Gay Pride

The hotel entertainment system had provided the bump-and-grind music. It was that kind of hotel in northern Charleston. As the music started, the TV itself was still set on a European football game so that the six of us spread out around the couch and chairs in Bud’s hotel suite living room could choose which to watch—the game, all six of us being sports oriented—or the cute young stripper, Jamie, starting to dance and take it all off. All six of us were actively gay as well as being sports oriented. As Jamie, small, Hispanic, beautifully proportioned and with a dark, sultry look, stripped his shirt off and began to undulate with the music, Bud, beer in hand, stood and moved behind him, dancing to the rhythm of the music, his pelvis close in to the stripper’s butt.

The six of us were alumni frat brothers, from a jock, but gay, fraternity at Georgia Tech in Atlanta. We’d all been sports stars of some sort in college. My sport had been tennis and I’d gone on to be a pro. I’d made a bundle of money, which I was now putting into various small businesses, hedging my financial bets. Most of the rest had been in their sports specialty for a short time or with a near miss on the professional level and had gone into sports management, which was what most of us majored in at Georgia Tech before graduating five years earlier. After college, we’d all either worked in coaching or management for professional teams or had gone into sales sports equipment. All had done well. Bud had gone off into real estate and he’d done better than the rest of us. Thus, he was the one with a suite in the hotel where we’d gathered after clubbing to watch sports events across the world with each other after the “big” event of the day. We’d brought a stripper, Jamie, back with us from the last club we’d been in to do a little sporting of our own. He knew and had agreed to what came after the dance.

Each of us intended to fuck him. Gangbanging was one of our activities when we got together. It’s something that had bound us together since college. Nothing bonded a bunch of guys more than standing around a bed, naked, every guy stroking his cock and waiting his turn to fuck a cute guy lying on his back on the bed, mingling his seed with that of his chums.

We knew his name was Jamie because all of the male strippers at the club had worked themselves down to bikini briefs, but no further, and their names had been stitched across their waistbands. Jamie had been paid well to come back to the hotel with us, get stripped all the way down, and to do it all with all six of us.

“Doubling will cost extra,” he said. We’d left that possibility open, but it was good to know it could be included. Most of us did each other, so it wasn’t out of the ballpark to share a guy.

Every year since we’d graduated, our team group of six from the Georgia Tech fraternity had gathered for a week somewhere to let loose. We were in an era of not having to hide to make it in the sports world, and although a couple of the guys still weren’t all the way out, we didn’t sweat our preferences becoming known. Some of us had married to obtain camouflage and even had kids, but we now had all stripped all of that away and become ourselves.

Every year we’d tried to find some place to go and some activity to focus on to let our hair down. Thanks to Chris, one of our submissives who worked in promotions for the Miami Dolphins, this year we were doing the Pride Festival in Charleston, South Carolina, September 15th through the 22nd. Today had been the final event, on the 22nd, a parade from Ann Street down King Street to Broad Street and then to Colonial Lake. Thanks to Steve, who repped for a sports uniform and equipment company catering to pro teams in New York, we marched as a group in full Broadway show girl splendor, in revealing sparkly costumes, plums of feathers, full makeup, and platform heels. We were quite a sight, six cut, muscular sportsmen and body builder types, in matching chorus girl costumes, sashaying through the city. We did wear masks, though. We were mindful of some photographer recognizing a couple of us and making a mint off us from the Enquirer.

It’s not that we weren’t all macho athletes; it was that we liked to cut loose now and then and let it all hang out.

After cleaning up and having a steak dinner, we hit the town together—a very gay district part of the town—ending up at a strip dive called Lenny’s Spot, picking up Jamie, and then hustling back to the hotel at midnight to start a party of our own and cruise the channels for sports coverage.

“Hey, come on, guys, don’t let me strip alone,” Jamie called out, and we all accommodated him to the extent of becoming bare chested. He whistled his approval, “Shit, you’re all built,” he exclaimed. “You could all be in a Chippendale’s dance line.”

“We’re all hung too,” Chris, who was sitting next to me on the sofa called out. And he didn’t lie. We all were hung, cream of the crop, all hunks even five years out of college. To be so had been an unspoken requirement for getting into our fraternity at Georgia Tech. We’d all kept up with each other and with our sports because we were the cream of the crop. “Don’t tease, sweetie,” Chris called out to Jamie. “Get it all off and come give me a lap dance.”

Jamie, swaying to the music, came closer into the sofa, very close to Chris, who leaned forward and put his hands on Jamie’s hips. Jamie was down to those bikini briefs that had given us his name. Bud who had shuffled forward with Jamie, going with the rhythm and grinding his crotch against the young stripper’s buttocks—Jamie couldn’t have been more than twenty-one—also had his hands on Jamie’s hips.

“I don’t think you need these anymore,” Bud said and, with Chris’s help, he stripped the briefs down and off the stripper’s legs. Jamie didn’t complain. Rather, he was bending over, face nearly in Chris’s crotch, unzipping Chris, fishing a nearly erect cock out, and exclaiming, “Fuck, you’re big.”

“We all are,” Bud declared, with a laugh, from behind Jamie. He unzipped himself, took it out, and was slapping and rubbing it against Jamie’s buttocks. Bud pushed it into Jamie’s crack and used his hand to rub the cockhead on Jamie’s hole. Jamie opened the stance of his legs and took Chris’s cock in his mouth.

“Ready for it, sweet cheeks?” Bud asked.

“Do it,” Jamie answered. So, permissions taken care of.

I was sitting right beside them, right next to the action. Jamie, Chris’s cock in his mouth, gave a muffled groan and jerked a bit when Bud penetrated him, grabbed his hips between his hands and started to pump him.

At that point, my attention went elsewhere, though, as Steve knelt in front of me, placed his hands on my knees, spread my thighs, and moved his mouth down to my crotch, nuzzling my basket, and making me go hard. Steve, a collegiate swimmer, had been my favorite punch in college. Very accommodating, very flexible, and very sexy. We’d been hot and heavy at Georgia Tech, but we had drifted apart after college. He’d gone to New York and I’d gone on the tennis circuit. We never been in the same place at the same time and neither one of us was much for keeping up correspondences. But we’d hooked up during each of these fraternity brother outings and had fucked. That’s what we did now. I unzipped myself and settled back in the sofa, as Steve unrolled my cock and gave me head.

Shortly afterward, I was still sitting side by side with Chris on the sofa, but he had Jamie on his lap, skewered on his cock, and doing a bouncing act while his head was turned to the side, sucking Bud’s cock, and Steve was sitting in my, lap, facing me, and riding my cock as hard as Jamie was riding Chris’s.

Twenty minutes later, when Steve and I were leaving to go to his room, most of the other guys were gathered around the doorway into the bedroom rather than watching the European football game on the television. I took a look. The three of them, Bud on his back, Jamie stretched on top of Bud and on his cock, and Chris crouched over Jamie’s back, with his cock inside Jamie also, were fucking in a double on the bed.

So, we were all going to have to put up more money for Jamie’s fee.

I fucked Steve on his hotel bed in what we called the “arch” position—we liked to try them all in the rare times we were together. He was on his back, legs spread and bent on the outside of my thighs, feet on the surface of the mattress by my hips, raising his buttocks to me, as I knelt between his open thighs, knees pressed in under his buttocks. I was leaning over, palms on his pecs, using the leverage of my knees to move my cock in and out of his passage in the fuck. He was palming my pecs, pressing up as I thrust up inside him and relaxing as I drew the cock back in preparation for another deep thrust.

* * * *

Steve was asleep, stretched out beside me, lightly snoring, with a smile on his face and not a stitch on his body, when I rolled off the bed. The bottle of scotch on the bureau was open and we’d barely touched it before starting downtown. I wanted some now, but on ice, which we didn’t have. I pulled on my trousers, shirt, and loafers, grabbed the ice bucket, and headed down the hall. The machine there wasn’t giving any, so I took the elevator down to the lobby to put whoever was on the reception desk on the hunt for cold and solid.

When I got off the elevator, a bedraggled Jaime, the stripper, soaked to the skin, was entering the hotel. Last time I’d seen him, he was pinned to the bed in Bud’s suite, taking a succession of men. I looked at my clock. Between fucking and dozing, I’d worked off three hours I was unaware of. It was almost 4:00 in the morning. Looking beyond Jaime, I saw that it was raining hard outside.

“Jaime?” I said as I walked over to him.

He looked up with a dazed look in his eyes, not recognizing me at first. “Oh, it’s you,” he said.

“That’s not very flattering,” I said.

He laughed. “I didn’t mean it that way. Not at all. You were there, next to me, and then you were gone.”

“I had business elsewhere, and you seemed fully occupied.”

“Not by you,” he said. “And I was a little disappointed. You were the sexiest-looking of the lot. But you were gone. I think you’re the only one I didn’t take.”

“Or Steve, I think. He was busy with me. And you aren’t his type anyway. So, you thought I was the best looking?” I was a susceptible to flattery as anyone else.

“Yeah, I did. You look just like that tennis player, Clint Newsome. Anyone ever tell you that?”

“Frequently,” I, Clint Newsome, said. I laughed but he didn’t get why, I don’t think, because he didn’t ask about anything to do with tennis.

“So, what are you coming into the hotel for and all wet, Jaime?” I asked.

“I’d finished and was going home. But my fucking car won’t start. I came back in to decide what to do. I don’t see any taxis out there at this time and in this rain.”

“So, you’re stranded at 4:00 in the morning.”

“Pretty much.”

“I have a truck in the garage here,” I said. “I could take you home.”

“Could you? It’s not too far.”

“But you’re soaked. You’ll catch pneumonia if you go around like this. And my car keys are up in my room. Why don’t you come up, take a shower, and dry off? I could lend you a shirt and a pair of trousers. They won’t fit, but a belt could at least hold the pants up.”

“Sure, that sounds good,” Jamie said. “What’s your name?”

“Winston,” I answered. I didn’t lie. That was my real first name. There shouldn’t be any question why I chose to go by an abbreviation of my middle name, Clinton, though. My family was into naming me after rich relatives, which worked out fine. They’d left me a bundle.

I let him in my room and said, “I’ll be back in a minute. I have to return an ice bucket.” He gave me a funny look but I had an ice bucket in my hand, so what could he say? Steve was still zonked, so I left the bucket in his room and went back to mine. Jamie had a towel out and had dried himself off, but he was naked and posed on the bed.

“You’ve had a shower?” I asked.

“I can do that afterward,” he said, giving me a sexy look.

“I think we’ve both had enough sex tonight,” I said. “Why don’t you take that shower and I’ll see what I have that you can wear.”

“You don’t want to fuck me?” he asked. “You didn’t bring me up here to fuck me? I know you fuck guys. You were fucking one right next to me this evening.”

“It’s not that, Jamie. We’ve both taken and given a lot tonight. If I fucked you, I’d want it to be memorable, not mixed in with an orgy.”

“OK, if you don’t want to,” he said. He went for the shower while I looked in my suitcase to see what I had that he could wear that wouldn’t just fall off his body.

* * * *

“You hungry?” I asked as Jamie was dressing in a sweatshirt he could swim in and sweatpants with a drawstring he could tighten enough that they wouldn’t be falling off him. I’d put his wet clothes in a spare plastic bag I kept in my suitcase. “I am. Maybe there’s an all-night diner we could stop at between here and your place for breakfast. My treat.”

“There is,” Jamie answered. “But I’ll only tell you where it is if I cover the bill.”

“I don’t want to put you—”

“It’s my uncle’s place. We won’t be charged. You can leave a tip if you like the service.”

“Well, in that case, fine,” I said.

The dinner was one of those ones made to look like they’d been a chrome railroad dining car in a former life, although that was just decoration effect. It was larger than a dining car, with tables set in front of a long lunch counter and a kitchen at the back that didn’t pretend to be either chrome or a railroad car.

Jamie was greeted by name and by a smile by everyone working in the place, including the cook, who opened the door to the kitchen to wave at him.

“Counter or booth?” Jamie asked.

“Your territory,” I said, “your pick.”

“A booth then. More private.” From the way the diner staff was welcoming Jamie, I didn’t think privacy was a possibility, but, what the hell. It had been his call.

“Is the food good here?” I asked, as we settled and a blowsy waitress dropped menus on the table.

“I may not be the one to ask,” came Jamie’s response. “Sometimes I fix it. This is my day job, right here. And I do everything but manage the place. Uncle Julio still treats me like a kid. He doesn’t think I’m old enough to manage the place.”

“Isn’t that a lot of work—to work here during the day and as a stripper at night?”

“I usually only do a half day here and I don’t do the club every night—and then not for an eight-hour shift. I’m pinned down with work most of my life, yes. Sometimes I do think it would be good to get out of the city and take a ride somewhere. But then, my car is a piece of junk. I wouldn’t want to chance driving it out of town. Well, you know. It broke down tonight.”

“Where did it die and what do you plan to do about it?” I asked. “Is it truly destined for the scrap yard.”

“Not ready to be shot yet, I hope,” Jamie said with a laugh. “It’s off Morrison Drive, near the hotel we were at. I’ll go over there tomorrow morning and pray under the hood with hope. Then it’s back to a full day of work. The afternoon at the diner and the late evening at the strip club. People here in the diner don’t know about the strip club. They think I’m going to school in the evening. I’d appreciate it if you didn’t say anything about it that any of them might hear.”

“But there’s something to do after dancing at the club most nights too, isn’t there?” I asked.

“Yes. I go with a guy usually after I’m done at the club. Do you have a problem with that?”

“No, of course not,” I answered, embarrassed that I’d been found judging. I wasn’t exactly a choir angel myself.

“I need the money, and I’m highly sexed. I enjoy the sex,” he said. “I’m not going to mix with the sex here at the diner, although there are guys who come in here and make a pass at me. I won’t bring that sort of business to my uncle’s business. So, I take it somewhere else. I’m doing OK. And I’m not ashamed with what I’m doing or how I’m doing it.”

We drifted off into more general conversation, got to sports, and I did a careful double time avoiding admitting that I was the pro tennis player he said I looked like.

We got comfortable with each other and were there for more than an hour and a half before leaving. As we were leaving, I saw a “For Sale” sign in the window by the entrance.

“Your uncle selling?” I asked.

“Yeah, he is,” Jamie answered. “But the sign has been up there for a long time. This area of town needs a diner, but not many investors want to invest in this area of town.”

“It can’t be from lack of business,” I said. “The place was doing well even at 5:00 in the morning.”

“Yeah. Uncle Julio isn’t doing as well personally as he was just last year, and my aunt died a few months ago. She was the life of the restaurant, a neighborhood icon and beacon for business. They’re still coming, but it’s like knowing she isn’t here makes it too sad for them to come as often as they once did. My uncle’s heart isn’t in it anymore either. He wants to move to Florida.”

“Your heart not in it anymore either?” I asked. Jamie had seemed a little sad when he told me the place was on the block.

“I’ve worked here, doing something, since I was ten,” he said. “It’ll be sad to see the place go. If they can’t sell it as a restaurant, it’ll be torn down and an office building will be built here. That’s what’s happening in this neighborhood—a building where people come during the day and leave at night. That’s death to a neighborhood. It adds people who have to eat, but I’d hate to see this diner not serving as where neighbors meet to socialize anymore.”

He lived about four blocks away, in a Victorian-style house that had been cut up into apartments.

“You want to come up?” he asked.

“I’d better not,” I said.

“You’d be afraid you couldn’t keep your hands off me?” He said that with a smile that tried to convey a joke, but I didn’t think he was joking.

“Something like that,” I answered, and we laughed, but it was true. I’d said we wouldn’t have sex tonight, and I meant it. I liked Jamie and thought of him in a larger context than just a stripper and prostitute. If there was to be anything, I wanted there to be a separation from what had already been.

“You know I’d like to have your hands on me,” he said, turning serious. But then he smiled. “But nothing like that. I’m wearing your clothes. Either I can strip them off here on the street to give them back to you, or you can come upstairs with me long enough for me to give them back there.”

“Well, since you put it that way.”

* * * *

We fucked on his bed. He’d stripped the sweatshirt and pants off and was naked. All it took then was for him to say, “You know, it’s not last night anymore. It’s today, a new day. If you don’t screw me now, I’ll know you don’t want me.” I picked him up in my arms and carried him into his bedroom.

He was naked and I was not the first time we fucked. We were frenzied, both wanting it—NOW. I put him down on the bed on his belly, but he didn’t go down, he positioned himself on his hands and knees and called out, “Fuck me. Fuck me right now. Don’t make me wait. Just put it in me. We can make love later.”

I got my fly open. I was already hard, and it was a bit of a struggle to get my cock out of my pants, but I managed. I climbed up on the bed, as Jamie cried out, “Yes, yes. Now. Raw. Like a dog!” I kept on climbing, on top of him, mounted on his ass like a stud dog on a bitch. He held steady as I penetrated him. Then I grabbed his hips and we were off to the races. He continued holding steady, rocking back on my groin as I thrust, and calling out “Yes! Yes!” as I jerked and released, jerked and released.

After that—after lying stretched out against each other, Jamie helping me get naked and the two of us kissing and nuzzling and fondling each other—we found ourselves in a sixty-nine position, Jamie’s smaller body stretched out over mine, him sucking my cock, and me folding his legs up into his chest and eating his ass out.

The shared frenzied need satisfied, we then made love.

The second fuck was long and languid, Jamie on his shoulder blades, legs spread and bent, feet flat on the mattress, with his torso streaming back and down onto the bed, and his arms raised above his head, hands gripping the brass slats of the headboard, whispering “Yes, yes, like that,” while I knelt between his thighs, bent over him, my arms embracing his waist, my mouth and teeth working his nipples, and my cock buried inside him. I varied the rhythm and intensity of my thrusts, giving it to him good until I felt one or both of us tense, ready to explode and then backing off, savoring the fuck, taking as much time as I could to hold off on one or both of us going to completion—until we couldn’t hold off any longer and in a moment of frenzied slapping of balls against tender skin and Jamie crying out, “Now! Now! Shit. Fuck, YES!” We came together.

Afterward, after we’d cooled down in each other’s arms and Jamie went to the bathroom, both of us contemplating what we’d do next and which one of us would suggest that I spend the night, is when I made my mistake. I completely forgot about how I had wanted to separate this from the previous evening, where Jamie was the paid stripper and whore for my fraternity friends and me. When he came out of the bathroom, I was counting out $500 in one-hundred-dollar bills and fanning the bills out on the nightstand.

“What are you doing?” he asked, his voice suddenly icy.

“I want you to know how much I’ve—” But I knew in that instant what I’d done wrong.

“I didn’t want to be paid for that,” he said. “That wasn’t about my being a male prostitute.”

“I’m sorry, I—”

“But, sure, if you had a good time, leave the money. There’s enough to cover another blow job and fuck. How would you like to have them? I’m just a whore and you’re a john.”

“I guess this wasn’t a good idea. It’s late. My friends will wonder what happened to me,” I stammered out. “I guess I should go.”

“Well, if you have to go. Take $100 back. The $400 will be quite enough for the service.”

I couldn’t get out of there fast enough then. I didn’t take a bill back, I just hurriedly dressed. Jamie did kiss me at the entrance door to the group of apartments, and I sensed there was still heat between us from the kiss. He even said, “Sorry I heated up. You were good to me and I maybe thought there was more to it than there was.”

I took two steps on the porch and then turned to apologize again and say I wanted to stay, but he closed the door and turned the lock.

* * * *

When Jamie got to his car on Morrison Drive the next morning, I already was there, with a tow truck hooking his car up.

“What’s this?” Jamie said when a Hispanic guy driving an old, rusted pickup let him off on Conroy Street off Morrison Drive in North Central Charleston.

“It’s my apology for last night,” I said. “I don’t know what I was thinking. You have me really going. But it looks like you moved on already.”

“Him? He’s my cousin, Julio’s son. Gave me a ride here. But what’s with the tow truck?”

“It didn’t sound like your prayer plan had a prayer, so I decided we’d get your car to someplace that can really fix it up. The garage guy’s been under the hood and said it shouldn’t be too serious. He told me what needs replacing but I know little or nothing about cars.”

“I can’t afford taking it to a garage.”

“Sure you can. I gave you $500 last night that you said you didn’t want to keep. We can spend it on your ride. I’ll take you to work and pick you up after your shift . . . unless you don’t want me to. I’ll even drive you to the club tonight.”

“I’m not working the club tonight,” he said. “I do get a couple of nights off a week. I’m starting two off.”

“Good to know. So, you going to let me drive you?”

“Like you drove me last night?”

“If you’ll let me. If you’ll forgive me for not realizing you saw last night as different from what you regularly do. I sure saw it as different. I didn’t want to make assumptions, though. I didn’t want you to think I was just trying to get it for nothing.”

I must have looked so forlorn and hopeful that he just laughed and climbed into my truck.

* * * *

“So, do you really have two days off?” I asked when Jamie climbed up into my Ford 250 double cab at the diner at 3:00 that afternoon.

“Yeah, two whole days,” he said.

I reached for him and pulled him to me. “Speaking of holes,” I murmured, taking his mouth in a kiss and reaching down and unzipping him. My hand went into his fly, but not to his cock or balls. I glided lower, my index finger going to his hole, rimming in, but quickly penetrating it. His response was to rock his pelvis on my penetrating finger.

“So, now you want me?” he whispered.

“I always wanted you. But I wanted it to be something special.”

We came out of a kiss, and he said, “You gonna fuck me right here in this truck?”

“Would you let me?”

“It’s not a good idea in the parking lot of the diner. As I said before, I’m trying to keep my lives separate.”

“But you’ll let me take you somewhere else and fuck you?”

“Maybe.”

“Does that mean you forgive me for last night?”

“Maybe.” Then he laughed. I pushed the finger in farther. He moaned, and I took his mouth in a kiss again. I was bent over him below the window level and the Ford F-250 Super Duty sat really high off the ground. We could do it here and no one at ground level would see a thing. I said as much and he just grunted. Extracting my finger from his passage, I unbuckled and unbuttoned his shorts and pulled them off his legs. My other arm was around him holding him down on the seat.

“Shit. You really gonna do this here?” he asked when we came out of the kiss again.

“Seems like a good place for a fuck,” I said. “I don’t think I can wait. Are you going to beg me to stop?”

His answer was to reach down, unbuckle, unbutton, and unzip me and brush my trousers down off my hips. I, of course, was hard for him already. I pulled his T-shirt over his head and helped him over the seat into the back. I’d parked near the back of the parking lot. It was a heavy-duty truck; it wasn’t going to rock the truck noticeably when we were doing it. Jamie went fully on his back, bent and spread his thighs, and pulled me down between them. He took my cock in two hands, guided me inside him, and I fucked him there in the backseat of the truck. I penetrated him deep and set up a fast pace. He clutched my buttocks, pulling me into him, and growled, “Get it. Fuck it. Stretch that hole.” He set his pelvis in countermotion to my thrusts and we groaned and grunted for several minutes, building up to almost-simultaneous ejaculations.

After I’d come, I lay there on top of him, with him nuzzling my cheek with his and him rubbing his thighs against mine.

“That was a nice fuck,” he murmured.

“So, I guess you forgive me for last night.”

“Last night? Were you there last night?”

I reached down, fisted the root of my cock, and moved it inside him. “I was here last night,” I said.

“Yeah, we’re good,” he said. “You going to drive me home now?”

“I thought we’d go for a ride.”

“Isn’t that what we just did—went for a ride?”

“I thought maybe out in the country. Down the coast. You ever been to Beaufort? You said you never get out of town. Let’s go to Beaufort for the night.”

“No, I’ve never been there. Go to my place first to get a change of clothes?”

“I don’t think we need clothes there. I have the key to a friend’s place. I’m taking care of it while he’s on a business trip in Asia.”

“Sure, why not?”

* * * *

All the way south, along the coast, to Beaufort, I worried about whether I had said and done the right things or if I was just digging myself deeper into losing Jamie. I don’t know why I didn’t want to lose him, but he had struck a chord with me and that was a fact—and wanted more time with him. This could turn out to be more than a casual fling. I was getting older. I was looking for more than just one-night stands.

The previous night—assuming that he wanted to get paid for what we did in his apartment—had thrown me off. He was a prostitute and I thought I was falling in to what he’d expect, not taking him for granted or trying to take advantage of him. But I’d wounded his pride. He apparently had been thinking we were doing more than just having sex the same as I was beginning to think. There was something “off” about how I was approaching him.

Jamie was showing me what gay pride was about—and it wasn’t about dressing up and parading down a Charleston street.

I think my failure with him may have started with me failing to admit I was really Clint Newsome, the professional tennis player. I wasn’t on the level with him from the get-go. I hadn’t revealed to him that I was wealthy and a public person. And now I’d compounded that issue by telling him we were going to a house I was watching for an absent friend. And I’d done even more than that. If this was going to pan out as more than a casual, limited-time fling, there would be a moment—or two—of reckoning. I didn’t know how he’d handle it—whether that would cause this to be no more than a casual fling.

It wasn’t about him being a stripper and prostitute. I didn’t give a shit about that. I wasn’t an angel either.

As we pulled up to the gates of the house, close to, but not in sight of Beaufort, rather on the west end bordering on Battery Creek in an exclusive section, I looked toward the building, with the enclosed tennis court next to it with new-found trepidation. It was just a bungalow, but it was a palatial bungalow that was in tip-top condition. It dripped money. This was the first time I saw it in that light. And at the moment I begin to sweat, realizing something else I hadn’t taken into account.

“This is quite a place,” Jamie said. “That’s really a fancy tennis court too.”

“My friend tells me it’s the community tennis court. They put it next to his house, inside his fencing, so outsiders wouldn’t use it.” I buzzed the gate open. I was digging myself in the mud.

“You have an opener for the gate in your truck?” Jamie asked.

“The truck belongs to my friend too,” I said, digging myself even deeper. “When I pull up to the house, we’ll go in through the back screened porch, facing the creek. You can wait there and I’ll check out the house to make sure none of my friend’s girlfriends are going to be surprised, and then I’ll come back with cold beers.”

“Sure. Sounds like a plan,” Jamie said cheerily.

Good thing I’d realized I needed to get into the house before I took Jamie in. The first thing I did was to go around picking up photos of me at tennis tournaments and the trophies I’d won at regional tournaments and tucked them away. I really was shit at this subterfuge business. I needed to stop digging.

We fucked on the screened porch, on a rattan settee, with Jamie belly over the arm, torso and arms dangling toward the wood floor and me mounted on top of him and mining his channel deep. Then we fucked in front of the TV in the living room, on a sofa, while we watched an English football game, with him reclining against an arm and his knees hooked on my hips, and me crouched between his thighs, fucking him in a missionary. And we fucked that night before both of us drifted off into an exhausted doze, on my bed in my bedroom, purporting to be my friend’s bed and bedroom. For this one, I lay stretched out on my bed, with Jamie riding my cock in both a face-on and reversed cowboy. Jamie was younger and more conditioned to this than I was, although I did my devil best to keep up with him.

Throughout he was pure innocence to who I really was and who really owned this place. He showed no interest in anything other than pleasing me and himself. I fretted the whole time whether I had screwed myself by handling his pride wrong.

I began to stew about what else I had done.

I drove Jamie back to Charleston the next morning. We’d had a glorious overnight away from the city. I was even more interested now than ever before to have more than a casual fling with him.

“We can stop at your uncle’s diner for breakfast and then I’ll drive you back to your apartment.”

“That sounds good, except let me get carryout at the diner and we’ll eat at the apartment. I don’t really want to face any questions when the crew there sees you and me together two days in a row.”

“That doesn’t sound good.”

“It’s not meant that way,” Jamie said. “I’m just not ready yet to share you with my coworkers there. I don’t know about you, but I’m have serious feelings and I’m not ready to be pecked to death by their curiosity and jokes.”

“OK, I understand. I’ll sit outside in the truck.”

“Hey, wonder what that’s about,” Jamie said as we pulled up to the diner.

“What?” I asked.

“The ‘For Sale’ sign is down. My uncle will stew about that if people aren’t seeing that the place is for sale.”

I stewed all the time Jamie was inside, putting our breakfast together.

“Strange thing,” he said when he came back. “The place has sold.”

“Good news, isn’t it?” I asked as I swung the truck into traffic.

“For Uncle Julio it is. But it sort of hit me like a ton of bricks.”

“Why so?”

“I guess I’ll have to be looking for another day job sooner than later. I hadn’t thought about that.”

“Maybe they’ll keep you and the rest of the crew on,” I offered.

“I don’t think it happens as neatly as that,” Jamie answered.

Maybe it does in this case, I thought as I drove toward Jamie’s apartment—and, hopefully, toward his bed as well. Maybe the reason I bought the restaurant yesterday was to make you manager and keep everyone else who wanted to stay on there. Maybe it was my way of telling you I wanted more for us. I haven’t taken your gay pride in consideration very well yet, but maybe I’ll do my damndest to work around that and to make us work.

One thing was for sure. When we got to his apartment, we were going to have to talk. I was going to have to come clean and let the chips fall where they may, and if he threw me out, it would all be my fault. Maybe not before we ate, but before there was any sex, I was going to have to give gay pride a chance to make this relationship honest, if at all possible.

Because I realized it now—I wanted this to be a relationship.