Anthony stood with his Muck boot on a fallen log as he peered out over the boggy forest.  Brandon’s eyes flashed to the stippled rubber upper, the way it gently creased above Anthony’s toe as he leaned forward.  It was a quick glance, but nothing that got the better of him.  He resumed tightening to the screw that clamped the phone snugly to Anthony’s selfie stick.

“I’m not sure we’ll get much of anything too interesting here,” Anthony thought out loud.  Ever since Brandon had started tagging along on his video-making ventures, he had gotten into the habit of speaking through his process.  Brandon had recognized what he was doing, and appreciated the effort.  So long as Anthony kept their focus on the cinematography, it downplayed the significance of the subject matter.  And that was–after all–why Brandon was here.

“Not deep enough?” Brandon squinted at Anthony in the sunlight, flickering peach in his eyes as the leaves above gently waved.

“Or very wet,” Anthony observed, poking a stick at the ground beyond the log.  He swung his leg over and planted his boot on the forest floor.  Both watched passively as his foot remained on top of the damp surface.  Anthony looked up at Brandon, who met his gaze.  “I guess it’s going to be glamor shots of Muck boots in leaves for the subscribers today,” he said, careful to avoid any hint of disappointment in his tenor.  “Good news is that it should be an easy one.”  He gave Brandon’s upper arm a reassuring pat.

Brandon knew he should feel relieved.  And he did.  Mostly.  But sometimes he thought he wouldn’t mind being tested by seeing Anthony get caught a little out of his depth.  It had been a dry summer.  Many of Anthony’s favorite mudding haunts had become little more than soft dips in the baked ground.  New material had been difficult to come by, and Brandon had been almost bored, let alone pushed anywhere near his limit.  He passed the selfie stick over the log to Anthony’s outstretched hand.  “Where would you like me?”

For the next hour, Brandon followed Anthony through the undergrowth, searching for ground that would yield, grabbing the additional angles of boots on the path, and watching as Anthony filmed himself stepping through the trickle of the one pitiful mountain stream they managed to find.  None of the material was remotely provocative as far as he was concerned, but there would be some followers–Brandon knew–who would relish any new footage.  When Anthony had just about run out of patience, Brandon had suggested using texture as an element of interest.

“Texture?” Anthony repeated, his eyes narrowing in thought.  

“Most of your viewers enjoy your videos because of the mud, right?” Brandon reasoned, trying his best to sound detached and nonchalant.

“That seems to be the case,” he responded, his habitual lopsided grin climbing up one side of his face.

“Well think about it.  That’s an element of texture.  What if we use close-ups in high definition, and maybe even some slow motion with water, to draw the viewers’ attention to other, different textures?”

Anthony looked unsure.  “Like what?  Leaves?”

Brandon flashed a tight grin.  He was pleased to be the one to have an idea for once.  But as always, he was unsure of where he stood with Anthony.  The nature of their relationship was a bizarre one–there was no appropriate label for it as far as Brandon was concerned.  “I was thinking your boots themselves.  You had mentioned ‘glamor shots.’  So let’s get in really close to this bumpy rubber upper.  The waffle pattern at your heel.  And the knit of the neoprene area around your legs here.”  He gestured to the drab olive shafts that hugged Anthony’s calves, realizing that he longed to feel the fabric on his fingertips.  Instinctively, he took a step back.

Anthony bobbed his head in agreement as he mulled over the suggestion.  “Yeah.  Yeah, okay.  Why not?  We certainly don’t have anything to lose.  And at least this video won’t be the same old stuff.”  

“Exactly,” Brandon agreed enthusiastically.  

---

When Anthony thought they had recorded enough artistic close-ups, they started back to the Jeep.  “You were really great today,” he said, looking over at Brandon trudging beside him.  

“Really?” Brandon tried not to sound too pleased as he slapped a mosquito on his arm.  The shadows were lengthening, and as the early evening light sifted through the trees in golden angled shafts, swarms of the ruthless blood-sucking insects could be seen dancing in the air like dust motes.  

“Absolutely.  You got really involved, you had ideas…this was good.” A pause. “Like a breakthrough.” 

Brandon considered this.  True, there were a few moments of electric tingle when he had been panning his camera up the back of Anthony’s leg and saw the way the sun softly shimmered off the neoprene or how his jeans bunched around the tops of the boots, but at no point had it given way to the ache in the back of his throat that signaled he was going too far.  He was about to acknowledge his agreement with Anthony’s assessment when they reached a clearing at the edge of the woods they had not remembered passing earlier.

It was obviously some kind of construction site. Instead of the soft-edged wall of foliage that trees naturally take on when woods meet a meadow, here the forest had been abruptly gnawed away. Trees at the edge stood disfigured with branches artlessly hacked back by machinery, sheered off at the edge of an arbitrary boundary.  The ground beyond was churned raw.  It mingled with water from an unknown source and spilled over black plastic barriers and onto the carpet of leaves like a candle that had been left to burn for long and had puddled across a tabletop.  The site was quiet, but the pungent smell of the disturbed clay assaulted their nostrils. 

“What have we here?” Anthony said loudly as he veered from the path and beelined for the mesh fencing, ferns slapping softly at his legs.  “Methinks we found some mud!”  Brandon, trailing behind with his eyes on the forest floor, didn’t even have to look up at him to know that Anthony was beaming. He had stopped before a large swath of silt, once a roiling river of yellow mud that had breached the barrier and was now frozen in time, slowly hardening back into the ground on which it had come to rest. Pebbles studded the flow like black shells on beach freshly raked by waves. 

As Anthony pulled out the selfie stick, Brandon automatically responded by unclipping his own phone from his belt holster. “I’m going to head right up this little mud flow and through that place in the barrier where it sags,” Anthony began.  He pointed his hand like a coach strategizing with his team on the sidelines. Usually Brandon found this reassuring, if not a little amusing—he couldn’t help but think that Anthony enjoyed being a little protective of him, always making sure that there were no surprises. But in this moment he felt uneasy. It was late. They had been out for quite a while, and though it had been an overwhelming success as far as he was concerned, Brandon couldn’t ignore the feeling that he was pushing his luck.  Nor could he shake the apprehension that Anthony was driving a bit hard to score a win for his channel. “Why don’t you follow alongside until we reach the barrier?” Anthony continued, swinging his selfie stick up before him.  

This was normally where Anthony turned and looked Brandon in the eye to ask if he was okay with the plan. Brandon pretty much always shook his head in the affirmative, and Anthony usually responded with a wink. But this time  Anthony was preoccupied. Brandon had hardly raised his phone before Anthony had stepped into the mud flow. The farthest edge was the shallowest, and so had dried the most. His boot tread scooped through the silt to the dead leaves below as though it were crumbly fudge. But as Anthony began to follow the mud’s path toward its source, the sludge quickly grew in depth. Brandon followed alongside, his screen trained on Anthony’s rubber-topped feet.  He watched the mud begin to curl over the boots like chunky peanut butter, and he became aware of the telltale ache starting in the back of his throat. 

By the time Anthony had followed his selfie stick to the sagging mesh fence, the Muck Boots were plowing into soft buttery ooze up to where the olive neoprene began. Brandon’s heart was thudding.  He could feel the heat spreading in his groin, the blood threatening to flood into his shaft like a light breeze toying with a windsock. “Pull your shit together,” he silently mouthed to himself as his eyes darted from the screen to the sodden boots. 

Anthony was on cloud nine. He glanced over at Brandon and waggled his eyebrows, giving a thumbs up. He pulled his right boot from the mire, which protested in a soft burbling sound as he did, and raised his leg to clear the barrier. The silty ooze on the other side had ponded thickly against it.  The boot sank to its rim as Anthony put his weight down.  Brandon felt his cock throb instantly in response as the surrounding mud responded to boot’s descent in a small chorus of bubbles that chattered at the surface, splattering his Anthony’s dark jeans with sticky tan flecks. 

Just like that, after a quiet smoldering under the surface all afternoon, Brandon was now on the brink, trying desperately to claw back from the erotic pull of the scene.  But the fetish gods can be cruel—especially when they’ve been denied their due. The displacement of Anthony’s right boot caused the construction barrier to sag further. A wave of now unrestrained sludge slowly began to slide between his legs and roll over his left foot. Anthony braced himself against the weight of the mud as it piled around the shaft of his boot and cascaded up to his jeans. The entire construction site, it seemed, was on the move—an earthen glacier drawing to Anthony as though eager to wrap itself around his legs.  He glanced up to shoot Brandon a look of sheer triumph for the spectacle he had created.  But it was met with flushed cheeks, his pants tenting at his crotch, and Brandon shaking his head vigorously as he backed away.