This story starts with a key, as the title suggests. Duh.

For some reason the previous owners of the house I’m currently living in had a shed built in the back yard – not one of those flimsy aluminum things you see at every Lowe’s or Home Depot but an honest to God stick-built structure with a lockable door, shingled roof and even a window. If this were New York City I could rent the thing out for a thousand a month.

It occurred to me one day that if I lost the key, which I was currently searching for in a drawer cluttered with batteries, sewing kits and matchbooks, I would be up the proverbial creek without a paddle. It was the only copy. I could call a locksmith, which would set me back a hundred or so dollars. But wouldn’t it be smarter to have a backup key made?

I finally found it and decided yes, I needed to have that key made right now.

I headed out to the Lowe’s across town, where a girl eyed the key, then looked over the jillions of blanks on her revolving key stand until she settled on one and inserted it into the cutting machine. After a brief period of fingernail-on-chalkboard screeching, the machine finished and the girl handed me my new spare key. It cost less than $3.

Aaaaand, it didn’t work.

I swore at myself. The big boxes were great for selling mass-produced shit for cheap, but when it came to something like cutting a key they sucked to high heaven. How many times had I gone to Lowe’s or Home Depot for a key, only to have the damn thing not fit the lock when I got home?

I took it back to Lowe’s and got a refund – hey, $3 is $3. I decided I would try a locksmith, but before that I’d risk having one made at Home Depot. Who knows? Maybe I’d get lucky.

Little did I know.

Home Depot was on the other side of town, as luck would have it, but it was near another store I wanted to visit, so I didn’t mind the drive. The lot was mostly empty so I had no trouble finding a parking spot.

The key kiosk was about halfway down the row of aisles, right up front. Problem was, nobody was there. I wandered around wearing my “I’m lost and need help” face, when suddenly this kid appeared. He was an odd-looking boy of, I’d say, 16 or 17, about 5-11, maybe 150 pounds, and thin blonde hair on an oversized skull. When I say “odd” I don’t mean to imply “unattractive” because he was fairly cute, just in a different way. I think maybe it was the size of his skull, which was disproportionately larger than his body. It gave him a strange, child-like aspect.

“Watcha need?” he asked. His voice was deep and masculine, which further contributed to the weirdness. It was as if somebody had grafted a boy’s head onto a man’s body and somehow retained the man’s voice. I gave a quick glance down below. He had a fine, muscular ass hiding beneath those blue jeans, and the hint of something in his crotch. I wondered if that too would be disproportionately large.

I told him my tale of woe and he said, “Gotcha” and beckoned me to follow him. We went around the corner and held up at a strange machine I’d never seen before. Apparently you insert the key to be copied into a slot, and a computer exams it and picks out the perfect blank. Then, you insert the blank into an adjoining slot and the machine cuts it.

I gave him my key. When I pressed it into his hand I made a point of extending the contact. His skin was amazingly soft, almost silky, and perfectly dry. A lot of men’s hands are sweaty and sticky, as if they’d just been shafting their cocks. But not Bighead Boy. Another bit of weirdness.

The machine immediately picked out a blank and the kid fetched it from a rack and stuck it into the slot. As the machine cut it, I made a joke about the sound reminding me of a cavity being filled. That struck a chord with the kid, who went on about how he hates having cavities filled, and the sound of the drill on his teeth, the vibration traveling from the bone into his skull, and if it weren’t for the Novocain, how bad would that hurt?

The machine finished cutting. He now had to insert it into a different slot where it would be smoothed and any filings removed by a revolving wire brush. While he was doing that, I asked him which of the three local high schools he was attending. He told me, and as we chitchatted he mentioned he was 18, and a senior, and already applying to colleges for admissions.

He removed the key from the slot and searched for one of those small, white paper bags to put it in. As he did that, I told him to have fun at college. And, looking back on it, I’m slightly amazed that I said the following, although I don’t know why I should be. I have a habit of making outrageous statements.

“I’m sure you’ll have a good time at college. Heck, if I were 15 years younger and you were gay, I’d be asking for your phone number.”

He looked at me intently for a moment, then said, “It’s 872-8421. And I get off at 6.”

Holy shit! Holy fucking shit! I couldn’t believe my luck. I scrambled for my phone, screwed up the entry code because I was hitting the keyboard in a panic, finally got logged in and told him to give me that number again. He did. And he told me his name – Jess.

I got him added to my contacts. My ears were ringing and my brain felt as if it were about to leak out of my skull. It’s not unusual to go the store and come back with a lot of stuff you weren’t expecting to pick up, but how many times does that include a hot 18-year-old?

I promised I would call him. As I walked away, he said, “See ya,” and added slyly, “Daddy.”

I spent the next three hours showering, shaving, changing clothes, getting my house cleaned up, flossing my teeth, trimming my eyebrows – hell, just anything I thought needed doing to make myself presentable. I even changed the sheets on the bed, in the faint hope things would progress that far. I remembered reading a classified ad on Craigslist from a guy who was complaining about a potential sex partner who left before the fun began because the bed smelled like “a sack of farts.” Didn’t want any chance of that happening with Jess.

At quarter to 6 I called him and demanded that he come over, straight from the store. I told him where I lived. He said he’d be right there.

And at a quarter after 6 a Honda Civic pulled into the driveway. He shut off the headlights and got out. He walked to the front door and knocked. I opened it, ushered him, then closed the door and locked it. When I turned around, he pressed himself into me and kissed me.

This was not a quick peck on the cheek or one of those tongues-and-spit exchanges you see in porn videos. He raised his right hand to the back of my head, ran his fingers into my salt-and-pepper hair and pulled me into his lips, pressing them against me, his tongue darting in and out flirtatiously. He pressed his body against mine. It was warm and soft, like butter left out of the fridge since yesterday, and it molded to fit the shape of my body. I could feel the stiffness of his cock and it compelled mine to grow hard and rise inside my jeans, yanking out pubes as it lengthened.

He held the kiss about 30 seconds and then, without saying a word, took my hand and led me to the back of the house. He didn’t have trouble deciding which bedroom was mine – only one had a bed in it. He lay down and pulled me down on top of him, his face beaming with innocent pleasure, and he said, “Now kiss the living shit out of me.”

I fell into him, devouring him with my mouth, my lips tasting the flesh behind his ear, his ear lobes, his throat, then landing on his lips to greedily suck at his mouth. He moaned suggestively and I could feel the vibration of his vocal chords against my own throat, almost like a cat purring loudly, and it was such a turn-on I groaned myself. My hands were exploring his body, slipping under his Polo shirt to roam his hairless chest, up over his shoulders, his pits and then down, down, until I was massaging his thighs. He pushed his crotch against mine as his hands ran through my hair and across my back, pulling me into him, as if every square inch of my body had to be crushed against his.

This was so unlike many of my sexual encounters, especially with guys his age. Usually they want to focus on the mechanics of sucking and fucking. But not this kid. He seemed to recognize and enjoy the pleasure of simple physicality, the compression of flesh against flesh. As we lay there on the bed wiggling against each other, our efforts generating a delicious, sensual heat and the odor of our ramped up pheromones lending a thick, musky scent to the air in the dark bedroom, I began to wonder why I had seldom explored this aspect of lovemaking. To think, I could learn something about sex from an 18-year-old kid. It turned my cock into a steel I-beam.