What We Did at the Ranch When His Family Wasn’t Looking

That summer when I was twenty still comes back to me whenever someone mentions the ranches up north. I’d been seeing Iván for almost a year when he invited me to meet his family, and from the moment we agreed to buy the tickets I knew the trip wasn’t going to be simple.

We made the trip in one of those old buses that still cross the dusty roads of the interior. When they dropped us at the entrance to the town, there was still a kilometer left to walk to the property. I used that walk to confirm what I already suspected.

—I’m going to introduce you as a friend from college —he told me without looking at me—. I’m not ready for them to know.

—I figured.

—Does it bother you?

Yes, it bothered me. But I understood it too.

I squeezed his hand one last time before the wooden gate came into view and set my backpack on the ground. From that moment on, we were just classmates, two twenty-something guys who had escaped the city for a short vacation.

The family welcomed us with that noisy country generosity: hugs that lasted too long, slaps on the back, a table laid out with stews still steaming. His mother, a small woman with huge hands, cupped my face and said I looked like a good boy. His father poured me a glass of red wine without asking. His uncles made jokes about the city. I tried to laugh at the right moments.

That same night, while everyone was eating in the big dining room, Iván motioned to me with his head from the patio door. I followed him without thinking. We crossed the yard in silence and went into the stable, which smelled of dry straw and animals. No one had seen us leave.

He pushed me against one of the beams and kissed me like he hadn’t done it in months, when only two hours had passed. His breathing was ragged, his hands at my belt before I could react. He yanked my fly open, shoved his hand into my briefs, and grabbed my cock, already half-hard, squeezing it with that desperation I knew so well.

—Here, seriously? —I murmured.

—Here, seriously. Turn around.

He spit on his fingers and brought them to my hole. I felt one, then two, pushing deep with a roughness I’d never seen in him before. I braced myself against the beam with my palms open, my pants down to my knees, the cold stable air hitting my ass. I heard the sound of his belt giving way, the rustle of fabric, and then the heat of his cock rubbing between my cheeks before settling at my entrance.

His cock was small, I’d known that for a long time, but that night it went in in one thrust, without warning, without his usual patience. It ripped a groan out of me that I smothered against my arm. He started fucking me with a frantic rhythm, completely unhinged, his hips slamming against my ass with a wet thudding that sounded outrageous in that silence. Every thrust lifted me onto my toes, made me clench my teeth into my sleeve.

—Keep quiet, keep quiet —he whispered into my ear, though he was the one breathing hard like an animal.

He grabbed my hips with both hands and pried my legs wider with a kick. He reached around the front and started jerking me off at the same rhythm he was fucking me. My cock was wet with pure pre-cum, dripping between his fingers, and with every tug I felt my legs go weaker. The smell of straw mixed with sweat and the semen that was already announcing itself. I bit my own hand so I wouldn’t cry out when he hit a spot that turned my vision white.

—I’m going to come —I warned him, panting—. I’m going to come, Iván.

—Come, come with me.

I felt him swell inside me a second before he did. I came over the dry straw with a long spasm that nearly knocked me to the floor, thick spurts painting his fingers and still coming between his knuckles. He came inside me in silence, his body trembling against my back, his cock pulsing inside me with each load. He left it inside until it went completely soft. When he finally pulled out, I felt the hot trail run down the inside of my thigh.

It took us almost a minute to separate. He wiped me off with a stable rag that smelled like old grease.

—Why the rush? —I asked later, already dressed and walking back to the house.

—Doing it here. With them on the other side of the wall. I don’t know. There’s something about it that turns me on and I can’t explain it.

I didn’t know what to say. But that sentence kept circling in my head for the whole two weeks, because it set the tone for everything that came after.

***

The first mischief was in the stable, but the second came on the fourth day. We’d gone up to the room on the second floor under the pretense of looking for something, and suddenly Iván closed the door and started unbuttoning his pants. He pulled his cock out over the waistband of his briefs, already erect, the pink head peeking out from under the foreskin. I knelt in front of him without him having to ask.

Right then, his mother shouted something from the patio. A question about where he’d left the key to the storage room. Iván cursed under his breath, threw the window open wide, and leaned out to answer her, his hard cock sticking out of his pants at the level of my mouth.

—In the kitchen drawer, Mom! —he yelled down.

I was still kneeling. And then it occurred to me.

I grabbed the base with my hand, held it steady, and slowly ran my tongue over the tip without warning. Iván flinched and went mute for a second. I licked the frenulum with the tip of my tongue, circled the glans, sucked the salty drop that was oozing from the little hole. I looked up at him from below, watching him try to keep his composure while his mother kept talking to him from the patio about some damn thing with the barn.

—Yes... Mom... no, I hadn’t noticed... —he said, and between phrases I swallowed his whole cock down my throat and pulled it out slowly, leaving strings of saliva hanging from it.

His voice cracked. He cleared his throat to cover it. I sucked him calmly, tugging hard as I came back up, pressing my lips to the crown of the head. I grabbed his balls with my free hand and massaged them while I buried his cock in my mouth until it brushed my tonsils. At one point a little moan escaped him, very low, almost imperceptible, but enough for his mother to ask from below if he was all right.

—Yes, yes, I’m fine... I just hit myself on the frame.

I didn’t stop. I took all of him to the back of my throat and started sucking him with a steady rhythm, my face pressed against his pubes, tears gathering at my lashes from the suppressed gagging. I stroked his ass beneath his fallen pants and pushed one finger between his cheeks, finding his hole just to put pressure on it. Iván gripped the window frame so hard his knuckles went white. He brushed his mother off with two more sentences, and the second he closed the window, he grabbed my hair with both hands and started fucking my mouth.

He shoved himself in deep, not letting me breathe between thrusts, fucking my throat like it was a pussy. I felt him swell on my tongue, felt his thighs tense against my shoulders. He came in my mouth with such intensity that I had to swallow shot after shot so I wouldn’t spill on the wooden floor. I swallowed every drop, kept sucking the head until the last thick pearl escaped, and licked it from my lips.

When he sat on the bed, breathless, his cock still shining out of his pants, he let out a nervous laugh that seemed on the verge of becoming something else.

—You’re insane —he told me.

—You started it.

***

The third was on the eighth day, and it was shorter but stranger. His uncle Ramón asked us to go with him to the shed to look for some old tools. He was a big man with a thick mustache, almost never spoke, but noticed everything. He spent half an hour rummaging through drawers while we waited seated on sacks of corn.

Iván looked at me. I looked back.

Without saying a word, his hand slid under the waistband of my pants and searched between my cheeks. My finger found the way at the same time, from behind his, slipping under his loose belt until I found his warm hole. We stayed like that, in absolute silence, each of us with a finger inside the other’s ass, subtly spitting on our fingers to wet them, while his uncle kept rummaging through drawers three meters away.

I pressed my fingertip against his prostate, a tiny rocking motion, and felt his under my finger, the hot ring closing and loosening in the same rhythm. Iván’s cock was outlined under the fabric of his pants, a thick line that couldn’t be hidden. Mine was the same, soaking my briefs one drop at a time.

The pleasure was hard to describe. It wasn’t so much the physical contact as the impossibility of moving, of breathing hard, of making any gesture. I felt my pulse in my temples and in my ass at the same time. Iván kept his eyes fixed on his uncle, blinking less, but every so often he pushed his finger deeper, searching for the spot that made me grip the sacks of corn with both hands.

At one point Ramón turned around and looked at us. We froze our hands in time, fingers still inside but motionless, but his expression was odd. He said nothing. He got out the tools he was looking for, made us carry two boxes each, and we walked back to the house in silence, with our cocks still hard and our fingers smelling like ass under our nails.

That night, while I was brushing my teeth, Iván came into the bathroom and closed the door behind him.

—Do you think he noticed? —I asked him.

—I don’t know.

—I think he did.

—So do I.

But neither of us said anything the next day. And neither did Ramón.

***

The fourth and last was the Friday before we left. The whole family was in the living room watching an important match, one of those classics that gets their blood pumping. Iván is a fanatic. I’m not. I took advantage and slipped into the kitchen under the pretense of looking for something sweet, and three minutes later he appeared with that look I already knew.

He closed the kitchen door without locking it. There was no way to lock it.

—Iván, no —I told him softly—. Not here.

—Just for a little while.

—There are a lot of people on the other side.

—Exactly.

He turned me against the counter, yanked my pants down by the sink, and left my ass exposed. He spat on his hand and smeared my hole with two fingers, pushing them in to the knuckle to open me up. I gripped the edge of the counter with both hands, my cheek pressed to the cold tile. I heard his belt hit the tiled floor. There was only a wall between us and the rest of his family. The television was loud. You could hear the shouts from the match, the laughter, his father and uncles commenting. It would only take one person standing up to get water or beer or a glass.

He shoved in with one thrust, to the balls, covering my mouth with his free hand to muffle my moan. He started fucking me fast, without giving me time to adjust, his hips crashing into my ass with a skin-on-skin sound that in that kitchen seemed like a cannon blast. Every time he hit me, I felt the pressure rise and the counter tremble under both our weight. The adrenaline mixed with fear was heavy and electric at the same time, and it had my cock dripping onto the cabinet door below.

Iván came fast, as usual. I felt the first hot load inside me, the second, the third, and the muffled exhale against the back of my neck. But he didn’t stop. He kept fucking me with the same intensity, his cock still hard and wet with his own semen, each thrust making an obscene wet sound that slipped out from between my cheeks. He bit my shoulder to keep from groaning, so hard that the tooth marks were still there the next day. He held my hip with both hands and pulled me back to drive in deeper.

He reached around the front and grabbed my slippery cock. He jerked me off in counterpoint to his thrusts, his thumb smearing pre-cum over my crown. I clenched my teeth into my arm. I felt my legs start to shake, my hole contracting by reflex around his cock every time he stroked the head. I was going to come all over the cabinet doors at any moment.

I could hear footsteps. I heard someone get up from the sofa. I whispered for him to stop. He didn’t hear me, or didn’t want to hear me, and gave me two more brutal thrusts, his hand squeezing my cock harder.

The kitchen door opened.

His mother froze in the doorway. She didn’t scream. She didn’t say anything for a few seconds. She just looked at us, first at him with his cock still buried to the hilt in my ass, then at me with my face pressed to the tile and her son’s semen running down my thighs, then at the pants on the floor. Her face turned into something I had never seen on her before, a mix of horror and hardness and something else I couldn’t read.

—Get dressed —she said quietly—. I’ll see you upstairs, in my room. Both of you.

She closed the door behind her.

***

What happened in that upstairs room isn’t worth telling in detail. There were muffled shouts so the rest of the family wouldn’t hear. There were tears from Iván, the first time I ever saw him cry. There was my silence, a long silence, because I knew it wasn’t my place to say anything at that moment.

His mother asked him one question at the end.

—Do you choose him or us?

Iván took a long time to answer. I looked at him, waiting. And when he replied, he did it in such a thin voice I could barely make it out.

—You.

It didn’t hurt then. That came later, weeks later, when I began to understand the true weight of the word. That night I just nodded, grabbed my backpack, and walked to the crossroads to wait for the first bus of the dawn.

It took two hours to pass. It was cold. I didn’t cry.

***

I never saw him again. They cut him off from everything: his phone, his social media, they even made him leave school and transfer to a university near the town. I tried writing to him a couple of times from new numbers. Nothing.

Three months later, a letter arrived at my parents’ house. White envelope, no return address, with the slanted handwriting I recognized immediately. It was barely two pages. He apologized for everything. He said he hadn’t been brave, that he hoped one day I would understand, that he wasn’t going to forget me. He made no promises. He asked for nothing.

I read it once and put it away in the drawer of my desk, where it still is.

I don’t blame him. Iván was a good boyfriend while he could be. What happened on that ranch wasn’t his fault or mine, not even his mother’s. It was the fault of a world that still forces some boys to choose between the family they were born into and the person they’re meant to be with.

Sometimes, when I pass a shop window and see a plaid shirt like the ones he used to wear, everything comes back at once: the smell of the stable, the heat of the kitchen, his mother’s voice in the patio. And I tell myself that I hope that somewhere in some distant ranch, he’s already learned how to choose himself a little too.