Dos Rocas

by BRK   

Lost on a cross-country road trip, Liam finds himself in a mysterious village where the men aren’t built the way you’d expect.

It had to be the heat, right? The unforgiving sun had baked my brain. It was the only possible explanation for what I was seeing.

It had seemed like such a simple expedition. The pretext for my little cross-continental jaunt was a possible job at a well-regarded energy company based in California, but there was a fair amount of wanderlust, too. A new state regulation meant they were about to bring on a slate of qualified geologists at generous pay, and as I was between engagements (I’ll just give you the Reddit post headline, which is “handsy ex-boss nets mission-critical underling a tidy settlement, cripples division”), and in no particular rush to re-employ myself, I reckoned I’d mosey on out to the left coast and give them a look-see. To make things as stress-free as possible I elected to eschew any schedules or timetables. I set up no arrangements or appointments, figuring I’d just make contact and see what was what when I actually got out there, whenever that might be. A bit of a drive, windows down and elbow out, wind fluttering in the ol’ classic linen short-sleeve, kicky sunglasses, a few tourist stops, easy as pie.

My first mistake, maybe, was not sticking to the interstates. Silly me, wanting to see the country by taking the byways and back roads where the real America lay. In forging this bold plan I somehow forgot that I had the direction-sense of a Crenshaw melon behind the wheel and that consumer map apps actively hated me. By day three out of Topeka I was as lost to the world as Aristotle’s treatise on comedy. Towns stopped springing up and vanishing behind me into the nubby, arid horizon. The sun intensified its punishing glare, mercilessly beating down on me and my 20-year-old, no-frills, what-the-heck-is-climate-control Dodge sedan as though in retribution for my insolence in straying from the civilized spheres hitherto allotted puny humankind. Low hills emerged and rose incrementally from the flat, dry-grass plains on either side of me, gaining in prominence and gradually twisting the land, until the battered and bleached two-lane highway was weaving and diving like a bull trying to throw its rider.

By the time the narrow vestiges of what had once been a road emptied out of the contorted hills into a deep, well-watered canyon dotted with small farms and narrow grassy fields, the buildings of a little town nestled at the heart of the crevasse like the secret settlements of Pellucidar, I was as frayed and fatigued as if I’d walked there from the nearest sign of human habitation—a forgotten and half-collapsed ghost town twenty miles back with no signage remaining to even tell me its former name.

More disorientation came when the road seemed to abruptly terminate in a dirt parking lot, a hard-packed square of ruddy earth decorated with a handful of trucks and old beaters lined up neatly as if for a lonely drive-in show. I steered my dusty Dodge toward a wide gap in the last row, between an fifty-year-old red Ford pickup and what looked like a military-surplus Jeep. The engine started to sputter and lose power, and as I was sliding into my chosen space the car died altogether, leaving me to coast the last few feet until I came to a complete and silent stop.

In a daze, I shifted the incapacitated car into park and switched the ignition to “off” out of habit, then slumped back into the vinyl upholstery, wondering to what end I had come.

The town lay directly ahead on the other side of a green, well-kept expanse of grassy lawn, the distance between bridged by a smooth, stone-paved walkway. There were buildings, and figures moving around them, I could tell, but the latter especially seemed indistinct, like I was having trouble focusing. Some of those shapes were definitely horses and mules, but others were surely people, only the blurry outlines didn’t seem quite…

One of these seemed to turn and head in my direction, offering a friendly wave. A few more were following behind him. My brain couldn’t make sense of them.

I got out of my car slowly, feeling unaccountably dizzy. It was as though the noontime sun, though no longer malevolent, were destabilizing me somehow, depriving me of cognitive rigor in the same way the Dodge had lost the power of forward motion.

All at once I slumped to the russet earth like my strings had been snipped. My last sight was the oddly-shaped blur of my welcomer now running toward me in alarm, the others close behind him.

I came to to find the faces of two men leaning over me, both bearing a rather flattering mix of curiosity and concern directed my way. I think I registered their extremely close resemblance but didn’t process it at first, being distracted by my change of venue.

Instead of the big blue sky that had reigned over the parking lot verging the hidden settlement there was a well-made white plaster ceiling. A gentle, cooling breeze seemed to be shifting gauzy curtains somewhere behind me, so that the soft light gamboled with the shadows over its smooth surface.

I was on a soft, high mattress under thin covers. My sunglasses were gone—as was my shirt, for some reason—but it was a comfy bed and a nice room to be in and I didn’t think too much about it. Something about the light suggested late afternoon.

“Doc Kwan is on his way. Do you want some water?” asked one of the men in a pleasing baritone, drawing my attention back to them. Must be twins, I thought blearily. Presumably they’d come and carried me here to this very large bed from where I’d collapsed by the car. That meant I likely owed them a thanks at least, and I was introverted enough around strangers that this caused me a small twinge of anxiety. Still, they seemed genial by nature, and quite approachable—I actually felt drawn to them, like something in me wanted to become closer with them.

Certainly the rest of me was up for that. They were both weathered but quite handsome, mid-thirties maybe and just my type, like an ex-cover model who’d found a second life working the fields or suchlike. Each was long-faced and stubbly, with bright blue eyes that contrasted appealingly with their dark eyebrows and messy, nearly black hair. When I nodded they smiled and withdrew, leaving me to drift a bit mentally while I contemplated the sunlit ballet above me.

Some time later a strong, sun-bronzed hand appeared, holding a sturdy pint-glass full of clear water, with a couple of ice cubes added in and even a narrow lemon wedge for good measure. “Impressive service,” I joked.

“Thanks. You might want to sit up.”

That seemed a reasonable suggestion. I did as directed, eyes on the water, which I now realized I very much desired. As I shuffled back in the bed and made myself more vertical the pillows were moved around behind me, so that I was able to rest my shoulder blades against a better-cushioned headboard than I’d expected. I took the glass gratefully and brought it to my lips, turning to thank my rescuer where he was seated in the chair next to the bed—and froze.

They smiled identical cheeky smiles and winked in unison. “Nothin’ wrong with your eyes,” they promised, sounding both calm and amused.

The water glass was still poised an inch from my mouth, almost—but fortunately only almost—forgotten. “You sure about that, hoss?” I asked quietly after a moment. I think I sounded placid than I felt.

The rest of my new friend bore out my previous assessments. He was tall and trim but sturdily built, like someone who’d packed on a healthy amount of strength and stamina from laboring in the open air at something he loved. A wash-faded red tee-shirt, the sleeves pulled taut around nicely-developed biceps, and worn but still smart denim overalls reinforced this impression and created a lovely masculine silhouette well-suited to a beefcake-and-tractors pin-up calendar. Such an offering would probably be found in the, er, specialty stationery aisle, though, owing to a number of nonstandard configurations. The overalls had three straps over the slightly-broader-than–usual shoulders instead of expected two, for example, and it was two tanned, lickable, adams-appled necks emerging from separate collars of that many-times-washed tee instead of just the one.

I stared, stunned and undeniably fascinated. They heads were set close, I noted, maybe three inches apart at the ears. For a split second this seemed weird to me from a purely engineering point of view, like neighboring houses where the side windows only offered the prospect of the opposite house. I wondered how often they knocked their skulls together by accident… how often those bristly chins rubbed gently along each other, and what that felt like…

Their smiles went a bit crooked. “I’m quite sure,” the left head (from my perspective) said.

Man, I loved that voice. Just hearing it settled me. And turned me on a little, too.

I was staring at their lips. Embarrassed, I blinked and met their eyes again. Stalling for time, I remembered the glass in my hand and finally took a long draught of the water I’d been given. It was cool, almost cold, and very refreshing.

The instinctive process of drinking and swallowing, of feeling the temperature differential of the liquid trickling down my insides, was oddly grounding—enough so that I actually found it in me to lift a brow and retort, “What about yours, then?”

The right-hand head (from my perspective) looked up abruptly from an intense, admiring study of my now-exposed torso, and the smiles twisted again, becoming a tad sheepish, if generally unrepentant. “You fell pretty hard,” the right head drawled. “We had to… check you for bruises.” Presumably this excuse explained my presently being without the flappy linen olive-green top with the little coconuts and palm trees I’d donned that morning in honor of what I had misguidedly hoped was to be the last leg of my California expedition.

“Uh huh,” I said. As it happened, I had been blessed with exactly the right genetics to make for a tight, swoon-worthy bod with minimal effort in the gym—and I put in more than the minimum, mostly to make up for the shortfall in height I had to contend with compared to my uniformly six-foot-plus friends, cousins, and brothers. That plus a clear, angelic face, golden hair, and sweet hazel eyes meant I was on familiar ground being ogled. Truth be told, this wasn’t even the first time my shirt had gone missing while I was compromised… but that’s a story for another time. “Find anything?”

“Nope,” they said with a grin, this time in unison. I shook my head and took another sizable drink of the water. It was already half gone. At least I still had my pants this time, at least, though even as I thought this I noticed for the first time that my feet were completely bare under the cottony baby-blue cover sheet. Shirt, sunglasses, socks, Pumas. Got it. Wallet, keys, and phone, too, I guessed, since I didn’t seem to be laying on anything and my pockets felt decidedly unburdened. I’d already left more in this guy’s room than I’d managed with my last pseudo-boyfriend’s apartment in a month. Might as well run out to the car for my toothbrush and call it a day.

“You did hit your head, though, when you fell,” the left one added more seriously, “so we sent for the doc just to make sure there’s no concussion.”

I hmphed, watching the other man thoughtfully. I didn’t feel concussed, not that I was sure I could identify the symptoms. I had absorbed the situation enough that I was past the initial shock and had moved on to wondering about things like pronouns. They did some things together and some things separately, and I was drawn in enough already to want to learn more about the relationship between the two braincases attached to their shared, seemingly otherwise normal farmer-hunk body. Did “we” refer to the two of them? Or were they a “he,” and “we” meant him and the others I’d glimpsed hurrying toward him when he’d dropped? The left head had said “I’m sure,” too, I remembered. Who was “I”, in that instance? How did it work when two minds shared a single existence?

Either way, I wasn’t in the mood to be interrupted by a third party, much less for the poking and prodding I assumed was in store. “I think we can tell—did you really say ‘Doctor Quinn’ earlier?”

My companion chuckled in tandem. “Kwan,” the left head corrected. “Doctor Kwan. He was up in the north field checking the horses, but should be here soon.”

“Checking the horses?” I repeated, momentarily distracted from the oddly agreeable mental image of Jane Seymour pressing a chilly stethoscope head against my sternum while my two-headed farmer-hottie admirer looked on. “You’re getting the vet to look me over?”

“He can do both,” the right head assured me, his amusement obvious. “We don’t have as much call for people docs as you might think.”

“Huh,” I said, nonplussed. “Well, we can tell Doctor Kwan everything’s fine. I’ll just rest up a bit and then… uh, maybe someone can look at my car, figure out how to get it started?” I’d been about to say “be on my way,” but something had made me veer away from that prospect at the last minute, my curiosity warring with an instinctive unsettled feeling at being prone and vulnerable in a place of unknowns. As it often did, my brain hedged and temporized with itself. Fixing my car would for sure take time—time enough to for me to sort out what seemed to be suddenly conflicting motivations. My libido kicked in its two cents, warmly reminding me of all the steamy erotica involving car trouble and sexy locals. A vivid fantasy overtook me of sharing a slow, passionate kiss with my new friend while he simultaneously nibbled my ear, and I had to force it down and concentrate on what was actually happening.

“No need for all that,” the left head said calmly. “You won’t be leaving, William. Not for a while yet, anyway.”

That focused me, and my pulse quickened a bit, not for the right reasons. That said, I wasn’t as spooked by the abrupt use of my given name as they might have expected. I already knew they had my wallet. If anything it was proof they weren’t psychic or otherwise paranormally knowledgeable, since the reality was my IDs were a lie—I never used my full first name. Like any self-respecting, rakishly attractive boy of Irish descent, I went by Liam in all situations and had done forever. Attempted intimidation, part a: blocked, I thought smugly.

More concerning was part b, the ominously noir-movie you’re-not-going-anywhere bit. I narrowed my eyes at them. “What do you mean?” I said.

Instead of answering, both heads flicked their eyes significantly toward the half-full glass I was holding, then back at me.

My guts turned to ice, and my bluff façade vanished as quickly as Major Toht’s face. “What did you do?” I demanded. I looked between them and the glass. Suppressing an urge to toss the remaining contents of the glass at them, instead I glanced around and, noting the walnut night stand next to the bed, close to the man’s right elbow, I smacked the glass down on it decisively. This caused the water to slosh violently, tossing the narrow lemon wedge around like a reenactment of the opening credits of Gilligan’s Island. I glared back at the two-headed man, crossing my arms over my bare, sculpted chest.

“You might as well drink the rest,” the left head said, unfazed. “There’s no going back now.”

More strangers burst into the room just as I had jumped out of the bed and was lunging toward the other man, who was himself rising from his chair, watching me intently. Strong hands latched onto my naked shoulders, holding me back. “What did you do?” I shouted again.

“Calm down, calm down!” urged a male tenor voice from behind me. “Jeremy, what’s going on?”

The handsome two-headed farmer—to whom the name “Jeremy” evidently applied, either singularly or collectively—kept his blue eyes fixed on me. This was slightly intimidating, seeing as him stranding up had revealed him to possess a good four inches or more on my middling five-foot-nine-and-a-half, but at the same time his blazing stare directed downward at me was making my blood rush and my dick react. He was solidly built, seemingly more for strength than for show, though what caught my eye was the way his slight extra breadth of shoulder gave his thick, squarish pecs a more oblong shape under the tee shirt and overalls. I wanted to see them—or, rather, I wanted Jeremy to unsnap off his three-strap overall bib and peel off that old red tee and expose his beautiful hairy, oblong pecs for the delectation of my eyes and tongue.

Fuck, this was messed up. Thank god I still had my pants, I thought, though if this kept up they weren’t going to be able to hide much. Though it wasn’t just my physical reaction that was bothering me. There was a deep affinity there between us, something I couldn’t explain by mere attraction, and it was my awareness of it that troubled me as much as anything else.

Jeremy’s eyes didn’t move, fixed on me as mine were on him. “I told William he was not able to leave just yet,” right-head Jeremy explained roughly. I assumed this was directed to the one who’d spoken behind me—the one who might or might not be the same person whose iron strength was completely preventing me from moving, despite the fact that I was no longer struggling.

“What, because of the concussion?” the voice asked. “I doubt he has one.”

Right-head Jeremy shook his head slightly, eyes still on me. It was the left head that looked past me, over my shoulder. This was disconcertingly easy given our hight distance, and the angle of his glance indicated the person he was speaking to was of similar height. Nothing unusual for me—my life was disproportionately full of comparative giants—but I wasn’t thrilled nonetheless. “He drank the water,” left-head explained.

The response to that was a sigh of exasperation. “Jeremy…” the voice said reprovingly.

“He asked for some,” right-head said petulantly. He was still staring at me, eyes full of emotions I couldn’t begin to process. Whatever.

Done with Jeremy for now, I tried twisting around. After a second the callused hands gripping my delts released me and I turned to face the person who had been restraining me. To my surprise I found myself face to face (to face) with a boyish young man roughly my age and height. He was blond and pretty, too—his eyes were even an alluring hazel like mine. He was also shirtless, as I was, and there the similarities ended. His body was like a dream. It was an aesthetic achievement I would have had to have spent hours every day in the gym honing and refining, following all sorts of complex revolving schemes to grow, shape, and chisel into massive perfection. A few smudges of dirt along his flank and rippling abs only added to his allure, honestly, like confirmation it was real flesh and not an illusion. He was nothing short of a walking wet dream, the first guy I’d met in a long time to make me feel like I hadn’t worked hard enough to make myself sexy.

Adam saw my appreciation and beamed at me, and fuck me if I didn’t flush and get fully half-hard just from his beautiful, incandescent smiles. It felt almost unfair for someone to be able to turn two such captivating, flesh-heating faces on you at once.

Another figure loomed in my peripheral vision, the eyelines suggesting that this was who Jeremy had been talking to. With an effort I tore my gaze away from the muscle Adonis and found a taller, good-looking two-headed man of East Asian extraction standing close behind him. Doctor Kwan, I guessed. I’d expected the town doctor to be older, but if anything Jeremy had a few years on him. He was fit but not ostentatiously so, his forest-green double-collared tee suggesting a lanky, well-proportioned frame.

He was watching me and Jeremy at the same time—one of the benefits of dicephalism, I supposed. When he noticed me looking he turned both sets of brown eyes toward me, chagrin flickering through them. “Welcome to Dos Rocas,” his left head (from my perspective) said. “I’m Min, and this is my assistant, Adam. You’ve already met Jeremy. I’m truly sorry your first experience of our little haven has been a bit… fraught so far.”

I blinked at him. “Dos Rocas?” I repeated, not sure whether to be amused. As we spoke I was acutely conscious of Jeremy at my back, eyes boring into me, and the warmly radiant presence of Adam, the shirtless muscle god, still smiling at me, mere inches away. Fuck, if my pecs were as big as Adam’s, we could be casually brushing them against each other right now, like commuters forced to stand too close to each other on a train and figuring they might as well get a few clandestine jollies out of a bit of bubble-butt butting. It wasn’t like I could step back, either—Jeremy was right behind me, and I could feel his heat, too. I tried to pretend the two men and my three-quarters erection didn’t exist, and force all of my attention onto Doctor Kwan.

Min—Doctor Kwan—grinned in stereo. “There’s a story or two about that name,” he said. “The short version is, legend has it our colonial town founder, Luis Bautista de Aguilar, had a reputation for being a bit… stubborn.” He demonstrated by pretending to knock on the side of his other head while making a clucking sound with his tongue, and I couldn’t help but smile.

“We should show him the spring!” the godling said , turning to Kwan.

Min frowned, considering. Again, he divided his attention between me and Jeremy. “Since you have partaken, you have that right,” the left head, the one meeting my gaze, said cautiously. I nodded. By this time I’d gathered that it was the water itself and not something Jeremy had put in it that was of import, though that knowledge was only marginally reassuring. “And the festival is tonight, of course,” the doctor added.

“C’mon, let’s go!” Adam said excitedly. He grabbed my hand firmly in his and would have dragged me out the door right that second if Min hadn’t put a hand on his shoulder, stopping him.

Min eyed me carefully. “Are you sure you’re not experiencing anything untoward?” he asked in a professional tone. “Headache? Dizziness? Nausea?”

I smiled. “I’m fine, Doc. Show me this mystical spring of yours.”

Min rolled his eyes before gesturing ostentatiously toward the open door of the large, airy bedroom I’d awoken in, as though my destiny awaited in the domicile and precincts beyond its simple walls and well-made walnut jambs. Adam lifted his eyebrows at me in an eager question, and, finding his enthusiasm irresistibly endearing, I nodded my assent. He grinned, and I let him pull me out of the room, Min and Jeremy following close behind.

From a distance the town had seemed sparsely inhabited, but it seemed there was more to the village than what could be seen from the parking lot at the end of the old highway. The wide streets were not exactly teeming, but there were plenty of people out and about, on foot, on horseback, or driving little mule-led carts. They nodded at me politely, far less shocked at the presence of an outsider than some of the rural waitresses and gas station attendants I’d seen in recent days, and I gradually gathered the impression that they were collectively reining in their curiosity about me so I wouldn’t be too overwhelmed.

I tried to return the favor by not staring back, but it was almost impossible not to. The town was strikingly diverse, of various colors and ancestries, drawn from any peoples who could possibly have somehow made it to this part of the world at any point in the past. The clothing was mostly modern and very casual—tee shirts, jeans, loose button down like the one I’d somehow lost track of thanks to a certain someone. Everyone was male and, I had to say, nicely built, though with significant diversity in height and level of physical achievement, and I couldn’t wait to hear how that was made viable long-term. What were the economics of a place like this? What did they do for trade, or for fun? I saw a fair few couples and throuples necking in alleys as we walked, and maybe that provided a hint as to some of their pastimes, but I felt the zeal of a new student stealing over me all over again as I hungered to know more. There were animals, too, dogs and chickens and the draft animals I’d noticed, all of them looking just like their counterparts in the regular world apart from exuding the same strength and perfect health as the humans; but this was a place above all of men.

Perhaps the most unexpected revelation was that two-headedness, which I’d assumed from my sample of three to be a universal characteristic of this secret Shangri-La I’d discovered, was merely dominant, not comprehensive. Maybe a third of the guys I saw were possessed of a single noggin like myself. They seemed just as much a part of the community as the two-headed folk: they waved cheerily, some tossing me a knowing wink, and seemed well-represented among the shopworkers, homesteaders, and laborers I passed. More than a few of the couples I identified were made of a two-header and a one-header, and they seemed as content and fulfilled as the rest.

I took all of this in with fascination and wonder, but also with a healthy dose of cynicism. It didn’t feel like an accident I was being shown these things on the way to whatever it was I was actually being brought to see.

At first Adam played guide and shepherd, Min having moved ahead of us to lead the way through the curving streets; but the puppyish muscle god was easily distracted and kept pulling me this way and that to peer in the glass-blower’s or the bookbinder’s or the chocolatier’s, and after a ways Jeremy nudged him gently but firmly out of the way and took his place at my right, lacing his fingers in mine. I didn’t mind. My shock at his having slipped me the mystical-springwater mickey had already dissipated—somehow I had the sense that I would have done the same had our positions been reversed. What I was left with was a need to know who this was next to me, and what it was he needed.

We walked in silence for a ways, wrapped comfortably in the noises of the town, each busy with our thoughts. Adam had now trotted ahead, and was comparing notes with Min about the horses they’d been checking over that morning. Finally I looked up at Jeremy and asked, “Why are you so possessive of me, Jeremy?”

He looked down at me in surprise, as if he hadn’t expected me to read his behavior that way. Then he looked ahead again. He didn’t answer at first. I squeezed his hand, as if to assure him I really wasn’t mad anymore. After a while he admitted, “I had a dream about you.”

“Yeah?” I wasn’t sure what more to say. In a town with a magical water-source, dreams might very well be reliably portentous, more so than where I came from. I kind of wished I could say I’d dreamt about him, too, but no such luck. I hadn’t had any premonitions or forebodings about him or this place, not that i could remember. Just the innate, unshakable sense now that we’d met that we fit together.

“Yeah.” His gaze was still straight ahead. “A whole goddamned year ago.” I blinked up at him. He turned the nearer head toward me then, one dark eyebrow arched, lips twitching. “You’re late,” he deadpanned.

I had to laugh, and he grinned too. “Sorry,” I said, my heart a bit lighter. “I got here as soon as I could.” For the first time it occurred to me to wonder whether my stumbling across this place as an incredibly lost traveler was as much of an accident as I’d thought it had been. It seemed increasingly obvious in retrospect, though the how and why were obscure to me. Still… accidents were the children of fate, some Greek had said, and a place like this might just tug at the warp and woof of the world according to its own likes and needs. Maybe it wasn’t even about just love—maybe Shangri-La needed a geologist just as much as Jeremy needed a life partner, and I needed a purpose in love and career. That would be interesting to find out. Dos Rocas clearly interacted with the outside—a lot of materials were handmade, I saw, but there were manufactured goods too, so there must be some two-way trading with the mundane economies beyond the crevasse—and that could mean any number of things for an earth scientist in a changing world.

He looked ahead again. “You can make it up to me,” he said airily, but his lips were quirked, and I was still grinning like a goof.

I noted the “me” and couldn’t wait any longer. I stopped us and we paused, facing each other near a little furniture shop, just on the verge of the grassy village square. I looked up at him, my gaze dancing between the two handsome faces I was already unnervingly familiar with. I’d observed separate behavior between them—the left head seemed more communicative, the right more temperamental, for example. But they also acted as an individual, and it sure seemed like everyone had a single name and a single relationship with the community. So did the distinct behavior indicate separate identities and personalities, or was it something else, like right- and left-handedness, or some kind of social conditioning about which head did what?

“Okay, I have to ask,” I said. “Are you one lump, or two?”

He looked at me with a curious frown. “What do you mean?”

I pointed at his heads with my free hand. “I mean: are you one Jeremy—” I waved my index finger between the two minds. “—or two Jeremies?” I spread my thumb and index finger, indicating separateness of the two crania.

He bit his lip. “I’m not sure it’s that… simple?” he said.

I tilted my head, and he tried to find words. “I think you would say,” he said at length, “that I have two minds, but… they share everything, all the time.”

I nodded. My hormones were being a pain. I wanted him, and that feeling was stealing into my very bones as I stared up into his beautiful blue eyes. A more sentimental sort might have confessed his undying love right there in front of the old fashioned tallboys, but, well, that wasn’t me. I went for the gag.

I smirked, remembering my observation earlier about his ears being opposite each other. I dropped my eyes to the lobes in question. “So, what you’re saying is, you can hear yourself thinking?”

He narrowed his eyes at me, and I smiled wider. We turned and started walking again, entering the verdant lawn of the central commons. “You’re not the first to put it that way,” he sighed.

“I never said anything. You didn’t hear me making any joke of any kind. So what’s the deal with this festival Adam mentioned?”

The musclepup in question had left us behind completely and was trotting all around the wide lawn at the heart of town, gabbling happily with the various villagers already gathered in twos and threes, some in larger groups like families of brothers or lovers. There were blankets and baskets of food. A few groups had set up barbecues in the freestanding stone hearths that dotted the space. Overhead the sun was merging into the high lip of the broad crevasse the town lay within, turning the sky above a captivating deep blue. A handful of precocious stars already dotted the domed expanse.

“It’s more of a picnic,” Jeremy was saying, as though following my own line of thought. We were approaching a low stone structure, maybe waist high, roughly tetrahedral, though it looked as though it were a natural feature of the land—a pile of rocks that happened to have a little inch-high fountain of clear water bubbling out of it, slithering down the far side and trailing away in a channel that disappeared into the fields and meadows beyond.

Min was there, and Adam had rejoined us after making the rounds. A few of the nearer groups of villagers were watching us, aware of my presence as an outsider. I tried not to feel self-conscious.

“We gather here every thirteen weeks to share food and stories,” Min said. “We seldom have visitors, but when we do it’s always on the day of a festival. It’s been that way, well, since I got here, and that was a long time ago. And probably long before that, all the way back to ol’ Dos Rocas himself, and the peoples before him, before there was even a village here, only men.”

I nodded. More people were watching. I felt like an awkward, just-landed alien, an Irish E.T. on the planet of hunky two-headers. “And these visitors,” I asked Min carefully, “it’s always people whom fate has drawn to you and your village?”

Min shrugged, not wanting to commit to the manipulation of destiny or whatever it was I was now sure had pulled me here. “Some have chosen to depart with fond memories,” Min said. His eyes fell on Adam and he smiled fondly. “And yes, others have chosen to join our little community.”

“Like me!” Adam affirmed with matching grins.

“Like all of us,” Jeremy said, squeezing my hand. “None of us was born here. We all made the choice.” He was watching me closely again. I could almost feel all the things he was thinking and wanting. He wanted me to stay, to be with him, but I had to know it was a choice—a choice to love him, and a choice to become one of them. And I had been shown more choices as we’d walked through the town, as if to say I did not have only the single option that it might have seemed like. I could go; I could stay, and look like me; I could stay, and look like Jeremy and Min and Adam; and maybe there were more options as well.

“But Adam was the newest,” Min put in.

“Until you!” Adam finished. As an afterthought he added, “If you want,” an edge of worry creeping into his ebullience.

I smiled at Adam, then, when I turned that smile toward Jeremy, my heart started to ache. I wanted to kiss him, but it wasn’t time yet, because when I did I wouldn’t be able to stop, maybe ever. I looked over at Min instead. “So,” I said, as casually as I could, “just so I know, what’s involved in the making of this… choice?”

Min smiled warmly, and Jeremy let out as long breath, his grip on my hand warm and tight, me gripping him right back. Adam beamed. They already know how this was likely to go.

It turned out there were stages to the process. Drinking water from the spring opened me up physically to the secret land the community shared, a place discoverable by no one not called to it. The next stage involved eating food from the fold shared by the villagers, which was why there was a feast at the antipodes of solstice and equinox and why the pull was stronger on those days, with all the villagers thinking about their community and its needs. The spring, it seemed, was nonsentient but friendly and eager to help those with whom it lived in centuries of equilibrium.

Once I’d shared the water and food, it remained only to choose what I wanted to become, and whether that involved staying in Dos Rocas or returning to what I was already thinking of as the outside world.

Night had fallen, and Jeremy and I were laying in the cool grass under the slowly multiplying stars, each on our elbows staring into each other’s eyes. I couldn’t tell what was more overpowering, my lust for his long, hard-won physique and handsome faces, or the tiny hot sun of unquenchable love that I could feel starting to stabilize and wax to permanence in the very center of my soul, a twin to the one shining out of those fathomless blue eyes.

I shook my head, my cheeks hurting from smiling so much. I decided the first component of our connection needed more immediate attention. Jeremy hadn’t brought any food to the festival, having been busy tending to me after my dramatic arrival, so the night had been all about couples and lover-families sharing their food with us—either as we made the rounds and I was introduced to the happy villagers, or later as we settled into our cozy fold near the spring. It was a wide variety of, as it turned out, hilariously mundane fare. Who knew they had hot dogs and tacos in Utopia? Jeremy knew my choice was a foregone conclusion and had indulgently played along as I’d dragged it out. He had been feeding me bits of each dish, teasingly checking with me to see if I felt full yet—“full,” we both knew, meaning “ready.”

I sidled closer, our shared arousal seeming to charge and warm the air between us. His hand rested on my upper arm, slowly stroking my full, sculpted triceps. I was almost purring under his touch. I never had found my shirt, and it suddenly seemed a cruel injustice that Jeremy was wearing any clothes at all.

“Jeremy,” I said huskily.

“Liam,” he responded dryly, speaking from both mouths because he knew I liked hearing my name that way.

We were being left to ourselves, but the others were still about us, cuddling in their own nests some ways away in a rough circle around the spring, watching the stars with us. This was a pretty close-knit community, and more affectionate than most, but I doubted it was good form to peel off my soon-to-be-lover’s pants right here on the town commons and go down on his stiff, heat-throwing cock. Still, I think I managed to communicate that there was one more taste I needed.

Jeremy smiled, dimpling hard under his stubbly cheeks. He slid his hand up behind my neck, pulling me toward him. Our lips fell together. Warmth flooded through me, my spine tingling like release of energy, and I shifted my weight, moaning in satisfaction as I was finally, finally able to join my mouths to his. It was the first deep, dirty double kiss of our new life together in the fields and village of Dos Rocas, the first of many, many more. Usually you’d say it was not the last, but the real truth was… with us, there would never, ever be a last.

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