Humble beginnings

   It started only a few years ago. I was about to turn seventeen years old but my body and my mind were years beyond that. From the moment puberty hit me, I had a very pronounced urge to explore every part of my body and my sexuality. Of course, I was too young at first so I did all of that exploring by myself. It was a great moment for me, because I discovered that I could learn who I was and what I liked in the privacy of my own room. Masturbation became something that made or broke my day.

 I wouldn’t say I got obsessed with it, I just thought it was fun to do it and try different things, with oils and stuff like that. From that young age, around twelve years old, I started watching porn on my parent’s laptop. It was our first computer and not even my parents knew a lot about the Internet or how to use it, so it took them a while to discover what I did with it. But when they did, they sent me straight to a shrink. That’s the type of parents my parents are, very nervous and prone to freaking out for nothing.

 The expert told them it was normal for a boy my age to explore his sexuality, but as most adults and people in general; they refused to believe I had any idea of what I liked at that age. They thought I was basically going insane because of bad influences around me. They forbid me to play more videogames, as well as watching any TV. I also was forced to interact more with people in school, only because I had few friends and none of them really ever had any kind of relationship outside of school.

 Weirdly enough, it was not long after that, between the shrink and my paranoid parents, that I met this new kid at school. We were a little bit older and hit it off right away. I had been forced to enter a sports team, so I was playing football with other guys, but I never really played. They all knew I hated being there so they left me be. But this new kid really loved to play but he also like talking to me when he was waiting for his turn to chase after the ball. He was very kind and funny and I liked that he didn’t pretended to be an adult.

 That year and the next one, we spent them together. I stopped that football nonsense but we stayed great friends. So much so that we went out for ice cream together, we would go to the movies and he would even come home and talk to my parents for very brief periods of time. And they loved him, even if I had left the team and I didn’t really have any other friends. They thought everything with me had gone back to normal and they were very eager to see the next step in my growth, the moment were I would decide my profession and go on to college to meet the woman of my life.

 Well, as I knew it would happen, I disappointed my parent’s big time. First of all, I kept masturbating and watching porn. I just got smarter than them, so they couldn’t catch me. Second, my friend Caleb (the new kid at school) had been one of the main influences in how to channel all of that that I had in my head and just all over my soul. Because I really thought it was part of me. We would steal porno magazines and we would always check out the ones with men first, because he knew very well that’s what I liked.

He got a girlfriend when we turned sixteen, a girl named Debra who was cool and all but I just didn’t find interesting. He told me he had sex with her several times but I never truly believed that. Not only because she looked too much like a prude, but because everything he said had a bit of exaggeration to it and it was very easy to notice. Anyway, I didn’t care at all because Caleb was a good friend to me, he didn’t judge or anything and we would have long and stimulating conversations about things we actually liked.

 It was just a couple of years before graduating that he came to me all excited. He had come home with his laptop and showed me a page where they announced the search for new actors in the area. It was not precisely for a period drama, but for porn involving younger actors and older actors. I was confused at first, but Caleb was very much excited, telling me it would be a great and fun thing to do, to just try out for a porn film and be able to tell that experience later, even if I didn’t get chosen.

 I wasn’t as excited as him when I saw it. Yeah, I spoke a lot about sex and bodies and all of that but that didn’t mean I actually knew how to do any of that. Caleb knew very well I was a virgin, but he seemed to have forgotten all about that. The other thing was that I had no self-esteem, at all. At that was something we didn’t really discuss because it’s not something very easy to talk to with friends. He was the guy I liked to hang out with to have fun, not to speak about things that made me feel like shit.

 But there was one detail that actually made him stop smiling at once and the webpage was clear about it: the actors had to be at least eighteen years old. They even stated that they would ask for ID before anyone would be able to do an audition. So Caleb’s enthusiasm fell to the floor because we were not even seventeen. He could have passed for older, because he already had some facial hair and he was very tall, but I still looked like a kid and had nothing going on for me to make people think that I eighteen years old. There was no way I could pass for someone older.

 But then, Caleb smiled again, grabbed his laptop and ran out of my room, only yelling he would see me in school after the weekend. There were some weekends we would hang out, but he knew I had to visit my grandparents and that always took way longer that it should, so we just hoped to see each other again the next Monday. During those two days, I did wonder about what idea had passed through his head after I had pointed out the age thing, but it was sometimes better not to dwell too much on things like that.

 I really liked how impulsive he was and how much of a good friend he was. He really didn’t care at all about me being gay and we even did that promise that if we hadn’t married anyone by the time we would be forty, we would marry each other.  It was a silly thing to do but nice anyway. We mocked my shrink and my parents together and how he would always do whatever he wanted whenever he wanted because his parents were hippie vegans or something like that. It was just a very entertaining relationship.

 On Monday, he arrived at school with two fake ID’s. He told me he had grabbed my picture from Facebook, because he thought I looked a bit older in one of them. He had done the same with his and then he had gone to a cousin of his that knew very well how to make fake ID’s. I didn’t even ask anything else because the cards did look authentic, with the proper seals and everything. I asked if he needed any money and he just assured me that his cousin owed him too much to be asking for any money.

 That Saturday, we went out late and told our parents we were going to see a movie. Instead, we went to this gay neighborhood were the auditions would take place. Funny enough, the guy didn’t say a word when he gave him the ID’s. He just gave us a number and told us to wait. That night, we only got checked out by three guys. I was one of the few men there that got selected to actually have an audition.  It would take place right then and there, only a few hours later. I was excited but really nervous.

 Anyway, that’s how it all got started. I have been working in this industry for six years now and, although it was very difficult at the start, I was able to pull through even after people in my first productions learned that I wasn’t as old as I had said I was at first. I was fired and hired in a matter of days.

 As for Caleb, he was just there to support me. He and his girlfriend stayed together even after our prom. Then, he realized that he wasn’t really into her and moved on to guys. He says he’s pansexual or something but the only thing I care about is that a very good friend has my back.

My partner

   When I saw him, I could only laugh. He looked at me exactly in the opposing way, making his eyes turn around as if he had just witnessed the most annoying thing happening right in front of him. That was the kind of relationship we had the moment we started working together. For some reason, our boss had decided our skills complimented each other’s, so he appointed us to missions together very often. I have forgotten how many times I pretended to be his brother, his friends and even his boyfriend or even husband.

 It all depended on the places we had to go and the things we had to do. Sometimes, the mission would be a very relaxing cruise through the Caribbean on an enormous boat that would float peacefully for over a week, carrying carefree tourists around. People that just wanted to get a tan and swim and maybe walk the massive ship, enjoying everything the place had to offer. Yes, I have to confess I loved those kinds of missions but we got assigned to them because they were specifically for rookies in this business.

 I remember one time; only about a year after we got to know each other properly, when we were sent to the Bahamas pretending to be a married gay couple going on an exclusively gay cruise. We had to steal some very important papers out of the office of a very important businessman who happened to be frolicking in the boat with his lover, unknown to his wife. It was a hilarious place and situation to be in, and of course stealing the plans was the easiest part of the whole thing. We did it the first night.

 For the other eight days, we had to hold hands pretending to love each other to death, when in reality we had almost hate for one another. Well, it wasn’t really hated but we certainly didn’t see eye to eye. He was the kind of guy that loves to focus on the job and is obsessed by doing everything by the book, like a little boy scout trapped in an adult man’s body. That to me annoyed me so much that I would often just go rogue for a couple of hours and that would, of course, made him go insane, a result I always loved.

 In the bedrooms, we agreed on sleeping on the same bed but avoiding anything weird during the night. No touching each other’s private space, especially not each other’s bodies. The first one to wake up would be the first one into the shower and so on. After a few months, we had a great system that avoided, almost always, any unpleasant moments during our missions. And as they would often take long periods of time to get over with, we just had to find a way to live with one another. It was almost a sacrifice for both of them and we did it because it was our job.

 However, those were our first missions, years one and two. By the third one, they sent us to shorter missions that required a greater deal of commitment from our part. In not so many words, that means that we had to risk our lives during those assignments. Sometimes, we wouldn’t even see each other but once, in critical moments. Besides those, we would often fly solo and assume unrelated identities. I have to confess it was kind of fun at first, playing to be so many different types of men, so many times.

 But after a while, it got annoying and the stakes started looking at me in the face. On my first mission, I got fired several times and they had to pull me out of a dumpster with a bullet on my thigh and several cuts all over my body. It was a weird experience, which was better than what my former partner was going through. I say former, because sometime after we started that decisive year, the bosses decided we wouldn’t be working together as often as we had done in the past. They said it was the right thing to do.

 However, I heard a drug lord almost killed him, after his disguise as a dealer was blown by some snitch. The snitch got killed right in front of him and the drug lord ordered his people to tie my former partner to a pipe and beat him up in every way they wanted. I have no idea of the details, but some people say he could have been killed if it hadn’t been for his security bracelet, which was a secret piece of equipment we all wear that activates itself if we fail to report to it at least once a day.

 You see, the drug lord took all of his clothes away and let him in a cold basement for at least four days. So the bracelet activated itself, called for back up to that specific location and the agent was saved. I was in a mission during that time, so I just heard it all from others. I was tempted to visit him in the hospital, the moment I was able to go back home, but I decided against it. Actually, I realized I was caring for someone I had never cared before, and that confused me enough to do nothing and go back to my life.

 It was almost a year later when they assigned us to a mission together. This time, it was a classic spy stunt: we had no covers, nothing sleek or sexy or nice. We just had to get our hands on a witness, extract him from a certain country, and go back home with that person alive. It was a nightmarish place to be, a horrible experience to be having. But, between all of it, I have to admit I was comforted when I saw his face in the airport the day we left for our mission. I wanted to tell him something but had no idea what to say. So, again, I decided to stay quiet and focus on the mission at hand.

 As predicted, the situation was dire. We had guns and a contact, but that was all blown to hell the second day of our stay in that dreadful hellhole. A group of guys attempted to blow us up in a crappy hotel. It was just luck that the cleaning lady had gone in before us. I know, that sounds insensitive but you kind of lose that part of yourself in such a job. We just started running and killing them all to get the fuck out of there. And in that moment, we were the best team anyone could have ever hoped for.

 It was as if our minds were connected, as well as our bodies. We didn’t even have to look at each other to work in unison; it was almost like a dance that has all the perfect moves to be the best anyone has ever seen. At the same time, I realized we weren’t the same people that had enjoyed those cruises and nice hotels at the start of this whole thing. We were two entirely different men and it showed. I saw it in his eyes the moment we started running away and I had felt it in myself for a long time before that. It just had been confirmed.

 He surprised me with his knowledge of the underworld of that city. Maybe he had been there before or maybe he had just changed that much. I had heard that after his traumatic experience, he had stayed on his post, taking many other risky assignments. He had a nice fiancé at the start but eventually she left him and no one could point at the exact thing that had caused that rift. However, the job was not one where you could see a lot of happy endings. So I understood if that had been the reason why he had decided to be left alone.

 In time, we got our witness and got her out of that place. It was by the skin of our teeth, as I was shot in the shoulder moments before our party rescued us on the border. The thing was, he had stepped in front of me and blocked most bullets by using a metal door as a shield. Only that one bullet had been able to reach me. Making me lose a lot of blood. I fainted in the helicopter that was carrying us and woke up many days later, back home, in a hospital bed. I was very dizzy, so what I saw seemed very unreal.

 It was him. He was fast asleep in the only furniture in the room other than my hospital bed, a very old sofa that seemed to have seen better days. When the nurse came in, she told me he had been there for over two days, never leaving for his home, never going anywhere. He just stayed there.

 After she left, I watched him sleep for a while. And as I did that, I tried to understand the whole situation. It was confusing for me and I know it must be the same for him. So I just decided to think it through another day. What was important was that I felt safe now, and I could finally rest properly for a few days.

State visit

   Everyone at the airport was ready. The staff had put on their best clothes and every single corner of the small terminal building had been cleaned to the last millimeter. From very early in the morning, people had arrived to help organize every single part of this impromptu visit. After all, it was the president of the most powerful country in the world. And theirs was one of the poorest and most isolated ones on the whole planet. However, the presidential plane had to refuel somewhere, so the small nation had received the honor of hosting the president for a few hours.

 From the moment they had been warned about the impending arrival of the plane, hundreds of people were put to work. Not only those in the airport, people who only really worked on weekdays and even then only in certain time frames, but also every single operator and technician available. They wanted not only the people to feel welcomed but also to make the best work possible with the plane. They got fuel from the city’s reserves, as the amount they had on the airport was not enough to refill a plane the size of the one they were going to see in a few hours.

 The process required almost every person in the capital, a city of about a thousand people, to wake up and also help by cleaning the streets of the city and the authorities enabling the movement of fuel reserves from where they stored it to the airport, which was fairly close to the city. People took to the streets with brooms and mops and every single cleaning help they could get, but the truth was no one really knew if the president was going to land and stay on the plane or walk around a little bit. Many people were curious like that.

 The president of the tiny nation was the one that was moving all over his house, calling the right people and asking everything from food to more cleaning products. He wanted to send a message through TV but the people of the studios were helping around so he decided to send it through the radio. It was much simpler and more effective; as it was the medium of communication that people listened to while they were preparing the city for the big arrival. Every single person in the country heard it and everyone understood the importance of the visit.

 To the eyes of the world, it was practically a miracle that their country actually existed. To be honest, it had been a thing of luck and one of those strange coincidences that happen out of nowhere. They were too isolated and unimportant. Practically everything they had came from their neighbor to the east. So they had known starvation and real poverty because when that neighbor didn’t have enough for themselves, they suffered too. But the world in general never really knew anything because they weren’t watching, until now.

 The country had no army but its people did behave like one once the president’s message had reached every single person. They knew they had around six hours to have everything ready. With luck, the weather up in the clouds would delay the plane a bit more to give them more time but they constantly checked with the aircraft and that didn’t seem to be the case. Everyone had to do their best in the time given. Only an hour after the president’s announcement, everything was coming up nicely and all citizens were helping, even elders and children.

 A huge amount of people arrived at the terminal in order to use the old kitchens that some rundown businesses had not used in several years. The idea was to cook a good amount of their national food for the people arriving, as well as other dishes that they might like. It wasn’t crazy to think that they would be very hungry, even at that early hour of the day. After all, this was all going on in the darkness of the night. The president was scheduled to arrive around eight o’clock in the morning, so they had to wake up or not even sleep.

 The cooking team was led by the nation president’s chef, his own wife. It wasn’t like in other countries were the president has everything and the people below him have nothing. In that nation, everyone was basically the same. People hadn’t starved in some years but they weren’t rich or even close to that. So the president’s wife decided it was best if someone close to the government like her supervised the food. It was the best way to guarantee that it would be perfect for someone with such a high profile as the ruler of the richest country in the world.

 They acknowledge that all those people in that plane, around two hundred according to the information they had shared with them, had been and eaten in places much better than their small country. That was obvious and they didn’t feel bad about it. But they wanted them to leave knowing a little bit more of their culture and about what they loved to eat and drink in those lands. The menu had been defined by the president’s wife and she was very confident that it was going to be one of the best feasts in the recorded history of their nation.

 It consisted of a special recipe for meatballs using a kind of cheese that was made from goat milk, which also happened to be used in their national beverage, which was kind of like a milkshake but less thick and richer in flavor. They also cooked the goats in various ways and were very proud about their vegetables and mushrooms, of which they had a very large variety. Various dishes were cooked with all those ingredients and some spices too.

 The small country’s president arrived in the airport only two hours before the arrival of the plane, to check everything out. The terminal had been painted in record time by volunteers and the control tower was bursting with life when, in normal days, it would only have one person and not even all day. He thanked everyone there and then went to the terminal’s commercial area where his wife and helpers were giving the final touches to the food. The smell had flooded the building and it was very delicious, so much that many stomachs growled loudly.

 Then, he went outside and did a walk around the tarmac and the runway. There wasn’t a single spec of dust anywhere, which he thought was absolutely magnificent, especially for such a windy part of the country. It seemed as if the weather was also helping them achieve their goal. The red carpet in the tarmac was the same one that the president had stepped on when he was inaugurated for his term, more than three years ago. A president’s term was five years and he couldn’t be reelected, which he personally thought was a good idea.

 He decided to check the band that had been practicing for hour in the cold and congratulated them for the amount of love they were showing the country. He stayed a bit to hear them play and, to be fair, they were not as prepared as he would have like, but there was no way of getting better musicians with only an hour to go. They would have to do. What made them special, at the end of the day, was that they played their instruments with real passion and the idea of making their country proud. And that was more than enough.

 The president decided to wait for the plane in the control tower. There, he would be able to know every detail about the upcoming visit. When he stepped in, the plane had crossed into their airspace. It would be only thirty minutes until they touched down in the runway. The atmosphere was really special. Every single person in the tower, in the terminal, in the tarmac and even in the city was ecstatic. This was, by far, the most exciting thing to ever happen in their country. And they had all worked together to make it the best day possible.

 The plane came out of the clouds and landed, in a very soft and elegant manner. Everyone applauded and greeted the people inside through the radio. The president ran outside, getting ready with all others. Many people from the city had come out of curiosity and they had been allowed to stay a bit further away. The plane parked exactly where they had determined it should go. For some minutes, nothing happened. Then, the door opened and everyone stopped breathing for a second. Their moment had come.