The Pale Blue Sky
by Jack Lynch
Part 5 - Carey, Chapter 4
19 Years Old. The Palace.
Father Sterling. Carey rolled the name around in his head. Did it fit? He closed his eyes visualizing himself as a Catholic priest. Trying to wipe his mind of the sexual feelings and bury his past experiences, he thought about becoming a priest. One problem: he wasn't Catholic. He even attended a Sunday Mass to see what it was all about but nothing about the service resonated with him. He was bored. When he noticed a cute altar boy with freckles and bright red curly hair, he thought to himself, this will not turn out well. He walked out before the service was even over.
After all that had gone down with Harper and Bell, Carey became withdrawn and reclusive. He didn't want to have anything to do with anybody. He gained an intimate knowledge of all of the cracks in the sidewalks as he walked with his eyes cast downward.
Sensing something was wrong, his roommate Roland tried to get Carey to hang out with his nerdy friends and him. Carey made a lame attempt to sit in on their daily get togethers but he couldn't understand half of what they were talking about. When they weren't talking in programmer speak, they gossiped about girls and sex. It was positively juvenile and annoying.
Carey ran the semester out to its conclusion. Disappointed with his mediocre grades Carey convinced himself that taking a couple of summer school courses might help him get a leg up on his Sophomore year.
Since the campus dorms were closed for the summer, he got a room in one of the fraternity houses that remained open. He was given a great corner room, windows on two sides, that was normally occupied by two guys. The only drawback was that it wasn't air conditioned. When it got unbearably hot he hung out in the icy cool library.
Summer school was hard! Because of the shortened lengths of the semester everything was condensed. Reading deadlines came one after another. Exams and papers seemed to pile up on top of each other. Sometimes, Carey had three exams in a week.
A warm summer day. One of the nicest of the year. Almost a perfect temperature, light fluffy clouds against a bright blue sky, the barest of a breeze. Carey sat at a table set along one of the walkways in front of a campus eatery. He flipped through the latest issue of the school newspaper, a daily during the regular school year and a weekly over the summer.
Out of curiosity or boredom, take your pick, Carey perused the personal columns on the inside of the back page. The small ads on the bottom were obviously come-ons for call out services or massages with happy endings. A couple of them promoted dating sites.
His eyes landed on a small ad in the bottom corner of the page for an adult movie theater called The Palace. With an address in the seedy part of town, the ad promised continuous showings, new titles every Monday, and two screens; one straight, one gay. He read the ad a couple of times, filed it away in his mind, and opened his notebook to review an outline for a paper he was writing.
By Friday, the temperature had soared into the nineties with stifling humidity. Sitting in his room, windows wide open and no cross draft in the offing, Carey felt a bead of sweat roll down his back. It was either hit the library for another fun filled evening or…The Palace.
Freshly clean light blue polo shirt, black jeans, athletic shoes, and a baseball cap to cover his eyes and face. He took all of the money and credit cards out of his wallet leaving just enough money for the theater, coins for a parking meter, and his driver's license. He felt terribly self-conscious as he walked to his car. It was like everyone he passed somehow knew where he was going. Hands in his pockets, head down, he walked deliberately until he was able to find safety inside his car.
When he got near the address listed in the ad, Carey saw the theater just down the street. A small marquee with flashing lights stood out because it was the only illuminated building on the block. Only around 30 feet wide, it was hard to believe the building could hold two separate screens. Theater One promised a double header: "Fallen Angel" and "Corrupted." Theater Two included two gay features: "Bigger and Bigger" and "First Timers." "XXX" and "Adults Only" signs hung off the bottom of the marquee.
Carey watched the entrance from his car after he sat parked just down the street. When it appeared no one else was walking past or going in, he left his car and walked quickly to the box office to purchase a ticket. Two sets of doors in the lobby revealed the choices, straight on the right and gay on the left.
Choosing the theater on the right, he entered and quickly found an aisle seat near the back. A movie was already playing. The theater consisted of fifteen or so rows, about twelve seats per row. A single aisle down one side. The audience was sparse. There may have been twelve to fifteen people in the theater in total, sprinkled throughout in a random manner. No two people sat together. All men, as far as he could tell. The room smelled strongly of some kind of disinfectant. The floor beneath his feet was sticky. Gross!
The scene depicted on the screen consisted of close-ups of various body parts, mostly genitals committing various forms of sex. The sound was way too loud. Non-stop grunting, moaning, and screaming. In between the sex, awkward dialogue making no sense at all was used as a bridge before the next round of screwing. Too much make-up, grossly over-sized breasts, hairy men with mustaches. Rather than turning him on, Carey was repulsed by what he saw.
Nevertheless, he stayed a few minutes to see if it got any better. It didn't. Carey got up to leave. When he entered the lobby and just before leaving the theater, he glanced at the side door leading to the other screen. Curious, he decided to check it out.
This theater was a mirror image of the first one. The audience was almost the same in number and dispersed in much the same way. Again, he chose a seat in one of the back rows, this time in the middle of the row.
The movie on the screen actually had some dialogue. A woman was talking to a young man. It appeared she was giving him instructions about babysitting her son. As they talked, a boy entered the room wearing a sleeveless t-shirt and short shorts. Although he legally had to be 18 years old to appear in a film like this, he looked younger.
He also looked vaguely familiar. Carey shrugged. No one came to mind.
The boy went to the kitchen sink, got a glass of water, and turned to carefully look his baby sitter over. Grunting in response to his mother's introduction to his babysitter, he left the room. The conversation ended and the mother left.
The next scene showed the boy on the deck in the back yard. He was naked laying on his stomach, a towel beneath him. A flicker of recognition. Carey searched his memory but came up empty.
The babysitter entered the scene and asked the boy if he wanted some sun block applied to his back. The boy mumbled his consent. Applying the sun block, the boy began to writhe in pleasure as the man's stroking became stronger and more intimate. The young man basically attacked the boy's perfectly tanned back and butt, reaching underneath to stroke his dick.
After some appropriate moaning, the boy turned over. Once they faced each other, their mouths met for some passionate kissing. The scene got increasingly hot as the two explored each other. The audience was pretty much silent through this except for a couple of coughs and gasps here and there.
As he watched, Carey couldn't help but develop a strong erection. That boy was positively beautiful. Long medium brown hair that fell across his forehead, smooth skin, hip bones partially sticking out.
Sucking his stomach in, he dipped his hand below the waist band of his pants and grabbed onto his cock. Slumping further in his seat, he spread his legs out. As he pulled on his cock, he suddenly realized a man had quietly eased himself into the adjacent seat. Carey froze in mid-stroke and turned his head, trying to make out who it was. He could only see the outline of the man's face but it was obvious he was old and grizzled. The smell of salty sweat and body odor filled Carey's nose.
Ever so quietly, he pulled Carey's hand out of his pants and replaced it with his own. Carey could have stopped him simply by pushing his stomach back against the waistband of his pants. Helpless in a sense but wanting more, he sucked his stomach in again to allow the man's hand to enter. The stroking continued as the man jerked him off. Clearly, he knew what he was doing. Carey wasn't sure how long it took but when he came, the jizz filled the front of his underwear as he quietly spasmed and gasped. The man slowly extracted his damp and sticky hand out of Carey's pants and silently slunk away.
Feeling weak and limp, Carey blandly sat watching the action on the screen for a few minutes. The movie seemed far away and suddenly less interesting. Slowly, he grabbed the back of the seat in front of him and pulled himself to his feet.
As he shuffled along the row and turned up the aisle toward the exit, he noticed a man standing against the wall of the theater. He wore some kind of long black coat. A flat top hat with a wide brim sat on his head. Some people would call it a Zorro hat. It was pulled down so most of his face was obscured except for a dark pencil mustache, thin lips, and a narrow square jaw. Carey turned his eyes to the theater door and left.
Returning to his sweaty room in the frat house, Carey stripped off his clothes and, naked, walked the empty hallway to the bathroom. He spent a long time showering the stink off of his body.
Throughout an almost sleepless night and in the following days, he spent a lot of time both beating himself up and trying to rid his mind of what he could only describe as sexual depravity. How low could he go? It was exhausting.
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