Time for morning laps, Surfer Boy, Gary told himself. No dawdling. Well, maybe a few extra deep-knee bends, just to show our bronzed and God-like body to the stolid Swede in the far lane. Wonder if he can see the crack of my butt in this new suit--or do the leopard spots (which make Coach Bassett cluck his tongue) camouflage the dividing line between my buns, which have been unbuttered for far too long? He did an imitation of Coach Bassett's cluck. "A young man, so much promise, so little--what? Let's just say he wouldn't marry the boss's daughter."

The outdoor pool was perfectly smooth turquoise Jell-O™ in a white, Olympic-sized trough. Gary thought (peeking between his toes) that it might really be like diving into a thick gel, and he would simply flounder, unable to pull his smoothly shaved torso through it, no matter how long his reach. It would be a fitting end to these deadly dull two months (and two still to go!) at the Little Dixie training camp.

As always, he was in the water before he knew his body had decided to throw him into it. It was a good dive, and the shock of pleasure he felt at his own skill made him lose consciousness of the need to time arm-strokes, breathing and kicks. Instead, it felt as if a wave flowed down the whole, single muscle that was his body, propelling him smoothly, without thought or strain. Then he rolled (toes brushing the electric eye that timed his laps) and kicked harder, suddenly furious to be done with it. He had hoped, when he sent in his deposit, that the heat and isolation would make it easier for him to stay in the water here, building his peak for the spring matches.

But he hated swimming when he was only training, hated it as much as someone who wasn't any good at it. It was his ticket to college, to something other than obscurity and a desk job in a medium-sized city. He loved competing--the adrenaline rush, the knowledge that, win or lose, you didn't dare hold anything back. But everybody in the pool came ready to win. You had to train, and it never got easier for him, only harder, and he was so upset with himself that he took in a lungful of water instead of air and had to haul himself up on the rim of the pool, choking like a little kid in his first Red Cross swimming class.

The Swede finished before he did, and Gary passed him in the shower on his way to his locker. Larsen was bigger than Gary. His muscles looked like slabs of pale stone when he was in repose, but in the water he was a buoyant streak of speed. His impartial, careful hands applied soap evenly to his body, completely unaware of the beauty of what they touched. Gary made the clucking noise again. He couldn't imagine anybody snapping a wet towel at his ass in this locker room, much less waving anything more interesting around.

Back in the dorm, Gary saw a small stack of mail on his cot. He immediately cheered up. Under a letter from his mother and a letter from his "roommate" Aaron (the return address had only a discreet initial before the surname) was a thin plastic envelope. The Advocate had finally caught up with him. He had debated whether it was wise to notify the magazine about his temporary change of address, then figured he would go nuts without a little contact with gay life. Since nobody was in the dorm, he slit the package and skimmed the magazine. The letters (even Aaron's) would be safe to read at lunch. This was not.

They had sent him the east coast edition. He chuckled at the restaurant reviews for New York City and Washington, D.C. No excuse not to have a swinging weekend now! It would take him--what--only a full day of driving to get out of the deep South? There was probably nothing in the classifieds either, but what the hell, he didn't want to read the opera review or a feature about gay involvement in the anti-nuke movement. There were four whole columns of ads from California. Unbidden, his eye picked out Aaron's post office box and flipped up to read the ad ("Straight-appearing young executive looking for summer fun, no strings, no games, no fats, fems or downwardly mobile types"). Well, they had agreed there was no sense in Aaron coming home to an empty apartment every single night. ... Feeling a little pain behind his sternum anyway, Gary flipped to the end of the classifieds. Well, what do you know--there was actually one entire ad running under his state. "Fine mind in a swimmer's body seeks same. Let's make a big splash!"

Gary couldn't stop laughing. He ripped the ad out, stuffed the magazine back into its envelope, and on his way to the cafeteria, as he buried it under a bunch of trash in a big oil drum, he was still laughing.

Over lunch, Coach Bassett stopped and handed him a thick packet. "What're these?" Gary queried rudely, around a mouthful of despised salad.

"Publicity photos. Pick out the three you like the best. You can keep the rest or pitch 'em." Gary had forgotten all about the photo session last week. Surely this was an omen. He fanned them out on the table and picked one of himself on a stand, with his arms up and tense (showing off the deep armpit, his beautifully proportioned lats). His quads stood out nicely. Unfortunately for the newspapers, so did his basket. But the anonymous advertiser (read "geek") would appreciate it. Before he went to the track to run his laps there ("Are you a man or a merry-go-round, Surfer Boy?"), he stopped at the dorm again for an envelope and stamps.

"This is a real swimmer's body," he wrote on the back of the photo, "and if you can match it, drop a pic c/o," and the address of the camp. "If not, don't bother."

Three days later (three days during which training seemed less arduous), he had a snapshot of a man (still young, but older than Gary, with a nose that looked like it had been broken) treading water. Even wet, his dark hair curled. His thickly furred chest was so broad that Gary wondered if it didn't churn up too much water resistance to make good time. But those biceps and forearms looked burly enough to drag the Titanic to safety. He reluctantly conceded that in this case, the phrase "swimmer's body" had not been just a euphemism for "ninety-pound weakling." He turned the picture over and read, "All this, and I have my hair," and a phone number. Gary ruefully rubbed his shaved skull. He was so used to other swimmers' faces, he had forgotten how odd his pale blond eyebrows and bare pate would look to anybody who wasn't in training. Cocky fucker. Where was the pay phone?

It was a brief call. Something wrong with the connection. He even had trouble making out the guy's name--Marvin? Martin? No--Marcus. But it turned out he lived just a bicycle ride away. Gary explained his situation at the training camp--so many days of working out, followed by a break day--and received a standing invitation to come over any time during his "off-day." Tomorrow, as it turned out.

That night, in his sleep, the lumpy cot turned into the chest and thighs of the well-built stud in the photograph. He lay face-down on him, his hands pinned between them, searching for the other man's cock. He knew it would be thick, the foreskin like folds of silk, the balls heavy in a sac covered with crinkly black hair. The whole flexible, flaccid shaft could be cupped in one hand until he began to squeeze and massage it, then it would slowly add inches until it protruded beyond his fist.

Instead, Gary woke up, and realized it was his own cock that was thrusting in his grip. He took a deep breath, listened. Nobody else was awake. Then the urge to come was so sharp, a pain in his lower stomach, that he said, "So what?" out loud and took himself over the edge. The splashes of cum felt good on his knuckles, hot, and the tangy smell made him realize he had not jerked off since his first night here. When was the last time he had felt a pronounced need to spurt, instead of having to coax that good stuff out of his balls?

Aaron had been a real find, a business major he met in an economics class. It had been fun, in the beginning at least, to put the moves on somebody who pretended to be a little reluctant. Aaron turned out to be the oldest son of a conservative rabbi, and his coyness was not just flirtatiousness; he still was not out to his family about being gay or even living with another man. While Gary enjoyed the new side of himself that Aaron brought out, a more toppy, aggressive persona than he'd realized even existed, after awhile he began to wonder if Aaron really wanted to have sex with him. He didn't mind pushing Aaron in the direction of the bed most of the time, all the while gently insisting that he really was going to fuck his brains out (and the front door was locked, and the oven was off, and no important phone calls were expected). But once in a while, he wanted Aaron to be the one doing to pushing and insisting.

Laying on his uncomfortable dormitory bed, Gary rubbed his hands over his own body, resenting the smoothness of his own skin, but needing the reassurance that he existed, he could feel, the envelope that contained his consciousness was still alive. He couldn't even remember what he looked like with his fur intact. There was something emasculating about shaving so often, as if he were stripping away any physical impulse that had nothing to do with swimming. He admitted that it wasn't just the training camp and the constant rejection of being surrounded by straight boys that made him feel extremely lonely. Didn't everybody need the passionate reassurance of a lover's uninhibited desire, the experience of being taken somewhere by someone else's touch? Maybe he wasn't attractive to Aaron. He could easily conjure up his lover's bespectacled, usually serious face, and see his kissable lips move in the fond phrase he repeated several times a day: "I love you, Gary."

Wasn't it sophomoric to want something more, something else, something more dirty, perhaps, even dangerous? Gary conjured up the photograph of Marcus, and realized that he wanted to see it again, to study it to see if he could glimpse some hints about the rest of the big man's body beneath the opaque water. Did he have a big thatch on his lower belly? Were his balls large enough to hang low, two separate eggs in a fuzzy, crinkled sac? And did his cock have a slight curve to it, with a tulip-shaped head? Gary wanted to run his tongue along the rim between the head and the shaft of that cock, and lap at the little tangle of nerves at its base. He wanted to slip his tongue into the piss-slit of that cock and savor the thin salty clear pre-cum that would tell him the dark man lusted after his hungry mouth. He wanted two hands around his ears, to be lost inside another man's need, to be able to stop thinking and exist only as a tunnel for his cock, a hole that offered just enough resistance and response to give that cock the best ride of its life. Sucking and sucking as if he needed Marcus's cum instead of air.

The intrusive memory of Aaron's cold little personal ad intruded on the building tension of a second erection. It was out of character for Aaron to take initiative like that, to put himself out there as a sexual actor. What kind of man would answer that ad? Would somebody else plow the tight, round little ass that Gary had marked off as his own? Would Aaron do things for the man (or men) who answered that ad that he refused to do for Gary? Would he swallow that shadowy stud's cum? Or lick his asshole? Would Aaron get down on his knees and beg to be taken? Could it be that Aaron might be the one who told his trick to get up on all fours so that he could plow them from behind? And did the specter of Aaron with his cock in somebody else's butt or face make Gary feel better or worse than imagining his lover's face distorted with discomfort and pleasure as he was penetrated by a stranger?

When they saw each other again, could it be that the bond between them, for all its faults, would be changed or even damaged? The rational part of Gary forced him to admit that it might be good for Aaron to loosen up a little, but the concrete picture of his boyfriend actually being loosened up by somebody else's hard dick made him unbearably sad.

By answering Marcus's ad, wasn't Gary going to put Aaron through exactly the same sort of sorrow and uncertainty? No, Gary told himself, I will not feel guilty about wanting to get laid. They had talked this over. He had Aaron's permission to get lucky. It would be distinctly uncool to take such emotional baggage to his encounter with Marcus, but in his cold and rough sheets, Gary longed to put his head on Marcus's big chest and receive absolution and comfort. He wanted to feel those hands rolling his cock back and forth, giving him a sort of sexual blessing, drawing him into a world where he didn't have to ponder such difficult questions. Eventually his imagination conjured up such a clear image of Marcus's red nipples, surrounded by swirls of bearish fur, and the sensation of that eager, arching cock sliding into the crack of his ass, that Gary's hard-on came back with a vengeance, and demanded some wrist-music.

Normally, Gary just needed to jack off and come once; it was easier to get it up again when another man was present to give him bad ideas and a raunchy second chance. He was curious about what this orgasm would feel like, and it was as ambivalent as he was. His second shot was smaller in volume, but the feeling was more intense, as if his urethra was on fire. Despite that, he wanted it to go on for longer than it did; he was abruptly dumped back into a damp, sweaty, soft-cocked state. How could you actually feel dissatisfied after coming twice? Gary fell asleep before he could answer this or any of the other big questions he had about the mysteries of Eros.

He made himself eat the next morning, made himself wait. He read a newspaper that was two days old and started a letter to Aaron that he knew he would not finish. But it was only 9:30 when he got his ten-speed out of the shed and pedaled away from the training camp, a note with directions he had already memorized tucked carefully into the pocket of his T-shirt. He was only on the macadam for twenty minutes before he peeled off and went down a dirt lane. A pheasant broke cover and beat frantically across his path. He swerved, then realized it was already safe in the brush at the other side of the road. The sweat between T-shirt and skin reminded him of the shape of his own body, how it had felt to rub his palm across his nipples, last night, and pinch one of them gently, to make himself come.

Gary heard the creek before he saw it. The bike bumped across a wooden bridge. Then the road took a turn to follow the creek. Even when the water was hidden from view by thick growths of willow, he could hear it, laughing to itself. This charming, bucolic stream would eventually become one of the tributaries of America's largest river. On either side of the river were marshlands that had been set aside as protected habitat, a bird sanctuary. He wondered briefly about the existence of a private residence in the middle of a federal park. It must have been there for a very long time. The wild land and the free-running water was a reminder of how close Gary was to the gulf, to the salty father of all waters. But that ocean was not the lovely blue Pacific where he had learned how to swim and surf, where he knew a dozen beaches like the palm of his own hand. This was a land where water meandered, became swamps and sandbars. The Gulf of Mexico seemed to Gary to be older than the Pacific Ocean, more corrupt, and the way to it was treacherous, full of false turns and snags, alligators and other strange fauna. It was a place for a bayou boy, poling his pirogue, low and slow, silently blending into the background of drowned trees and Spanish moss. Death to a boisterous mob of young guys with California tans and freshly waxed boards.

According to the odometer between the handlebars, he must be almost there. Yep, the road forked here, and there was a lightning-struck oak, so he took the right-hand branch, away from the water (twinge of disappointment), and there was the house, "set back from the road a piece," as Marcus had promised, under shady trees. The yard was overgrown and the house looked uncared for. He knocked on the front door, got no answer, and walked his bike around to the back. A note was pinned there. "Welcome, Gary, I'm down by the lake. Just follow the trail. Hope you left your Speedo at the camp. Marcus."

He grinned, leaned his bike against the steps, and loped down the trail. It was a few hundred yards down a slope, and there was the river again, feeding a medium-sized lake. A homemade dock ran into the water. This must be where the snapshot had been taken. But he didn't see anybody. Oh, well, the water looked good. He skinned out of his cutoffs and T-shirt and strolled to the end of the dock.

"Dive in! It's deep enough," somebody called. There was his host, treading water ten feet away. How had he gotten so close without making a sound? Gary shrugged and slipped into the lake. It felt good.

Marcus had been submerged when Gary arrived, but he felt the tremors in the water when his guest's feet hit the dock. He came up for air, and it took a few seconds for his eyes to adjust. Nevertheless, he got a clear and very appetizing glimpse of a tall young man who might have been blond if he wasn't completely shaved. The lack of body hair made his guest seem vulnerable despite his almost inhuman, peak physical condition. Gary had a face that was masculine but expressive. His features had not yet settled into the immobile and unreadable condition of an older, more disappointed and resigned man. He seemed enthusiastic, although Marcus was sure he had to be feeling some anxiety about meeting a stranger. Somebody who might be even stranger than you could guess.

Doubt surged in his chest. Had he been right to come here, to return to his childhood home? So much had changed since he left to enlist in the navy; his parents were both dead, and his brothers had scattered to South Carolina, even Tennessee and Texas, and one sister in Seattle. It was truly unsettling to feel like such an alien in this familiar place, one whose smells and sights conjured up a wealth of nostalgia and regret. (For even a happy memory can bring sadness, since that moment of joy has vanished, one bright bubble in a flock of malicious crows.) And what was he to do with this Yankee boy, someone who came from such a different place and time? But Marcus wanted what he saw. Sex, as it so often does, overcame any qualms he might have had about the consequences. He was bigger and stronger than Gary, and could control the encounter, keep his secret, just this once.

The silky cool water caressed Gary, noticeably more friendly than the dead, chlorinated water in a man-made swimming pool. It seemed to leach any trace of tiredness or pain out of him; the energy it infused him with as he did a shallow breast stroke was clean and light. Then he suddenly felt even better. A hand that was a great deal warmer than the water had circled his shaft, and was measuring him slowly, up and down. He was face-to-face with the man in the photograph, and the smell of his body hit Gary in the face like the first smack in a spanking. Marcus smelled like something good to eat, and never stop eating. Up close, he was even furrier than the photograph had shown. He was matted with hair, and Gary wanted to rub his face all over that big chest.

Taken aback by the lack of preliminaries, he tried to reach for the other man's body, but Marcus evaded him. "Let me take you out further," he said, and had Gary in a towing hold before he could protest. Gary could have sworn they didn't stop until they were in the center of the lake. Marcus let him go, then began a weird game of sexual tag. He was swimming around Gary in amazingly quick, tight circles, and he would dart in just often enough to administer a caress (and keep Gary afloat). Sometimes it would be his mouth instead of his hand that would enclose Gary's cock. He trembled, trusting the hands under his buttocks to keep his head above water. It had been too long since he'd felt so good. He was eager to reciprocate, but no matter how hard he tried, he couldn't grab hold of Marcus's dick, although a couple of times he felt it brush his stomach or thigh, and knew it was as hard as his own.

"Let me touch you!" he finally cried, exasperated, near tears, and Marcus (behind him) pulled him close, wrapped his hands around Gary's aching, over-stimulated rod, and thrust his own cock in between the muscular cheeks of the other swimmer's ass. He timed the hand strokes to his cock thrusts, giving Gary the giddy sensation of simultaneously fucking and being fucked, though he knew Marcus's cock remained outside his body. He did not realize they were still swimming until he saw swirls of semen lost behind them and the familiar piers of the dock. He was pushed toward the makeshift wooden ladder before he could turn and kiss Marcus, who had darted away, back to deeper water. "You go inside, lunch is on the table. Don't wait for me to eat. I want to swim a little more."

Gary felt like he would collapse if he stayed in the water. The intensity of his orgasm was making his limbs shake as if he had hypothermia. How often had he fantasized about sex in the water--weightless, streamlined sex--with another athlete whose stamina and physique equaled his own? He dragged himself into the house. Just as he entered the kitchen, he saw the back of a departing older black woman. She wasn't wearing a uniform, but something about her neatly-pressed dress and apron made Gary sure she was a servant. The table had been set with enough food for five people. He ate a lot of cheese and fruit and drank a couple of pints of water. He even made himself a thick sandwich out of forbidden cold cuts. This morning had made him feel better than months of coaching, lectures on nutrition, sprints and power-lifting. When he was done eating, Marcus still had not come out of the water. Gary wandered into the living room and fell asleep on the couch.

His dreams were disturbing. He had read about Vietnam vets who had been injured by a particularly nasty kind of land mine, one that jumped to waist height before exploding. The men who survived usually lost their genitals as well as their legs. (In his sleep, Gary protectively cupped his drained, waterlogged and tender cock and balls.) These men had a powerful incentive to participate in a government experiment with human DNA that might restore the lost parts of their ruined bodies. While a carefully crafted virus went to work on their genes, the men sat patiently in vats of nutrient solution and antibiotics. Part of the experiment worked fine. With proper recombinant encouragement, their newly-ambitious cells recreated perfectly operating cocks and balls. But from that point on, things went awry. Their leg bones fused, articulated like a spine. Where new legs were supposed to grow, large and powerful fish-tails sprouted.

The military was not apologetic. The experimental subjects were reminded that they had known they were taking a huge risk. The men (mermen?) were relocated to a larger, common pool, where they began to forge a team identity--although the purpose of that team remained vague, at least in the beginning. Sexual conditioning was used to reinforce that bond, and some of the methods used to break down the men's resistance to homosexual conduct were cruel. The Pentagon's liaison to the research staff hinted at the possibility of them re-enlisting, being formed into some kind of special services unit. The idea of being kept together, belonging somewhere (and the accompanying training in underwater communications, demolition, navigation, flora and fauna) kept many of them from going into shock. But there were some men who could not live in such a drastically altered form. Gary woke up before one desperate man in his dream figured out how to commit suicide in a tank with smooth aluminum walls.

The house suddenly seemed threatening, and claustrophobia propelled Gary outside, back down the trail to the lake. Where the hell was his friendly swimming companion? The hot afternoon sun was soothing, and made the goose bumps fade from his bare skin. Once more he scanned the lake and saw no one, until he went to the end of the dock. "Ready for another round?" leered the handsome face.

"I'm not sure. I had some pretty weird dreams."

"Come into the water and tell me about it."

Gary slipped nude into Marcus's element. But instead of talking they wound up sexing, even more frantically than before. Gary barely made it back to the camp by curfew. He left behind a thoughtful man who was far too captivated by the young swimmer. Had it been so long since he'd had really good sex with another man that he was a pushover for falling in love? Love had not been part of the plan. But maybe it would be okay to have a regular fuck buddy. Despite his skill at maneuvering in the water, Gary had spent less time in that element than Marcus, so perhaps there was less danger in meeting again than the older man feared. The sincerity in Gary's voice when he cried out, begging for the chance to touch Martin was moving, more moving than Gary probably knew. And Marcus wanted to feel those hands and that mouth all over his body. But it couldn't happen. Ironically, to allow Gary to do the things that Marcus ached to have him do would ruin everything. The sex could only keep happening if it was strictly limited.

There was such a difference between having sex with a man who knew that he was gay and accepted it than a forced encounter with a heterosexual who knew he had no other outlet than to make use of male flesh. Marcus knew that many a straight man had a far greater capacity to enjoy gay sex than he knew. But still, in an institutional environment, such revelations were unwelcome. When a man like that got his rocks off, there was an undercurrent of regret, shame, and anger that set Marcus's teeth on edge. He wanted the man he embraced to be thinking of his body, infused with desire for all of his virile attributes, not pining for breasts and the entryway between a woman's thighs. Gary's grace in the water, his quick intake of breath when Marcus supported his weight and almost fucked him, his hunger for more--these things were so seductive that Marcus put his face in his hands and tugged on his hair to try to get them out of his mind. He realized he would have a hard time waiting until Gary's next day off. A very hard time. Such a hard time that a cold shower (or a bath, of course) would not be much of an antidote.

The next off-day found Gary back at the old, empty house. The week of training had flown by. He had done better than ever before at meeting his goals, and didn't give a shit when Coach Bassett told him so. The troublesome images of Aaron's--adventures? Not infidelity!--lost their sting. When he wasn't with Marcus, he was still with him in the spirit, reliving each precious moment of contact, moving in his arms, panting to be put upon his cock, and coming despite the fact that it was denied him. He was there the next week as well. And the next.

The sex was so good, but Marcus would not allow Gary to touch him, nor would he engage in any kind of penetration. Gary accepted it after awhile, assuming that since Marcus was calling the shots, he could change things if he wasn't satisfied. The brief heat of Marcus's semen jetting between the cheeks of his ass, before lake water washed it away, became an erotic trigger that always made him come too. Then Gary would get out of the water, go inside and eat, take a nap (always marred by more weird dreams), and eventually come back outside for more sex. When he left, Marcus would still be in the water. Gary would cycle back to the camp, alternatively mulling over his sensory impressions of Marcus's body and the dreams.

His nightmarish visions of the military medical experiment were supplemented by dreamy visions of a blue, underwater world where silvery-scaled people cavorted in their strange cities, playing dolphin games with each other all day long, offering each other gifts of necklaces and sex and food. Their behavior with one another was so sensuous that it was difficult to tell where sex began and ended. There seemed to be no restrictions upon who or how they embraced. There was no obvious work being done, yet their playfulness was also creative. There were buildings, ornaments, art, and all of these things had a quality of buoyancy, with no sharp edges or corners. Gary loved these dreams. He sometimes found a trace of tears in his eyes when he woke up, exiled from that idyllic setting and those gentle, beautiful beings.

Over time, the underwater sex with Marcus was interspersed with more and more conversation. What little Marcus revealed of his personality fascinated Gary. He was a man who was apparently capable of violence, in the appropriate context, but was also burdened with a delicate conscience and a sense of compassion for human frailty. Gary had never encountered anyone like him before. Growing up in southern California with its emphasis on youth, novelty, and pretty surfaces had not prepared him for the complexity of a southern gentleman's melancholy character, nurtured in an atmosphere where there was no escape from a tragic sense of history and abundant evidence of man's capacity for evil as well as good. Nobody would ever guess from looking at Marcus or listening to him that he was gay. But he accepted his own desire for other men as naturally as he accepted all of his other basic needs. There could be no sexual shame in his presence, only permission and--even better--skill. Despite Marcus's insistence on controlling their encounters, Gary sensed that he would respond to an equally assertive partner. The fact that he could not find the trigger that would allow Marcus to bring down that wall tormented and teased Gary into a frenzy. How could he turn kissing somebody into a sexual fantasy? Who jacked off to thoughts of doing nothing but kissing another man? It was weird, being this crushed out, but the elation of the crush sped Gary through the tedium of rehearsing for races.

One fateful day, the strangeness of the repetitive dreams made it impossible for him to respond to Marcus's light, familiar but still achingly arousing touch. Gary was also feeling a growing anxiety about the approaching end of his incarceration in the training camp. As the lusty grin on his friend's face was replaced with genuine concern, Gary knew he was falling in love with this man, and instead of making a joke about not being able to get it up underwater, he haltingly described the dark visions that troubled him. Eventually even Gary's muscles tired of treading water, and he relaxed into Marcus's tattooed arms, wondering how he could keep both of them afloat so effortlessly. Then he happened to look down, but off to one side, the way his father had taught him to look for fish in a brook. And he saw the lower half of Marcus's body for the first time. The two-fluked tail was muscular, dappled brown like a rainbow trout and undeniably masculine.

"It's true, then," Gary said thoughtfully, and wondered why he was relieved. Probably because he had known the truth for a long time, but had not let himself acknowledge it. Marcus was a mer.

"Yes. Do you want to hear the rest of the story?"

He did. Gary's body signaled urgently that he wanted something else, too, now that his tension and anxiety were gone, but he made himself wait.

"One of their own scientists betrayed them. She had spent years developing a way to communicate with dolphins, killer whales, and other intelligent ocean mammals. The military had gotten wind of it, taken over her project, and taught the pinnipeds to carry explosives and conduct underwater sabotage. A lot of the animals were injured or killed during carelessly conducted exercises. None of the stupid lifers in charge of this very hush-hush project could understand why this would traumatize her, or anticipate that she might turn against them because of it. She was supposed to teach each of us how to work with a dolphin partner. A weird variation on the K-9 corps. Somehow, she found out that the Navy intended to use us to staff underwater nuclear missile silos. She also found out how they intended to replace us. The mer-virus is in our semen. Theoretically, we can make any man into a mer. But they never got far enough in the experiment to actually offer us a victim to see if that transformation would really take place. I think the woman who let us go was actually more upset about the prospect of the dolphins getting killed than she was about the way we had been treated. But one night she sneaked out to our tank, told us what the score was, and gave us the location of the underwater base they had already built for us. Then she let us loose. We found it, and moved in."

Gary postponed dealing with the full import of this by quibbling about details. "How do you live underwater? You still breath air, don't you?"

"I'm breathing with my lungs now, but in the water my gills keep the oxygen coming." Marcus took Gary's hand and ran his palm over his chest, then further down, to his hips. The skin began to change there, acquiring a slightly abrasive texture, the triangular pattern of large, hard scales. Marine armor for a new kind of warrior. Gary could barely feel the frilled edges of raised half-circles, rhythmically fluttering open and closed. "I'm a deserter. I left when I found out that there was another, hidden agenda to our creation that even the scientists didn't know about.

"Being a mer is really hard on your mind and soul, Gary. I can't ever go back to the land again, and I never lose my sense of loss about that, the fact that I can be so close to the shore, but never really return home. They wanted to exterminate those people you saw in your dream. After the worldwide boycott of the tuna industry, which happened because of all that graphic publicity about dead dolphins, they are running scared about what would happen if school children and little old ladies and all the members of the Sierra Club knew there were people down there. I don't know why they think they need a war to do it, though, because we're killing them already. All the poison that we pour into the ocean has already endangered them."

Gary was so excited to learn that his idealistic nap-time visions had a basis in reality that he couldn't stop himself from interrupting. "But you and your buddies, you could put a stop to that. You could fight back! You could save them!"

"Gary, you don't understand. How can you when you haven't been there? When we found these people, they were so different from us. I never thought I would encounter such innocence unless I was dealing with a child. But they're not children, and yet they don't know the meaning of violence. I don't think they even know how to get angry. Even when they knew we came from the same people who had hurt them, they still took us in and helped us, made it much easier for us to survive. They don't even know what it means to be dishonest, Gary. They can't even tell a lie. And by teaching them to fight back, we're already changing them. And I don't think it's a good change. I just couldn't stand to watch it. So I left. I decided to come back here, to this house that my mother and father had left me, and ... I don't know what."

"Stop. You don't need to tell me any more." Gary felt like his head was going to explode. He could get away! Away from Old Mother Bassett and his satchel of vitamin pills. Away from Aaron, who might be relieved, although he would never admit it. A series of tricks would be much easier to conceal from his parents than a boyfriend. Away from his own stifling closet, the racing circuit. Away from the boredom of staying in peak physical condition for no good reason. He would never have to come out of the water, and he could be surrounded by gorgeous, available men all the time--and it would mean something besides a trophy or a scholarship. But was he ready to be a soldier in an underwater world?

"Give me that seafood," Gary snarled, laughing, and dove for Marcus's rigid cock.

Marcus tried to fend him off, but Gary had acquired a strength born of a drive to join the strange new world that had opened up before him. He ran his tongue up and down the fat vein on the underside of Marcus's cock, which was indeed shaped exactly as he had imagined. Marcus's hands found his face underwater and urged him to take the heart-shaped head into his mouth. He licked around, inside the piss-slit, his lips rolling back and forth across the coronal ridge. Marcus's grasp on his head grew tighter, and Gary's teasing was soon rewarded with a thick, slick dick opening his throat. Just as he was about to run out of air, Marcus rolled onto his back, his wet erection glistening in the failing sun, and one of his arms closed around Gary, holding him above water so that he could complete his mission. The first dose of semen spurted into Gary's mouth almost immediately, and he swallowed every drop of the salty, sticky cream. Lost in the crisis of his own orgasm, Marcus let go of him, and Gary was unexpectedly dunked into the lake.

"All I can say is, I hope we have to do this a lot to change me," Gary sputtered, surfacing. Marcus shook his head at the two-legged swimmer's giggling face. How could he joke about something so dire? How could he be so eager to abandon the dry world--wild flowers, museums, movies, music, crowds in shopping malls and bars? "I told you, man, I have no way of knowing if their crazy theories are going to work. We shouldn't have done even this much. What if the way that they fucked me up messes you up in a bad way? I don't want to be responsible for screwing up your body or your life. You need to really think this through. Even if you do change and become like me, I don't know if I can go back there. I love the sea-people, Gary, but by the time I returned, they wouldn't be the way that I remember them anyway. I don't think I can stand to witness any more suffering or death."

"But how can you refuse to help them? Look, you and the guys in your outfit, you didn't choose this war. It came to you. Fighting back is better than just giving up. How often do you get a chance in your life to do something really good? To be a hero?"

Marcus shook his head. "Listen to you, child. 'The guys in your outfit.' You haven't even been to basic training, and you're trying to talk like an old soldier. Have you even been on a hunting trip and had to shoot a deer, youngster? Yeah, I didn't think so. War is not some happy adventure, Gary, even if you honestly believe you are on the right side. Terrible things still happen. Things that you can't ever get out of your mind. I'm sick of it. I'm sick of killing and death. And I'm tired of being a pawn in somebody else's game. They want us back, and I never want to be their prisoner again. I don't imagine the punishment for escaping is going to be very pleasant, do you? And I just don't think we can pull it off, honey. How can a few dozen ex-Seabees and thousands of pacifistic, day-dreamin' mermen and mermaids who can't stop having sex long enough to finish looking at a map bring the entire U.S. military to its knees?"

"Well, we didn't exactly win in Vietnam, did we?" Gary challenged. "Guerilla warfare is very damned difficult to defeat. And you have the advantage of dealing with an enemy who is entirely out of his element."

"They don't need to put on diving gear and come down to fight with us hand-to-hand," Marcus said wearily. "They can shoot us down with missiles. They can stay up on top of the water and beat us to death with huge sound waves. They can use chemical warfare or germ warfare. They prefer to kill at a distance."

"Yeah, well, they also don't want anybody to know this is going on," Gary said. "And I know who could tell on them. The two of us, right here. With you here to show them that it's no joke, no story out of the National Enquirer, we'd be on every news program from here to Sunday."

Marcus laughed. "I can't argue with you any more, honey. I'm tired of talking. Why don't you go inside and get something to eat?"

"Okay," Gary said. "But then I'm going back to the training camp, and I'm going to pack up my stuff and come back here. I'm going to stay with you. After all you've been through, you shouldn't have to be alone. And you won't be. Never again. Whatever we decide, we can do it together."

Marcus looked at him thoughtfully, nodded once, and then swam away. Gary wondered if he ever got to stop swimming. Did he sleep? With those gills, he supposed it would be possible for Marcus to simply drift off underwater. I want to sleep with this man, he thought, and realized, with his heart so full of feeling that it was about to burst, that this was no euphemism for "fuck him to pieces" but was instead a softer desire for contact with his body, for affection and intimacy.

Someday I will, he resolved. When I have a real swimmer's body.

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