The private junior high boys school I went to was a sports school in a sports town. Everything revolved around football in the fall and soccer in the spring. In addition to that, we all had to specialize in other sports as well. It stands to reason then that the coach they brought in for football and soccer was the most important man in school and could do just about anything he wanted as long as our teams kept on winning.

I can’t think of any other reason they would have kept on Bull Temple, as authoritarian and obvious as he was, except that while he was the coach at the school we won in every sport we competed in.

Bull was a lot older than most of the other teachers and staff at the school, all of whom seemed to come and go quickly. He was an ex-Marine, we were told. Back from a second tour in Iraq, catching up with his life. He would be a natural leader among the boys beyond his football and soccer coaching, even if his playing skills didn’t shine brightly above the rest of ours in all of the intermural sports we played to let off steam. Even in choosing sides and getting anything going, we’d all hem and haw and throw out suggestions, until, at some point, in a few, not-to-be-questioned, barked-out words, Bull would tell us what we’d do. And we’d do it.

The fact is that he could play any position in any sport better than any of the boys at the school, so no one questioned his instructions or dared to cross him in any way.

Even though he was graying at the temples now, which was barely discernible with that buzz cut he maintained, and had some tested-by-life lines in his handsome, square-cut face, he was still every inch the in-control Marine. When I’d go down to the basement of the intramural gym to swim my laps early in the morning before classes started, he’d be there in the weight room, stripped down to gym shorts, lifting weights and doing push-ups and pull-ups a couple of hundred reps at a time. Not an ounce of flab on him, all steel and muscle, with his veins popping out on his arms and legs and along his torso because there wasn’t any fat for them to run through under the skin.

Other than coaching the mainline and pickup sports games out on the basketball and tennis courts and intermural football field in the afternoons, he didn’t really fraternize with the students much at all. He was a man of few words and of hard, serious stares that made you feel compelled to pay attention to him, to make him approve of what you were saying and doing. He never talked about what he’d done in life, what he’d done in combat or what combat had done to him, but his bearing and the intensity he approached everything with, whether it was study monitoring work--and he was diligent in keeping the academics of those he called “his boys” up as much as he coached their athletics--the pickup games, or those solitary morning gym workouts, made you want to accept whatever he said as basic truth the rare times he said anything.

He really was reclusive and totally apart from the students and other staff members, something that went way beyond the difference in our ages, life experiences, and his manner of being above any argument or discussion rather in it, of being the last, authoritative word. He didn’t live on the school grounds with the other students as most of the private school teachers and staffers did; he had a small house out on the edge of the town. At one time it probably had been the gatehouse of some estate, although the bigger house was no longer there.

That’s where he held his study sessions with a select set of students.

The study sessions became somewhat of a mystery that students whispered about but never reached any conclusion on about exactly they were and how much of a help they were in passing tests and completing winning papers. No one even could--or would--say for sure who was in the study group, or had been at one time. The only common denominator in the names tossed out were that you had to be a serious student, not into the party scene, a talented athlete, and good looking. And, of course, they all had to be boys; it was an all-boy’s residential school.

My parents were assigned to an embassy in a country so primitive they didn’t want me there. There wasn’t any school for me there, for starters, and I couldn’t pursue my ambition to be an Olympic swimmer there either. So, I was at a school that would support my dream and where my parents were half way across the world from me. My parents hadn’t had much time to give me close attention anyway with all the diplomatic duties they were faced with.

Bull did spend a fair amount of time supervising the studying of the boys at the library in the late evening. That’s where I’d see him the most. In terms of athletics, he’d show up occasionally to check on how my swimming practices were going and we’d been in a couple of afternoon pickup basketball games, where he’d chosen me for the skins side and we’d shared wins; and I’d occasionally see him standing at the weight room door, panting in shallow, controlled breaths between his marathon one-armed push-up sessions, watching me come out of the gym pool some mornings. But it was really seeing him walking between the tables at the library, making sure that the boys were studying rather than fucking off, that caught my attention the most--probably because in the most recent weeks it seemed like he wasn’t really studying much there at the library; he seemed more pausing in his prowling near the table I was sitting at and watching me study.

It should have made me uncomfortable, I suppose. But it didn’t. I found it flattering. Bull was taking an interest in me. Bull, the natural leader, the one with all of the answers, all of the experience. Bull, who already had met life head on and who had his own house and camouflage-painted Hummer H2 that made all the heads snap whenever it floated across campus. Bull, the man of the world, who even the professors listened to and obeyed.

Al Chapman stopped me on the quad one day. He pulled away from a group of guys he was joking with as I passed by and said he wanted to tell me something in private. Al, the school team’s fifteen-year-old quarterback, a guy I wouldn’t have thought even knew I existed. Quiet Al, the guy who aced all of his tests, had a solid-gold passing arm, and who I assumed could pop the cherry of any boy on campus just with one of his sultry gazes--because, yeah, it was an all-boy’s residential school, and fourteen-and-fifteen-year-old boys had raging hormones and would get what they could get where they could get it. I was fourteen, although my male cherry hadn’t been popped yet, I’d come awfully close and was ready for it.

“Big test coming up in algebra,” he said to me when we had withdrawn to the verge of the quad’s tree line.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’ve already started studying.”

“But you’d like help and would be willing to contribute, wouldn’t you?” Al asked. He was looking at me with a hard stare. He seemed a little more serious than the test was worth.

“Yeah, I guess so. I usually study alone, but ... it’s a big test, and--”

“Bull wants me to invite you to his study group. Seven next Tuesday, at his place. You know where it is?”

“Bull’s group?” I was practically speechless. The mystery group. Something like a golden ticket. Of course I couldn’t say no. Especially to Al. “Um, yes. Yeah, sure. I’m sure I can make it. Out at the end of Pine, right? Don’t know if I can leave campus, but it’s an easy bike ride.”

“Right. Seven on Tuesday. Anyone who asks where you’re going you can just tell them Bull’s invited you to a study session. I can tell him you’ll be there, then?”

“Yeah. Yes, I’ll be there.”

Al gave me a hard look and then he turned and was gone.

Tuesday night, almost exactly at seven, I pulled into the asphalted area at the side of Bull’s cottage and put my bike in a bike rack he’d set by the driveway for the students to use. The house was right off the road, but there was such a thick fringe of trees and bushes between it and the road that you’d never know a house even was there if you didn’t know it was there and if you didn’t see the mailbox at the edge of the drive.

Bull’s Hummer was there and just one other car, a BMW motorbike I thought belonged to Howard Kraft. That figured. Howard, fourteen, but close to fifteen, was one of our math brains in addition to being a star basketball player. No other bikes were there, though. I looked at my watch. No, I wasn’t early. I would have thought that anyone invited to be in Bull’s study group would be prompt. I’d think they would know that much about Marines. Well, maybe I’d rack up points with him for being on time.

The front door was ajar when I got to it and there was a note taped to the knocker to come on back to the back of the house, so I didn’t knock or ring the bell. I entered directly into the living room, which was sparsely furnished, but all of the furniture looked like it was good quality. And the place was neat as a pin. Another Marine trait, I assumed. The living room was only dimly lit, but a hallway running off it toward the back of the cottage was brightly lit, so I just moved on back. I could hear the murmuring of voices from somewhere in the back of the house.

A door was open as far back down the hallway I could go, and a light was on in that room, so that’s where I headed.

And I stopped dead in my tracks, in shock, as soon as I walked through the door.

I was in a sparsely furnished bedroom. A double bed against the wall to my left. A straight chair immediately to my left beside the door, with a wooden bureau beyond that.

And directly in front of me, in front of a draped window, under a pole light, the only light in the room, in a straight chair set at a three-quarters angle to me--Howard and Bull.

Howard was the first one I identified, because Bull was behind and below him in the chair. Both were nude. Tall, lithe, almost gangling, sandy-haired, ruddy skinned Howard, sitting on Bull’s lap, facing me, his long, thin legs hooked over Bull’s muscular, widespread legs. The balls of Howard’s feet planted on the carpet, giving him leverage for his rising and falling hips. Howard’s chest was arched out, and Bull’s arms were wrapped around him, his hands palmed on Howard’s pecs, Bull’s thumbs and forefingers playing Howard’s nipples.

Howard’s face had a mixed expression of pain and ecstasy and wonder and panic all at once. Howard was the one who I heard murmuring. He was panting and moaning and making little gurgling sounds. He was the one doing most of the moving as he rose and fell on Bull’s thick cock. On the rise I could see a good three inches of condom-sheathed cock appear above the short, curly pubic hairs at Bull’s crotch. And then the three inches would slowly disappear as Howard descended on it. Howard was also doing most of the huffing and puffing. Bull was more or less just sitting under him, solid as a rock. Muscles taut, bulging. A slight smile on his face--slight, but more expression than I usually saw from him. The only movement from him those thumbs and forefingers rolling Howard’s nipples and a slight undulation of his pelvis as he rolled, almost imperceptibly, in countermovement to Howard’s rising and falling, moving back as Howard rose, and forward to meet Howard’s downward thrusts.