My parents were pretty much dirt poor. We lived in a trailer park in the western Chicago suburb of Hodgkins. It was a small park behind a shopping mall next to an old quarry. My parents had me when they were seniors in high school. They worked and got the trailer after graduation. It was no secret that I wasn't expected or wanted. My mom left us when I was seven, and we never saw her again. My dad started whoring around and drinking before that. But at least, even after Mom left, he never abused me, he just wasn't very affectionate or caring.

There were other kids in the park to run around with, and I had friends there and in school. I wasn't a jock or popular, and I wasn't a brain or a gaming dork. I wasn't a small kid, so I wasn't picked on a lot, and I knew how to fight anyway. I was quiet and kept to myself for the most part.

That quiet side of me grew larger when I hit puberty and started finding guys far more interesting than girls. I started puberty a little sooner than most of my classmates, so I ended up being one of the bigger kids in seventh and eighth grade. 

I was tall and broadly built, had dark-blond hair and blue eyes, so  I got a little attention from the girls. I pretended to be interested, and even took a girl to our eighth grade dance. We made out a little, but it felt like I was faking the whole thing.

Over that summer, I ran around with some of the other kids in the park. I was pretty much the oldest one there now, as Terry was seventeen now and hardly ever there, being out driving around with his high school friends.

I'd been interested in guys instead of girls for almost two years now, and there was this one guy in the trailer park named Cory. He was almost a year younger than me and in the grade below mine. Now that I was almost fifteen, he had just turned fourteen.

Cory was a cutie. He had nearly platinum-blond hair, big green eyes, and juicy red lips. He needed braces for his slightly buck-teeth, but his parents didn't have the money or insurance. There were a few little freckles across his nose and cheeks. He was slimmer than me, and more slightly built. He liked gaming and reading and got great grades. We didn't hang out at school because we were in different cliques, but at the trailer park we were pretty much always hanging out with each other - if he wasn't playing some fantasy game or something with some of his gaming friends.

One thing we liked to do was sneak into the old quarry and sit on the end of one of the old truck trailers and watch it storm. We could see all around us, facing west, away from the city lights, and watch the lightning. The trailer kept us dry, usually. The smaller kids didn't follow us because the quarry was supposed to be haunted - that was why it was closed, they said. And climbing down the steep side was very hard to do unless you had the reach of longer arms and legs. So the quarry was mostly left to Cory and me, now that Terry was no longer interested in going there.

One hot, humid, sultry evening, during summer break, we knew it was going to storm pretty bad, so Cory came over and we headed down to the quarry before the rains came and made it harder to do. We took the little radio, snacks and drinks and a lantern, and our portable GameBoys. This was before kids had cell phones with games on them.

I'd been fantasizing about doing stuff with Cory for a long time now. Often while sitting on the back of a trailer in the quarry during a storm. The last few times we had gone down and watched it storm, I'd thought about reaching over and seeing what he'd do if I put my hand down his pants.

As we got to the bottom of the quarry, he turned on the radio and we walked to one of the trailers. Just as we hopped up into the trailer the radio announcer said Cook County was now under a tornado watch and a sever thunderstorm warning. Big hail, dangerous lighting, and damaging winds were coming and would last nearly an hour.

Excited, we got settled in a couple feet from the open doors where we had sat a bench seat from an old car that someone had thrown into the pit - the seat not the entire car. We also had a couple of tables of old wire spools.

Faint flickers of lighting were outlining the top of the quarry walls to the northeast. Blue, green, even reddish flashes wove in with the usual white and yellow ones.

"Gonna be a great show," Cory said excitedly.

I could see his grin in the faint flashes. His teeth were very white, his lips very dark. And his big eyes reflected some of the faint flashes.

"Yeah," I agreed.

It was unusual for the wind to affect the trailers down in the quarry, but a big gust slightly rocked the one we were sitting in.

"Downblast," he said in awe.

"Yeah, huge one," I agreed.

It had even stirred up a cloud of rock dust from the quarry floor and blown it, billowing, across the pit floor. Then huge drops of rain began pelting the ground and drumming on the plastic trailer roof.

The lighting grew closer, and the slow, constant, rolling thunder grew louder. We could see the texture of the low clouds as they scuttled from the northwest, slightly lit by the orange streetlights of the suburbs. But the backlighting of the clouds by the high lightning really showed off the clouds.

Oranges, reds, greens, blues - all lit up the sky just over the rim of the quarry.

We opened our sodas and the chips and commented on the lighting, and the swaying of the trees up on the edge of the pit. We could tell the winds were pretty strong up there. Then the rain pelted down so hard that we could barely hear each other yelling.

The lightning was fantastic! So many colors! And the flashes constantly lit up the sky. There was rarely a dark pause. And the thunder rolled and boomed without break for nearly half an hour.

At one point it hailed so hard that we worried the plastic roof would shatter. Then the air temperature plummeted. More than once, the trailer rocked and groaned as it was shoved by downdrafts and microbursts.

Then the hail stopped, the winds weakened, and the rain came back. But the lightning and thunder went on unabated. What a show.

The radio announcer said a funnel cloud was spotted near Blue Island. That was twenty or so miles to the southwest, past us and no danger, but still very exciting.

Now the lightning was mostly cloud-to-ground. Long, jagged bolts of yellow and white, breaking the air with claps we could feel in our chests. One hit so close that we heard the snap before the clap of thunder.

We both jumped in the bench seat and ended up against each other, giggling.

"Geeze! Any closer and we would've felt that one!" he commented, his eyes wide.

"No shit!" I agreed.

I noticed that our shoulders and thighs were touching now. My mind had occasionally thought something sexy from time to time as we watched the storm, but now it pretty much fastened onto those kinds of thoughts as the storm rolled on.

Now the radio announcer said another funnel cloud was spotted above Highland Park. That was closer, and likely moving toward us. It was a small one, but still, a real one, and not that far away.

We actually pushed ourselves tighter together, nearly huddled up now.

We listened as the reports put the tornado nearer and nearer. As it passed near us, it diminished and weakened, and by the time it was passing just to the south of us, it ended. But we could see the wall of lighting surrounding it.

The rain kept pelting down, the lighting was moving off to the southwest where it was out of our view, and the winds had died down. It was cool now, too.

We could tell another storm was coming by the flashes on the horizon of the quarry pit. Yellow flashes lit up the rim, and were growing closer.

"Close," I said.

"Yeah. Too close," he laughed.

We relaxed a little, but stayed very close to each other. We both had room to move further from the other, but neither of us did so. I took that as a good sign.

The radio announcer told us the worst of the storm was now passing over into Indiana, but another strong thunderstorm was moving into the western suburbs on the heels of the ones that had just passed through.

"This is so cool," Cory said, looking right at me.

"Yeah, it is," I agreed.

I could make out his eyes easily in the flashes of lightning, and his smile almost as easily.

I was really hoping - hard - that he was thinking the same things I was. I doubted it very much, though. The chances of him being gay too were just too high against.

But I really had to try. Something. Anything.

As he watched the lighting over the rim of the quarry, I could see him pretty clearly at times. He was sitting with his legs extended out straight, one ankle over the other, and he was slightly leaning back against the seatback, slightly slumped down. I could just make out his package in the brighter flashes.

My mind ran through all the scenarios I had fantasized. I got hard and horny, and wished I knew some way to find out if he would be willing to do mess around a little. We'd both laughed about getting excited and getting boners during storms before. We'd even both said how we liked beating off when it stormed - when we were at home, of course.

At one point he looked my way just as a bright flash of lightning lit up the inside of the trailer. He must have seen me looking at him.

"What?" he asked.

I didn't know what to say. I thought furiously.

"I was just thinking something," I replied.

"What?" he asked, still looking at me instead of the nearing storm.

"Remember what we said? About... you know, what we like to do during storms?"

He laughed, then said, "Yeah. You mean, like, about beating it off?"

"Yeah," I said, my guts turning over.

I was going to do this. I am going to do this. I've got to at least try. He'll only tell me not to if he doesn't want to. He won't go telling anyone. I don't think. No, he won't. And I've got to at least try. There won't be many more storms this summer, and probably none anything like this one. I've got to.

I reached over and put my hand on his lap.