Taking me shopping is usually an expensive venture and, although this time it had nothing to do with me (honestly!) a lot of money was spent. Quite an astronomical sum, in fact. Very subtly, Tay steered me into one of the jewelers in the mall, and greeted the guy behind the counter in a way that could only mean that Tay was a fairly regular patron to this place.

"Hi Paul, are they ready?"

"Yes, Mr. Hanson - one moment, please." and with that, he disappeared into the back of the shop.

"Tay, what are you up to?"

"Nothin'," he said, grinning his mischievous grin.

A moment later, the guy re-appeared carrying a tray with three small, black velved-lined boxes, and set them on the counter.

"Thanks, Paul. Can you charge them to the account?"

"Of course, sir."

Tay turned and grinned at me, beckoning me over with his finger.

"If you're gonna be my boyfriend, I guess we'd better make it kinda official." He opened the boxes to reveal three solid silver chokers with leather cords, similar to the ones he was wearing: A crucifix, a football and a tiny compact disc.

"Tay, I... I can't accept... I mean how much do... I mean they must..."

Tay grabbed my shoulders and spun me round a hundred and eighty degrees, removing the band holding my hair back and chucking it over in front of my face to give him access to my neck. He took the football and laced the leather cord through the eye in the top of it, then laid it around my neck, deftly securing it with a tight double knot.

The sensation of having something tied around my neck was a little disconcerting at first, only ever having had things that hung before, but just like wearing a watch, I reasoned that I'd get used to it pretty quick. Next came the crucifix, being tied in a slightly lower position than the football. Before he adorned me with the CD, he handed it to me for inspection. Around the circumference of the disc in miniscule engraved letters was the inscription "from the Middle of my Heart - Tay".

It was a simple inscription, but I swear I nearly broke down into tears then and there. I wanted to hug and kiss him so badly, but I knew I couldn't. From the look of frustration from Tay, I'd have said he was thinking exactly the same. Gently, he took the CD choker from me, and carefully tied it round my neck. He dragged my hair back into place, tieing it back again, then picked up a hand mirror from the counter and leant over my shoulder so we could both check the results.

The results were amazing: I thought these choker things were soooo cool! Thing was, I had always thought them as Tay's trademark, and hence just admired them on him. Now we matched.

"There ya go," he whispered into my ear, sending shivers down my spine. "You look half-trendy now!"

The joke slipped right past me as I gazed into the mirror at the three silver ornaments, twinkling as the pulse in my neck moved them ever so slightly.

My gaze moved from the chokers to Tay as he looked over my shoulder into the mirror with me, and I then realised it wasn't the things he had bought me he was staring at, it was me myself! Man did I want to kiss him bad. He was just so perfect - everything about his complection being completely flawless in my mind. His personality too was just so spot on - his off-beat sense of humor, his subdued-yet- extroverted approach to people, his morals... They were all so well founded and balanced in a way that accentuated them all, no single element of his character overshadowing another.

"Well don't you two look a picture," grinned Kieran. "Are we gonna stay here all day while you two gawk at each other?"

I grinned. "I guess we can't, much as I'd like to..."

We both took a deep breath and decided to have another meander around the mall.

It was at about this time that Hayley, as she slid back from the jeweler's window, decided that I was the devil incarnate. Who was I to come waltzing over from England and suddenly be a whole lot closer to Tay than she had ever been! Taylor must've spent the best part of four hundred dollars on me without even thinking about it, and the most he had ever given her was... well - jack shit, actually.

What was so special about this Dean character that Taylor - her Taylor - doted over him so damn much, huh? Then and there, she made a resolution that she would get to the bottom of this no matter how long it took her, or how devious she had to be to find out what was going on.

'Circles within circles,' thought the freelance journalist as he squeezed off another few frames, once again capturing Hayley on film, this time peeping round the window frame of the jewelers. He smiled to himself and stowed the camera back in his bag, and walked nonschoulantly back to the parking lot.

Tay, Kieran and I spilled out of the jewelers back into the mall and with a "You're it!" from Tay, began a movie-style chase through the crowded thoroughfare, punctuated by "'Scuse me!"s and "Sorry!"s left, right and centre. Within seventy feet, the inevitable happened and Taylor managed to cream a bloke with a fairly large bag draped over his shoulder.

The man was livid, getting up and grabbing Tay by his T-shirt. When he saw who it was, he seemed to loose pace momentarily, then continued with the retribution.

"Why don't you look where you're going, ya punk? What if I was an old guy, huh? You coulda killed me! Just watch out." and with that, he roughly swept Tay aside with his arm, sending him backing into another couple, who he courteously apologised to.

"You OK, Tay? I asked, gently straightening out his T-shirt.

"Yeah man, I'm fine... Jeez that guy was a grouch"

"I could swear I've seen that dude somewhere before," said Kieran, frowning as he tried to put a temporal reference to the vague memory. It didn't seem important, though, so he just shook his head and carried on walking up the mall with us.

After five minutes or so, I started to get a rather uncomfortable feeling. The feeling you get when you know you're alone, but you have this little itch at the back of your mind that someone is in the room with you, or that you're being watched. As subtly as I could, I pretended to be half-interested in a shop, so allowing my head to turn round as we walked by it. Quickly, I scanned behind us, but as far as I could see, nothing seemed out of the ordinary, so I tried to convince myself it was just my imagination.

An hour or so later, we were back in Kieran's truck, rattling our way back to the outer suburbs of Tulsa. I could not help but smile as I let my fingers trace round the chokers Tay had given me, and kept drifting off into my own little world as I basked in the pool of love that he provided me with. So much so in fact that both Kieran and Tay had de-bussed back at Kieran's drive before I even noticed we had stopped moving. Much to the others' amusement, I shook my head and climbed out after Tay, almost falling into him as my brain scrambled to remember how to operate my less-than-cooperative body.

We said temporary farewells as Kieran had decided to wash his 'car', and from Tay's past experience, being within twenty feet of this spectacle was not advisable.

"OK, Dean - you gotta do it: Come sign our wall!"

"Huh?"

"The garage wall! You HAVE to draw a cartoon and sign it - it's part of Hanson law now."

"Umm... Tay, I can't draw for shit! I'd just mess the whole thing up..."

"Quit moaning already and get your ass down there, Lidster!"

"Sir!" I grinned.

We both rattled down the thin plywood steps into the cavern that could once feasibly have been a garage, although it had been used so damn much that life's little luxuries such as carpet, decent lighting, insulation (acoustic as well as thermal!) and a sofa that looked as if it had been used as a plaything by that three-headed dog that guards the entrance to Hades (although I was later informed most of it was attributable to Zac) had been moved in.

Scattered around were a quite astonishing number of beanbags that made it look as if someone had dropped a handful of giant Skittles, and interspersed with them were assorted bits of music kit including Tay's Wurlitzer, a couple of guitars, what looked like the conglomeration of two-and-a-half drum kits and a load of recording and mixing gear that, although looking very well used, had obviously been cared for well.

In the far corner, having what could only be called pride of place, was the dirty great sunflower from the MMMBop video and a couple of feet away was an equally imposing 50" widescreen rear-projection TV, surrounded by what could best be described as a branch of Dixons.

The thing that amazed me most, though, I could not see properly from where I was. I walked over to the centre of the room, and slowly did a 360-degree turn on the spot, that being the only way to truly appreciate the enormity of the all-encompassing panoramic cartoon that adorned the walls. It was as if Ike, Tay and Zac's entire minds had been laid down here in pictoral form, the abstract yet strangely organised layout being testament to that. The larger-than-life, bouncy doodles depicted everything from the Man from Milwaukee's flying saucer to the small wood that I could see from their back yard, and wherever there was a physical fixture in the way, it was commandeered to become part of the cartoon. Tay, Ike and Zac appeared all over the place in assorted scenarios along with a flying Eskimo, superheroes, buildings, open land, a toothpaste-powered passenger train and a couple of small solar systems. It was amazing.

Tay took me by the hand and led me over to a section of the wall that had been coloured a deep, iridescent blue and in the centre of that patch was a stylised map of the UK. I couldn't help but stare in wonder as I recognised the huge twin yellow loops of Alton Towers' Corkscrew and beneath it stood characatures of both Tay and myself, hand in hand.

I couldn't believe I'd been immortalised on the garage wall in this way: Only the most important things to Ike, Tay or Zac got scribbled here irrespective of how petty or stupid they might have seemed to adult minds, and it somehow seemed to be the ultimate memorial of our love when we were apart.

Tay looked at me and, then and there, I lost it. I jumped at him and sent us both flying back onto a pile of beanbags in a whirlwind of arms, legs and hair, us both loving the stupidity of it all. Tay made a break for it and legged it towards the door end of the huge garage and thumped a switch, causing the tired motor that opened the door to chug into life. Like a scene from a sci-fi movie, Taylor was silhouetted against the comparatively bright sunlight as the door gradually would up into the roof, the slight through draft causing his thin hair to wisp around, the sun highlighting its every move.

Just as suddenly as it started, the motor stopped its whining with a clunk as the door had been fully raised.

Tay stood there for a moment, his taught, curvaceous body looking good enough to eat - hell I was even drooling!

He stayed like that only for a matter of seconds before he uttered the immortal words: "Catch me if you can!" and nimbly leapt over the small boarder onto the garden path. I pegged it after him, determined to catch my "prize", and followed the trajectory I assumed he had taken. It was because of this I was surprised when Tay leapt from his flat-against-the-garage-wall position and tackled me from behind, sending us crashing down onto the lawn. We rolled over each other a few times until Tay picked himself up and stood over me. I was treated with a stunning view of his lightly muscled stomach and the prominent, soft bulge the family jewels made in his jeans. He smiled down at me, then the smile turned to that scheming grin that could mean any one of a thousand things.

"Do you trust me?" he smiled.

"Now that depends," I countered, not wanting to commit myself too early to the scheme he was quite obviously cooking up in his genius mind.

"If you trust me, you won't move a muscle."

Without giving me time to think of much else apart from 'Uh oh', Tay moved his arms together and pointed his fingers as if he was about to dive into a swimming pool, and leant forward, gravity very quickly accelerating him towards me. As if in slow motion, I watched the tips of his fingers hurtle towards my face and I was about to close my eyes when his own eyes caught mine. In them was a look that immediately put me at rest and I immediately felt bad for doubting him, even for that brief instant. I felt his hands as they quickly diverged in front of my face to land with a heavy thud on either side of my head. The muscles in his arms tensed as they absorbed the energy of the impact, slowing him so that he came to rest exquisitely gently on my chest, our faces just an inch or two apart. Throughout this, our eyes had stayed locked together and remained so until our lips met. Moments later, our tongues broke through our lips and invaded the others mouth, wrestling for who got access to which mouth.

Diane frowned out of the kitchen window as she saw her son rolling around on the lawn with his boyfriend: Secretly, she wished that this would just be a passing phase, but by the way that he looked at Dean, and the way Dean gazed back, she knew this was a very unreasonable assumption. She then felt very guilty, selfish even, for wishing her son to be something he was not, then smiled at the realisation of how Taylor felt, reasoning that it must be similar to the way she fell for Walker those many moons ago. She sighed happily, and continued busying around the house.

Hayley was frowning too. How could he? First he 'pushes her out of his house' by taking this Dean guy and making him his best friend over her, and then he goes and damn well slams the door in her face by renouncing the sexual orientation she assumed he had. Now THAT was rejection. Still not believing what she had seen, she put her eye back to the viewfinder of her father's camcorder, tracking the motion of Tay and myself as we rolled around the garden, locked in a deep embrace.

Rejected, repulsed and demoralised by what she had witnessed, she stopped the camcorder and picked it up complete with tripod and slung it over her shoulder. In a way, she felt as guilty as sin for spying on Tay through the hedge at the back of his yard, but she had to know. Now she did, however, she wished she didn't. Actually, she didn't know what she thought: If only there was some way she could get Taylor back for what he had done to her - HOW COULD HE? At that moment in time, revenge sounded very, very sweet to her.

"Now THAT is sad," grinned Zac, breaking the pleasant silence he and Gareth had shared as they walked back towards the house from their woodland abode.

"Huh? What is?"

"That!" he said, standing behind Gareth and pointing over his shoulder so he could more accurately follow Zac's gaze.

"Who's that?"

"Our next-door nightmare - I mean neighbour - Hayley. She is obsessed with Tay: You ought to see the way she drools over him..."

"Yeah, but you drool like that over me."

"You wish! You're as ugly as pig-shit with an IQ to match!"

"You're dead!" he yelled, lunging after Zac. They both ran back down to the house laughing.

Zac careered through the gate practically knocking the latch from its fixings, and promptly tripped over Tay and myself as we rolled around on the grass. Gareth soon followed and, seeing three of us already in a pile, decided that it looked like a damn good idea and threw himself on top of us, producing a unanimous "Oof!" from the pile as he landed.

"Gareth or Zac?" whispered Tay into my ear.

"I'm up for a challenge - you have Gareth..."

"Three, two, one..."

We simultaneously sprung up from our spread-eagled positions and leapt for the designated targets. Zac literally shrieked with pleasure as I landed on him, the tips of my fingers seeking each corrugation in his rib cage. To try and subdue the wild flailing, I sat on his lower chest. This had limited success in that his body was subdued, but the four free limbs that were still free took advantage of the situation and flailed harder to make up for the restricted torso.

Getting nowhere fast, I decided to cheat. I took some of my weight off Zac and shifted it to my knees, allowing me to rock forward. When my feet had sufficient clearance, I allowed one of them to drop back into the 'V' created by Zac's legs, then brought the toe of my foot up fairly sharply - not enough to cripple by any means, but certainly a good attention-getter. Zac drew breath sharply and half sat up in the well-known reflex "must protect my nads at all costs" reaction, so allowing me to grab the bottom of his T-shirt and drag it up so it was still around his neck, but inside out, covering his arms. Before he had time to recover, I hopped off him, undid his belt and dragged his trousers round his ankles doing an equally fine job of immobilising his lower half.

Now a far more workable sight was presented to me: A twelve-year- old effectively bound and blindfold, with no clothing on his body save a rather small, faded pair of boxers that had obviously been handed down from brother to brother.

"Wou bathtard!" came Zac's muffled complaint from somewhere under the T-shirt. I couldn't resist it: I leant forward, licking my lips, and blew the biggest raspberry my lips and lungs could muster on Zac's tummy. His whole body tensed then convulsed in fits of laughter as he desperately tried to disentangle himself from his inside-out clothing to escape from my rapidly vibrating lips. It was no use, though - I just continued my onslaught, allowing my lips to wonder further up his body. As I reached his left nipple, his protestations suddenly stopped, a deathly silence falling upon the back yard. Meekly, Zac asked "Please, Dean - don't do it, man," as if I were holding a gun to his head.

I extended my tongue and gently played it over the now very aroused tip of his nipple causing him to moan ever so slightly and try and push his chest towards my mouth.

"That's enough of that, you horny little sod," I grinned, drew breath, and felt myself go dizzy with the pressure I created in my lungs in blowing the raspberry of all raspberries on his nipple.

Zac shrieked once again and his arched back suddenly flexed into a curved one, trying to shield as much of his front as he could a bit like a hedgehog. Unfortunately for him, he only succeeded in trapping my head in position.

Meanwhile, Tay was having a damn good go at Gareth, the only difference being his T-shirt was completely off and tied round his wrists. Tay was manically tickling Gareth by running the tips of his fingers all over his frame, concentrating mainly on his sides and armpits - areas which Gareth obviously now wished he didn't possess.

In another moment of simultaneous thought, Tay and I looked at each other, smiled a knowing smile and on the count of three, dragged Zac and Gareth's boxers to their knees, revealing a pair of throbbing hardons. Tay and I laughed, then in good form, ran off back to the house, leaving the two as good as naked, bound, and rolling round on the lawn.


On to Chapter Twenty-Eight

Back to Chapter Twenty-Six

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The Exchange is © 1999 by Dean Lidster. This work may not be duplicated in any form (physical, electronic, audio, or otherwise) without the author's written permission. All applicable copyright laws apply. All individuals depicted are fictional with any resemblance to real persons being purely coincidental.

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