The boy was back, looking in the window at the used Schwinn Super Sport, a racing bike we were asking $129 for. He looked at it so longingly--this was his fourth or fifth visit--that I almost cringed whenever I saw anyone else show interest in it now. I so much wanted to talk to him, to tell him that it wasn’t the bike for him. He was small. If he could reach the pedals at all, he wouldn’t, I’m sure, be able to sit in the seat of the bike. The problem was that in the Rugged Mountain Bike shop I owned and out of which I ran an ambition biking club, there wasn’t an appropriate bike for him for sale at any price less than that.

And I ached for him as well. He was a young teen, with an innocent, blond beauty that made my cock twitch. I couldn’t help liking my men young, very young, but not younger than fourteen, or being lost with curly headed blue-eyed blonds with a mournful look that could change to mischievous in an instant. Liking them that young didn’t mean I indulged in them young, of course. I messed around with some of the younger seventeen- and eighteen-year-old guys in the biking club. But all the time I was on top of them, pumping away, I imagined them as being younger--mostly fourteen.

I had no trouble finding sex partners among the bikers. They tended to be narcissistic, and a man obsessed with his body was a man who appreciated having other men obsessed with his body too. And I owned the shop. I lived upstairs. Young men who were into bikes looked up to me and wanted to impress me. They would let me fuck them for favors. I kept that limited, though. It helped that I was a biker too and still had a trimmed, muscular body at thirty.

The young boy had ventured into the shop once to look around at the bikes, but his attention always went back to the one in the window.

“Do you work here?” he’d asked once.

“Yes. I own the place,” I’d said. “My name is Seth.” Somehow I wanted to establish a connection with him. What I really wanted to do was to fuck him, but I figured a familiarity with each other and exchanging of names was as far I could hope that it would go. I hoped that all the time I was talking with him he couldn’t see that he gave me a raging hard on. Besides I wanted to try to adjust his hopes. I could talk to him for a while and watch him and then, when he was gone, I could go upstairs and masturbate to the thought of fucking him.

“I’m Patrick,” he said. “That bike in the window--”

“I’ve seen you looking at that bike, but it’s not for you ... at least yet,” I said. “It’s too big a bike.”

“I’m fourteen,” he answered defensively.

Both my heart and my cock did a lurch. Fourteen. My desired sex partner’s age, not that I’d ever be able to indulge. “It’s not the age, really,” I said. “It’s the inches of the inside of your leg. I don’t think you’re tall enough yet to manage a bike that size--to pedal and sit in the saddle at the same time. Maybe something else in the shop. Look around.” I certainly ached to get in the saddle with him.

I knew that looking around wasn’t the answer either. If he couldn’t afford the used Schwinn bike in the window--and it seemed from his behavior that that was the problem--then we didn’t have another appropriate bike in the shop he could afford either.

“How many inches do you have?” he asked.

I nearly swallowed my teeth. As I already was thinking of what positions I could put him in to get my cock up his ass as far as possible, I naturally misinterpreted what he’d asked right way. I had a good eight inches and I enjoyed thinking about them and talking about them in the right company. It was one of my best assets--what kept men saying yes to me. I managed to recover, though. I told him, “The bike’s a bit of a stretch for me too.” It wasn’t, of course, but I wanted to humor him. I also wanted him to stay in the shop, talking with me. I was aching to fuck him. He was small for a fourteen-year-old. I bet he would be tight. I bet I’d enjoy working my eight thick inches inside him.

He gave me a smile that melted my heart and heated up my equipment and turned and did a circuit of the shop, looking at all of the bikes on display, and talking to me. He repeated that he was fourteen, that his father was dead and he lived with his mother who was working a couple of jobs, and that he didn’t like school much but planned to be a nuclear physicist. He also was on his own most of the time, he loved to bike, and he had been in a big-brother mentoring program and liked the contact with an older man but he hadn’t hit it off well enough with his mentor. His mentor wasn’t as physically active as I obviously was to have the muscular, but trim biker’s body I had. He wasn’t shy about letting me know he liked the cut of my body.

He babbled on, charming me and sending me into waves of sexual want. I felt drained when he’d left the shop and as if all of the sunshine had been sucked out of the building. But I still went upstairs for a whack-off session with him in mind.

The next time he visited the shop provided the tipping point. He fell over a line of bicycles, taking them down with him, and cutting his thigh. It didn’t bleed much, but he seemed almost in shock, and I panicked.

“Here, let me get a wrap on that,” I said. “Sit down over here.” First aid equipment was a necessary and popular sales item in the store. I knelt in front of him and got a gauze bandage wrapped around the wound. He was wearing shorts and a T-shirt--and wearing them divinely, I might add. I trembled as I held and manipulated his thigh while I applied the bandage. I’m sure he must have noticed.

“Can you walk on it? Is there someone I can call to come get you?” I certainly didn’t offer any store responsibility for the accident. He’d stumbled on the row of bikes all by himself.

He stood but then grimaced and sat down again. “I don’t think I can walk on it yet. And my mom works someplace where they won’t let her take telephone calls. I have a number for her but she’d hurt me worse than this if I called her in the middle of her work day. And she couldn’t leave work to come get me anyway--not until 5:00 at least.”

It was 3:30 p.m. then. It was a day that I closed the shop about then and rode my bike. All the regulars knew that.

“Would you like to wait upstairs--in my apartment--until you can call you mother?” I asked. All thought of leaving him and going for a ride on my bike had deserted me. I wanted to ride him.

“That would be nice of you,” he said, giving me the smile of someone saved from the guillotine.

“Can you make it up the stairs on your own? ... of course you can’t,” I said. I didn’t want him going upstairs alone. I went over and changed the Open sign on the door to Closed and locked the door. I suppose even then I knew I’d try to go over the line with him, if he’d let me.

“Here, I’ll carry you.” I had him in my arms. He was light and warm, and he smelled of honeysuckle. I ached to lay him. He put one arm around my neck and palmed my pec with his other hand. I’m sure he could feel my heart doing flip-flops. He leaned his curly blond head into the hollow of my shoulder and sighed.

I put him down on the couch in my living room. “Would you like a coke or something while you’re waiting up here? I’ll just be downstairs. I’ll have to reopen.” I didn’t really have to reopen, but once upstairs I began to panic. He was only fourteen. It didn’t matter that fourteen was my favorite age.

“I don’t want you to go to any trouble.”

“It’s no trouble,” I said.

When I came back out of the kitchen, Patrick was stretched out on the couch, naked. His clothes were on a nearby chair. With shaking hands I put the Coke down on the nearest surface and just stood there, bug-eyed, swaying back and forth on the balls of my feet, feeling the crotch of my trousers jutting out in the room toward him, and emitting a gurgle deep in my throat.