son could be
happy and in a loving relationship. Perhaps. This particular set of
parents had no experience of gay sons, their older boys being rampantly,
absurdly heterosexual; they did not know whether to encourage this coupling
between their young blond son and his dark haired friend or whether to
confront them and put a stop to it. They did not think that seventeen was
old enough to know these things for oneself, even though at seventeen they
themselves had been as fiercely in love and as addicted to the physicality.
But now, with the muffled sound of their son and his boyfriend both surfing
an emotional and physical high as they rolled together in bed just audible
from across the hall, they began to stop worrying and concentrate on their
own sexuality. "I think he will be OK," whispered the father. The mother
agreed, and then reached for her husband's engorged penis. "Remember when
we could do it all night long?" she sighed, half nostalgically, half
suggestively. They smiled in the darkness and moved closer together,
memories stirring, sexual organs nudging.

At 3:57, the blond and his dark-haired lover allowed their lips to part and
themselves to breathe air that hadn't come from the other's lungs. The
sexual desperation was passing and the love reasserting itself. Still
panting, they looking at each other in silent, blissful wonder and at some
unspoken but specific point known to them both, they allowed the
dark-haired lover's penis to slip free. They knew that, for now, they had
finally exhausted the desire that raged between them every hour they were
alive, and that sleep would claim them both within a very few minutes. In
fact sleep enveloped the blond first, he being so completely relaxed and so
ludicrously happy; while still kissing his lover's neck as they clung
together in the glow, his heart rate slowing second by second and his limbs
sagging in a rag-doll floppiness, he gently passed into sublime slumber.

In the bedroom to the left, the blond's sister felt her brother's happiness
somehow radiating through the wall. She lay back staring at the ceiling in
the dark, releasing her pillows from her grasp, as the memory of the last
of many orgasms that night faded from her muscles. It didn't matter if it
wasn't immediate, she thought. As long as one day she could make love like
that, that would be fine, very fine.

At 3:58, the dark-haired lover summoned the energy required to lift his
head off his lover's chest and extinguish the two candles next to the bed.
Before he did so, he looked down at the blond's face, slipping deeper into
sleep even as he watched, but the joy in his smile as clear as day. He
noticed two or three small splats of his boyfriend's semen as they had
fallen between his nipples. He gently licked each one up, kissing each
spot in turn then tenderly and lovingly brushing the lightest of kisses on
the blond's sleeping lips. This act of love over, he snuffed the candles
and lay his head back on the blond's chest.

In the bedroom to the right, the blond's brother was closing in on a major
rush. Buried right under his covers and wriggling around deep in the bed,
his right wrist was working overtime on his shaft and the fingers on his
other hand tickled and teased his scrotum and what it contained. Despite
several girlfriends and a number of gratifying sexual experiences, he was
still an addicted masturbator, only weeks out of his own teenage years, and
it was as much as he could do to refrain from giggling in adolescent
delight as he upped his speed for the last time and with a sexy memory
racing through his head, he tripped over the line and gushed into his boxer
shorts.

At 3:59 the dark-haired partner let thoughts of the day drift through his
head as he gradually gave in to the overpowering urge to sleep. They'd had
such a great day. Walking through town, meeting with friends, only the two
of them knowing the massive secret that had grown and blossomed between
them in the last few weeks. Then in the afternoon, more walking, along the
riverbank, making plans for the future, running away perhaps, certainly
getting a flat together; then snogging behind a tree and then feeling a
buzz as a woman walking her dog had seen them. And then dinner tonight,
not daring to look at each other or seem at all out of the ordinary as they
had eaten with his boyfriend's whole family -- first time he had met both
the brothers -- then as soon as had seemed decent, gone upstairs to where
they had laid out a mattress for him on the floor of his boyfriend's room.
Their first night in a bed. They'd made love before of course, and in beds
too; in the afternoons, secretly while other people were out; but not all
night, not hours of sucking and licking and other wonderful pleasures,
hours of tasting each other and exploring what was possible, not like this;
this was it, the real thing, an unhurried night of love and then sleep
together afterwards. It was perfect. The dark-haired lover smiled like
his boyfriend, and, still wrapped round his blond partner, he was asleep.

In the bedroom immediately above, in the attic, the blond's oldest brother
held his own orgasm in expert delay. Sprawled in his black leather
armchair, naked, his legs spread wide and his right fist tightly gripping
part of his oversized, chunky erection, he'd let this climax rise nearly to
the surface then recede several times since about half past midnight, when
he had first heard his youngest brother fucking with his first boyfriend.
There had been the shock that his kid brother had grown up: only a few days
before he seemed to be an ordinary teenager and now he was a sexually
active adult doing the new and wonderful thing; and from that had come an
irritating jealousy. His brother had no right to be having hours of hot
sex while he sat in the attic ogling porn. Several years, and hundreds of
women before, he had felt that wonder himself, but now for him sex was an
essential, a necessity of life with the wonder smashed away, and several
nights a week he went out and found it, usually easily, but with
increasingly less concern as to who it was with. On the nights he didn't
couple up, he had a growing library of hardcore porn with which to refine
his masturbation techniques. In fact he didn't really approve of
masturbation much and definitely thought it was second best, but this
hadn't stopped him becoming a particularly skilful self-manipulator.
Having just heard his brother moaning as he'd climaxed powerfully for the
fourth time that night, the blond's oldest brother shrugged off his
jealousy, lifted his groin off the chair a little, and, aiming for his own
mouth, imagined himself trapped in the ferocious lesbian orgy he was
staring at on the screen, and then gasped and gasped as shot off his own
frustration in a hot splatter-shower of semen over his chest and face. The
orgasm was intense, and the relief would last in time for him to sleep.
His ejaculate still sliding down his skin, he walked over to his open
window and lit a last cigarette. Shit, did he need a proper girlfriend.

At 4:00am, the lovers were settling into the kind of deep sleep that only
the very newly in love can reach. Completely happy to be tangled up in
each other's limbs, seemingly oblivious of the uncomfortable temperature of
such a warm summer's night, oblivious to the family's knowledge of their
love, oblivious to the difficulties yet to be faced at school, oblivious to
everything other than the bliss of sleeping in a lover's arms.

In the bedroom over the hall, a more experienced, more practised, more down
to earth loving couple were beginning their own manoeuvres of love. But
they really had perfected the art of making love silently, and nobody, not
even their eldest son who was standing directly above them idly smoking and
licking up semen from his chest as he stared out over the dark garden,
nobody heard them as they laughed and whispered and began the long climb to
the top. Odd that it was their youngest son who had provoked that night's
bout of pleasure, but fitting somehow too: a suitable way, perhaps, to
celebrate his coming of age.