Butterfly

“Yes, I would like that,” I answered, not really sure. I had enough experience now to discern the Congolese baritone’s interest—the nature of it—but not enough experience in these matters to be either quick or glib in response. There was no reason not to say no—Hal Horton, the conductor for the D.C. Gay Men’s Chorus, had asked that we all be welcoming and accommodating to the needs of the visiting soloist—so I didn’t say no.

“We can go to my hotel. It’s nearby. There’s a bar there. Ethan is it? Your name is Ethan?”

“Yes, of course,” I said, watching the slim, but muscular dusty-black—black, not brown—man move away from me as I stood up from the piano bench. As he moved—I’d almost say glided—away he was talking with other members of the choir, full of self-confidence, fully aware that he was in the spotlight. He was a handsome man. I’d almost call him majestic. I certainly thought of him as majestic after having heard him sing through the Broadway Show program we had been rehearsing. He moved gracefully, like a dancer, and I couldn’t help looking at the movement of his bubble butt as he walked away and before others descended on me to talk about issues with the program the choir was singing. I was the choir’s new accompanist.

I was still feeling my way around with relationships with men, and my exposure to that was slowly evolving. At twenty-four and in a new body, I had moved to Washington, D.C., a totally new man—literally—to work as a practice accompanist at the Kennedy Center, the city’s premier performance arts center hovering over the Potomac River between Georgetown and the Mall area. I was working too, voluntarily, as the accompanist for the D.C. Gay Men’s Chorus. This put me in direct contact with openly gay men. I was much too much of a novice in a world I’d long watched from the sidelines to be able to identify a gay guy in the general population, and, in my new life, these were men who not only were gay but also who noticed me and came on to me. This was a new world to me.

I was a child prodigy, graduating from high school at fifteen and from college—in the music program at DePauw University in the sleepy little Indiana town of Greencastle, southwest of Indianapolis—at nineteen. From there I’d gone into a dull life of mediocrity, teaching piano in Greencastle, the most unusual aspect of my life being that I lived with an older man, who kept me. I did my teaching in a room in his large house, which meant I didn’t go out much. We did have a sex life, in a limited sense, but we were both undesirables to others at that point in life and did little more than mutual hand jobs and quick, awkward fumblings of oral and anal. We both were fat. I had always been heavy and geeky, my nose always in studies, always too young for the other boys my age, never into sports. Clayton Snyder, an elderly dentist, was fat and ugly, but he kept me safe and in the isolation I sought and was very good to me, as a companion, until the day he dropped dead of a heart attack when I was twenty-one and he was sixty-four.

I hadn’t realized that he was a millionaire several times over—or that he had no one to inherit other than me. His death came as a life-altering shock to me. I could have remained withdrawn, except now financially secure. The unexpected acceptance to study performance piano at Julliard in New York City abruptly changed all of that, sweeping me up in a whirlwind of opportunity that moved too fast for me to defend myself against it.

In those years in New York, now financially secure and becoming aware of the world and of my own sexuality, I spent almost three years coming out of my cocoon and morphing into a butterfly. I shed seventy pounds, put myself into the hands of an expensive personal trainer and groomer, became an accomplished pianist and a body-beautiful, model-class twenty-three-year old. When I had become a butterfly, the personal trainer taught me to take cock and to want to give cock as well. He was much more interested in oral, however, and taught me to give expert blow jobs—without giving much in return. But my interest in music had taken center stage and my experience with men was still very limited.

Then, barely twenty-four and having learned all I could at Julliard and having developed and stylized my body to perfection, I took the job in Washington, D.C., and started to try my butterfly wings—with the innocence of a much younger man and in a whole new life that gave no one reference to my sad past.

We were practicing at the Theater of the Performing Arts on Connecticut Avenue, near the Van Ness Center, and the Congolese soloist, Beno Kayembe, was being roomed at the Days Inn by Wyndham several blocks north of the theater. We walked, him moving gracefully, like a panther, a hand on my buttocks to guide me, me like a lamb to the slaughter. He was confident. I was trembling, emotionally willing but also an emotional basket case. This was something I’d come to a new life in Washington to pursue—a new, riskier, sexier life.

I was trying my best to hide my nervousness and inexperience in this from Kayembe, embarrassed by my almost total naivete in gay matters. I was avoiding accepting this “let’s go for a drink” idea as being more than just that. I had zero confidence in my ability to attract men, even though I now did so. I had every reason to believe that this was just normal life for a hunk like Kayembe—that he could casually pick up and bed willing men.

What if this wasn’t an assignation, I wondered. Was I being stupid and completely inexperienced? And what if it was?

While we were moving, he admitted that the Days Inn didn’t have a bar. “I was just checking on whether you’d go to my hotel with me,” he said, with a full white-toothed grin.

I smiled back, not wanting to admit to him that I hadn’t caught the signal at all, let alone the meaning of it.

“By that I mean my hotel room,” he clarified. I still didn’t do more than smile. He took it as acquiescence, I’m sure—that I was as much into casual sex as he was. It was actually a result of not knowing what to say. His hand went possessively to my butt as we walked.

We stopped at a bar on Connecticut Avenue and had a drink, although I couldn’t have told you later what either of us had to drink. But we didn’t stay long, exchanging chit chat on how each of us had arrived at today’s rehearsal—his life in the Congo and the difficulty of growing up gay—not openly, of course—and as a singer, also not that openly, being expected to be something else, which, in his case was being a personal trainer in a gym. I told him he certainly looked like a personal trainer and he was pleased. I told I’d had a personal training before I came to D.C., but I didn’t tell him just how much work it had required to get me fit. He said nothing about my new, trim self, but then he had no idea what I had looked like three years ago. I got the definite impression that he was much more about himself than any guy he was trying to make. It was pretty obvious that he didn’t have to try that hard to make a guy. All of his conversation indicated that he was confident he was going to fuck me and that I had been in synch with that from the moment we met and I agreed to go with him.

There was no question whether I was gay and a submissive. I was working with the gay men’s chorus and I had accepted his invitation to go with him—and he quite obviously was a top.

I was more sketchy about my background, not thinking that he’d be impressed to hear I had once been 230 pounds, painfully shy and unsocial, and dull as a bedpost. He’d obviously been drawn to the new, butterfly, version of me, and I decided to leave it like that, dwelling on having been a child prodigy and thus more secluded from a normal life than most boys and that I had recently finished my studies at the Julliard in New York and come to D.C. to start a new life—to start life itself, actually. Late.

“You mean it was late when you started letting men screw you?”

“Yes.” His bluntness went straight to my cock, making me harden. In many ways he was primitive, raw surface honesty. I found it arousing. “Not that it has happened much,” I added. I was so afraid he’d find me too inexperienced for him. I was on the edge. Did I want to or didn’t I? He was far beyond me on that issue. It was like he already was laying me on top of the table in this bar—by right of his beautiful body and his raging self-confidence.

“You’re not telling me you’re a virgin, are you?” he asked.

“No. Just not much experienced,” I said.

“Sweet,” he said, a grin spreading across his face and a hand going to my thigh. “Shall we go to my hotel room now?”

“Yes,” I said, trembling and shimmering inside.

* * * *

“I’m from the Congo. Our country holds the record for biggest cocks. Over seven inches.”

“You’re bigger than that, aren’t you?” I said, with a shudder. I, of course, was no expert in gauging cock measurements, but he looked a foot long to me—and thick and very, very black. It fascinated me; I couldn’t look away.

“Yes, I am,” Kayembe said, with a grin. “A lot longer than that.” And he was, I was sure. It would have hung down to his knees if it hadn’t been sticking out, erect. “That’s why I undressed first. I didn’t want you to find out too late to withdraw.”

“But you’re hard. So, you don’t want—”

“No, I don’t want you to leave,” he said. “If you don’t think you can take it, you can at least give me a hand job. After a rehearsal like we’ve just had, I’m all keyed up.”

“But you don’t mean that, do you?” I asked. “You’re not going to let me leave just with giving you a hand job.”

“No, I’m not,” he said, with a grin. “But we can pretend, if you want. You’re going to take it inside you and love it.”

The Congolese soloist had stripped as soon as we’d gotten to his hotel room. I’d sat on the foot of the bed, watching him, trembling and struggling with myself on whether I wanted to be here. But I had grown impatient and I wasn’t getting younger. I wanted to know it all, experience it all. Kayembe would be something exotic—something “more.” And that he was. I’d never been with a black man before. I’d probably never be with a black as primeval and hung as he was ever again. His body was magnificent—not overly muscular, but perfectly formed. Dusky black, not the variations of chocolate seen in most blacks in America. Purely Central African, exhibiting even more so because of the tattooing and the stippling on his chest and shoulder blades—a pattern of raised beading of the skin. Nothing like I’d ever seen or ever would see in an American black, I was sure.

And the cock. It was the cock that was arresting, out of proportion to the body. In erection, oversized for his body, impossible to avoid, reaching out toward me as I sat on the bed. Impossibly long and thick. Proud, as it had every reason to be. The raised beading—the stippling—went in a swirl around the shaft as well. I tried looking away, but the wall next to the bed was a mirror, and I could still see it there, reaching out toward me. Besides, he was handling it himself like it was a precious treasure, which, no doubt, it was to him—and to many of the men he had sex with.

He reached over and touched me on the shoulder, gently saying in that rich baritone voice of his. “Don’t be scared,” he said. “I will be good to you. You will open to me to take it deep. Play with it. Make it something you want inside you.”

Shuddering, I turned back to him, took the shaft in my hands, and, as he leaned back and jutted his pelvis forward to let me handle it, played with stroking it and pulling the foreskin back on the glans. I knelt before him. He took my head between his hands. I knew that he wanted to dip my head forward and for me to take him in my mouth.

“I want you to give me suck,” he murmured.

“I’m building up to that,” I answered.

“If you don’t want this—if you think you cannot take me, give me release with your hand; then you can leave,” he said. “If not, take it in your mouth and then in your ass. I’ll give you an experience and an education as you never had before. Do you wish to leave?”

I hesitated, absolutely terrified. But I wanted to be a butterfly. I wanted to unfurl my wings and experience a new world—a whole new life—while I had time and opportunity to do so. If I left, I’d always wonder.

“I want to, but I don’t know if I can,” I murmured.

“It’s all according to nature. I was made to be inside you and you were made t sheath me. If we take our time, you can. And once you have . . .” He didn’t finish the sentence, but he and was caressing my cheeks with his long, black fingers, coaxing me into position.

“No, I’ll stay,” I said, my voice shaky even in my own hearing. “But you’ll be? . . . you’re so big.”

“Good,” he said, ignoring the plea. “We begin.” He placed his hands on my shoulders, pulling me in closer on my knees on the carpet at the foot of the bed and between his spread thighs, his hands going back to cupping my cheeks, the bulb off his cock pressed at my lips. I opened my mouth, doing what I could to unhinge my jaw, opening up over the glans, pressing the foreskin back with my lips and teeth. This, at least, I had done before, if not with a shaft of this size. I had been doing this much since I was nineteen, if not often. My eyes watered at taking him in. He moaned as I dragged my teeth down the sides of the shaft and over the nubs that had been stippled on the cock as I took him in. As I did so, I wondered if I’d be able to feel the nubs on my passage walls, but I didn’t remember to think about it later while it was happening.

“Fuck, yes, you can suck cock,” he said. “So, let’s do this right.” He pulled out of me, lifted me up to my feet, efficiently undressed me, lifted me again, and gently put me down on my back on the bed, with my head hanging over the foot of the bed. The bulb of the cock was pressed to my lips again, with my head arched back, giving the shaft a straight channel into my throat. I gagged a bit as the cock slid in, but this only made him laugh. It didn’t make him stop. I opened wide, including my throat, putting myself into the stance I’d used before to deep throat, and he gasped at how much of himself he could get into my throat—not all by any means, though. He massaged my throat with one hand, feeling where the bulb of the cock was reaching, while working my nubs with the other and slow stroking my throat to an ejaculation. I gagged in trying to take and swallow the cum, but I managed. He sighed his satisfaction, pulled out, and then started manipulating my body into the main event.

While we were naked and in preparation, he playing with his shaft to regain hardness, I remarked on the beauty of his body, which pleased him. He said nothing of mine, which I resented more than a bit, as I had worked hard to achieve it, but he spent time exploring me with his hands and his mouth, so I took that as the best compliment I was going to get from someone as self-absorbed as he was. He didn’t throw me out of the room unfucked. He knew every inch of me intimately and had used me totally before I hobbled out of his room on my own.

What came afterward probably was as rough for me as it was because he had been fooled into thinking that my ability to deep throat, even of a cock his size, meant I was experienced in other ways. I wasn’t—not well enough for a man of his size. But there wasn’t much I could do about his taking from that point. He was much, much stronger than I was and he just put me in the positions he wanted me in and, after he’d recovered his erection when he was done preparing me, he just took what he wanted. It didn’t matter to him that he had a cock that stretched me to the limit and could almost reach my tonsils from the ass end.

This was all for his pleasure. Whatever I got along the way, which was a lot, mind you, was incidental to Kayembe taking his pleasure. He was accustomed to guys he was fucking being so in awe of him and his endowments that they gave him whatever he wanted for his own pleasure.

I was in awe of him. He entered and entered and entered me as I writhed under him, panting and gasping, and he fucked me totally. I took it and took it and took it. He obviously enjoyed hearing me groan and moan and unsuccessfully press on him to take it less vigorously. At length, I just gave up and lay back, open and vulnerable, spreading my legs as wide as possible, lifting my tail to the best angle of access, and he took his pleasure as he wished.

* * * *

I was exhausted, stretched out, totally defeated in his arms, and after a half hour of preparation, with Kayembe intent on bottoming out in me before, in his words, he could “begin,” I collapsed and totally surrendered. And when I did, when I totally relaxed—or thought I had—I stretched that extra little bit that got those last two inches, of many, many thick inches inside me.

All the time he was working me with his mouth and his lubed fingers and a huge greased dildo, he had been demanding and cajoling me to relax and open totally to him, which I thought I had done, but I had been wrong. When I finally despaired of pleasing him or even of surviving the experience—of dying gloriously because throughout it all I was aroused, on a high, and wanted to do this, to sheath it all and enjoy its play and flow inside me—I did relax and open enough for the satisfaction of his complete possession. His satisfaction, not mine, in his mind. This was for his pleasure. I was just there to sheath him and give him an evening’s sport—sexual exercise and release.

I couldn’t complain. He hadn’t indicated it was otherwise. And I was using him too—to go to the top of the mountain in sex. To make up for lost time and opportunity. To be able to say I could take, what, eight or ten inches of extraordinarily thick black cock? Who knows? Who cared at this point—other than Kayembe who was determined that I do take it before, as he claimed, he could “begin”?

Fuck, if he hadn’t begun already . . .

When I had gone completely docile and, I thought, relaxed, loose, and stretched for him and he had buried that last two inches, he was sitting on the foot of the bed, with me in his lap, facing him, my back on his thighs, my left leg running up his torso, and my arms dangling, uselessly, at my sides to the carpet. His hands were squeezing and separating my buttocks cheeks.

Victorious at last, he laughed, murmured, “I told you you would do it”—not that I could do it but that I was going to do it and then, after holding for nearly a minute as my breathing calmed down and we both concentrated on the throbbing of his shaft fully buried inside me, the muscles of my passage walls undulating over the alien club possessing and stretching me to the limit, he began what his idea of the fuck was—grasping my hips in his hands and pulling me on and off the cock in long slides.

Moaning, I lay there, letting him have his way, no longer struggling in any way, being positioned and moved like a rag doll. Over the next half hour, he manipulated me into several different positions, never pulling his cock all the way out, always bottoming on his slides and thrusts, taking me totally.

As he fucked me, still coaxing me to open to him, he was whispering, “Think of something else. You will relax more. You need to relax more. I want to be in deeper.” He wasn’t coaxing me thus out of irritation or frustration. He was clearly enjoying the conquest and challenge of taking it from me. I was giving him the sport he sought.

Relax more with a club inside me? My mind went to butterflies floating around in a garden of flowers, and it worked. Beyond that, being a pianist, a musical background—on the piano—floated in as well, and I luxuriated in Liszt’s “Transcendental Etude No. 10” and his “Reminiscences de Norma,” as well as Prokofiev’s “Piano Sonata 1, Opus 1.” With these aides, I relaxed, loosened, and stretched more and, in doing that, I increasingly was able to focus, with a want of my own, on the cock working inside me—and I did want to enjoy the cock working inside me—as well as the sensation of the floating butterflies with musical background.

I came out of the butterflies flying to the rhythm of the music to find that Kayembe was happily fucking away, my having opened to his satisfaction. He was grunting with pleasure and had set up a steady rhythm of long, deep slides, with my body going with him, assisted by a palm to the small of my back, pulling me into him on the thrusts and releasing on the withdrawal. The thrusts became more thrusts, less slides, more insistent, marching toward a climax.

“Is good. Is very good,” he declared.

I let out a long moan of pleasure myself. There was still pain, but now it was overcast with the pleasure of him having pleasure with my body and the knowledge that I was open to managing a huge cock. He dipped his head and took my mouth in a deep kiss, maintaining the primeval, natural beat of the fuck. Coming out of the kiss, he gave a deep sigh and continued with the rhythm, giving us four or five minutes of the full-pleasure fuck he was pursuing.

I had taken the kiss—he was not much into kissing—as a signal that I was giving him what he wanted in the fuck. Knowing this, I relaxed even more and melded with him, and when I did, I found I wasn’t just giving him what he wanted, but it was more pleasure for me too—more of what I wanted.

Near the end, I was on my back on the bed, my legs spread and bent, my feet flat on the mattress, and Kayembe was crouched between my thighs, an arm under my waist, holding my pelvis off the mattress, my torso streaming back on the bed, my cheek to the bedspread and my arms stretched out in a sacrificial pose, when arousal built in me and, using the leverage of my feet, I raised my pelvis more and began moving with him again, pulling my hips back when he did and thrusting forward when he did—crying out at the explosive contact at full thrust. We were in the groove of a full-on fuck.

There was a minute of total pleasure for both of us. Involuntarily, I cried out, “Yes, yes, yes! Fucking A, screw the hell out of me!” and, the tension exploding out of me, just let everything drain out of me.

“Good, we’re fucking now,” Kayembe exclaimed, arching his back, raising his head, babbling in an unrecognized language to the ceiling, and panting hard, as the rhythm of the fuck stepped up. And we were fucking now. It wasn’t just the Congolese bull trying to ruin me for his personal pleasure, it was the two of us fucking. I raised my torso, grabbing his shoulder blades with my hands, digging my fingernails in, and pistoning my pelvis against his thrusts in one coordinated dance movement of the FUCK.

We cried out almost simultaneously, ejaculated, and I fell back onto the bed. Kayembe collapsed on top of me momentarily, but only momentarily. Rising off me, he gave me a smile and said, “Good. It was finally good. You gave it to me fully there for a couple of minutes. It isn’t often that good.”

“And you took it from me, ripped it right out of me,” I responded. I couldn’t help it; he’d wiped me out, and though I’d gotten what I wanted, to him it was all about his pleasure.

“Yes, yes I did,” he said with a grin, completely oblivious to the meaning of what I’d said, tone deaf to the spark of resentment there. And then when I just lay there, panting and moaning and looking at him, he said, “Are you OK?”

“Fine. I’m fine,” I said, even though I hadn’t done an inventory yet to ensure I hadn’t been shredded. I certainly hurt—all over. Internally as well. But this was mixed with the glorious feeling that I’d done it. I’d managed a primeval Congolese black bull. What had he said? That the Congo had the highest rating on cock size? I was sure I’d taken the biggest one on the charts.

All he said then was, “Good.” He trotted off to the bathroom, his satisfied shaft swinging against his legs, and I heard him pissing in the toilet. He was fine. I couldn’t be angry with him. He was like a big teddy bear. He hadn’t misled me about what would happen, what my role in this was. I’d given him what he wanted, even though it had taken time and effort. He’d managed to get his pleasure and he had done so. It was all about his pleasure, but there, for a few minutes, it was sheer pleasure for me as well.

I groaned, rolled over, and sat up on the bed. Was I satisfied? In some ways, yes. I had met and surmounted some barriers in sexual satisfaction. I had moved forward in my experience. I could go now and . . .

But I couldn’t go now, not yet. Kayembe was coming out of the bathroom. He was in magnificent erection again. He was smoothing another condom on the erection. He was going to fuck me again.

“Now we can have a better fuck. You’re well open now. I will slide right in, deep, and we will have a very good fuck,” he said, as he reached the bed, lifted me, put me on all fours at the foot of the bed; mounted and penetrated me; and, holding me close to him, fucked me again.

He was right, though, it was a better fuck, and I stayed right with him. It was a natural-rhythm fuck, me fully open to his size demands and able to share in the pleasure to enough of an extent that I could enjoy it—and, certainly, enjoy knowing he was getting a full measure of pleasure out of it.

After we’d come this time and he’d pulled out of me and I’d collapsed on the bed, he went back to the bathroom and I heard the shower start.

I was moaning but I also was smiling. The second time was everything I could have hoped for in the experience I was seeking. We fit now and moved in one coordinated rhythm from the very beginning to the end—a quicker progression than the first time. Far more pleasure for me and satisfaction than the first time.

Still, I’d had enough. I rolled off the bed, pulled on my clothes and left, clicking the door behind me. I needed a shower, but I’d have to get that at home. I couldn’t risk staying here with him anymore. He was an insatiable machine.

I was hobbling and was somewhere between sore and in pain internally. I made it down to the lobby. The receptionist was away from the desk. I could see her in the office, standing at a desk, turned away from the lobby. It was after 10:00 in the evening. Kayembe had fucked me right through dinnertime. It was raining and there was a diner next to the hotel. I was hobbling. I didn’t think I’d be able to walk to the subway and endure the trip back to the Cathedral area, where I had a studio apartment.

I went to the diner and ate who knows what? My mind was on butterflies in a meadow, backed by stirring piano music. I went back into the hotel and asked the receptionist at the desk, who hadn’t seen me before, if there was a room available. She looked askance at me. I was a bit disheveled and I had no luggage. I did have a well-filled wallet, though, both with cash and credit cards. I was a millionaire, thanks to Clayton Snyder, the Greencastle, Indiana, dentist.

“Sorry, I’m parked not far away and my car won’t start,” I lied just to get on with this. “I will worry about the car tomorrow.”

This placated her. There was a room available. I went to it, ran a hot bath, soaked in it for an hour, and then struggled to the bed and, with a long moan, flopped down on my back and went to sleep.

The next morning, I went to the hotel’s complimentary breakfast room. Beno Kayembe was there, with a mammoth breakfast gathered in front of him from the tidbits the hotel served. He saw me enter and his eyes followed me around the room while I picked up a bagel, a couple of packages of cream cheese, and a cup of coffee. I didn’t look his way, but I could hear him exhale when I came over to his table and said, “Can I sit with you?”

“Certainly,” he said, and I sat. He gave me a tentative smile. “You left last night before saying good-bye.”

“It was overwhelming,” I said. “I thought we’d both had enough. I checked into another room.”

He didn’t focus on the “overwhelming” word. It had all been for his pleasure, and he finally had gotten what he wanted. It didn’t really mean a shit to him if I had been overwhelmed. But it was natural with him, nothing purposeful in it. He was from a different culture, a patriarchal one, and perhaps one where the man with the biggest dick ruled. He undoubtedly had the biggest dick. I shuddered at the thought of that cock and what it had done inside me. Despite still being sore this morning, it aroused me and I couldn’t help think about him fucking me again.

“It was good for me last night,” he said. “Especially the second time. You adjusted to it. You checked into the hotel? You spent the night here?”

“Yes, I spent the night here,” I said. He completely misunderstood why I had done that.

“Can’t get enough of Beno’s snake?” he said, with a little laugh. “The third time would be very nice. Would you like to go back upstairs with me?”

That he’d said “would” rather than “will” wasn’t lost on me. He didn’t have the determination this morning that he’d had last evening. “Would a third time give you pleasure, Beno?” I asked.

He gave me a blank look. I could see the wheels spinning and not resolving. What else was there but his own pleasure? It was natural. I couldn’t fault him for that. So that he didn’t have to find a response, I continued on. “I don’t think you really are interested in a third time, Beno. I’m not either”—that may or may not have been true; I hadn’t processed that yet—”I think you are a one and done sort of man, which is fine. Let’s leave it like that.”

He processed that for a minute or more and finally said, “You were very nice. I like taking my time getting in—as long as I do get in.”

“Thank you, Beno.”

And then after he’d eaten some more of his breakfast. “Can I ask you something?”

For some reason I pretty much knew what he was going to ask. “Certainly. Ask ahead.”

“In the chorus. There was a tenor on the first row. Small, light-haired, blue eyes.”

“Ryan. Yes, I know him. Ryan Abrams.”

“I think he was looking at me, you know, like . . .”

“Like he wants you to fuck him?”

“Yes, like that.”

“I’m sure he does. He likes black men—and big cocks.”

“Do you think—?”

“I think he’d love being laid by you,” I said.

And obviously, when we attended the next practice of the gay men’s chorus, the signaling between Abrams and Kayembe indicated the two of them would be fucking at the Days Inn by Wyndham that night. I hoped Ryan’s passage could take that cock more easily than mine had, but Ryan was a little tart, so I trusted he’d be delighted with a Congolese cock.

As I was watching them, Jeff Bender, a handsome, late-thirties lawyer who sang in the bass section, stopped by the piano. We’d been flirting for a couple of weeks. He was a hunk. He also was six-foot-six and was built like a tank—a solid, bodybuilder tank, though, not a pudgy one.

“I’ve been thinking,” Jeff said, “that maybe you’d like to go for a drink with me after the rehearsal.”

“Or maybe more,” I said, my gaze going to his crotch. There was every reason to believe he was hung. I thought he was hard now, coming to ask me to go out with him. The confidence of the Congolese stud had rubbed off on me. I’d gone to the top. And I’d done it to be more loose when opportunities like this one came along.

He smiled. “More would be nice,” he said.

“There’s a hotel, a Days Inn by Wyndham up Connecticut Avenue,” I said.

“Perfect.”

I saw butterflies, a whole field of butterflies, fluttering around in my mind. One thing was certainly. I had left the cocoon.

* * * *

We were on the bed in the hotel room, both naked. He had a magnificent, muscular body. And, yes, he was hung. He’d been sitting at the foot of the bed, and I’d been pressed into his crotch, his hard cock deep inside me, my legs wrapped around his hips, the heels of my feet pressed into his buttocks. My torso was streaming down to the carpet, my arms stretched out in a sacrificial cruciform, “take me, I’m all yours” stance, as he gripped my hips in his hands and pulled me on and off the cock.

“God, you take it well,” he murmured.

“I’ve had practice,” I answered. Not a lot, but recent. I wouldn’t tell him that, though.

“I’ve been wanting to do this with you since you arrived as the chorus’s accompanist, Ethan,” he murmured. “So nice, so sweet, so yielding.”

“It’s what I’ve wanted too,” I responded. And it was. It was what I was developing toward, to be a free spirit in life, a butterfly.

He reached down and grasped my arms and pulled me up into his chest, wrapping his arms around me and taking my lips in his in a deep kiss. I grasped his buttocks, squeezing them, moving my own hips in coordination with his. As we reached climax, I arched my head back, my torso angled away from his chest, my arms dangling at my side in total surrender and yowled to the ceiling. We came together, one ejaculation after the other.

Butterflies, piano music in the background—satisfaction. I was totally in the groove now.