Great Christmas Tree Buy

“Here, let me help you get that tree to your car.”

I flared up a bit. Anyone who looked at me knew I wouldn’t need help in getting a seven-and-a-half-foot boxed fake Christmas tree out to my car. I hadn’t even thought of buying a tree when I’d come into the Kokomo, Indiana, Lowes. I’d been looking for a new laptop. But there were all those tree ornaments my dad had sent me when he was moving out of his house in Wabash and they had trees on deep sale here as close as it was to Christmas.

Then I looked at the young guy standing, looking hopefully at the exit door, and I thought better of it. He looked really good to me. Sort of preppy for Lowes. But young, the way I liked them, probably not more than nineteen, the way I really liked them, and Italian sultry—small, slender, olive skinned, white-teethed ready smile, sleek black hair that would hang to his shoulders when let down, and groomed five o’clock shadow. It wasn’t the first time I’d noticed him while I was walking through the store. It almost was like he’d been following me, and he certainly had been giving me looks.

I’d seen him before. I just couldn’t remember where or when. And there he was, beside the cash register, when I punched out. He was bagging purchases for customers. He was the bagboy. That certainly came as a surprise. He looked awfully preppy to be working in a store—and too delicious to be a bagboy.

“It’s started snowing,” he said, as I hefted the tree box and he intercepted me at the exit door. “We wouldn’t want anyone to slip on their way to their car.”

“Sure,” I said, welcoming the contact and the few more moments with him that a trudge through the snow would take. “It’s the black Jeep Wrangler over—”

“I know which one it is,” he said. And then he continued. “Sorry, my dad takes his Jeep to your garage for work. I’ve seen you and your Jeep there. It’s a great car. A rugged vehicle for a rugged man.”

“Ah, I thought you looked familiar,” I said, although I still didn’t remember having seen him at my garage on North Union Street. And, no, I didn’t miss the come-on line. So, was he gay and seeking, I wondered. It certain seemed that way.

“Well, you take one end of the box and I’ll take the other.” I really didn’t need his help. I was 220 pounds of sculpted muscle. I worked out several hours a day. I didn’t build this body just to look great. But he was really a cute guy. He was small and slender, but well put together, very sexy. I wasn’t in a hurry to see the back of him. Well, I would be happy to see the back of him, of course, but not clothed, going back in the Lowes. He had a narrow waist but a bubble butt—one of those buttocks with a good curve on it but deep hollows below his hips. Just the curves my hands liked to glide over. His trousers were tailored to emphasize his trimness. His clothes were expensive. Money was coming in from somewhere other than bagging people’s purchases in a Lowes.

“I’ve seen you in the gym too,” the smiling cutie said. “Rocky’s Gym over on North Buckeye.”

“Ah, yes, I own a slice of that gym,” I said. “You seem a little up town to be going to that gym.” That was my way of saying that he looked like a straight-up rich college kid and Rocky’s was a sweat gym, with a fairly large working-class homo bodybuilder clientele. I was still confused that he was bagging for a big box store.

“I’m nearly nineteen,” he said. Bingo, I thought. “I’ve been going to the gym with a bunch of other guys two Saturday mornings a month for a while,” he continued. “I saw you there once on another evening. I don’t think you noticed me; you were tracking down another young guy and were focused on him.”

So, he was declaring that he knew I hunted young guys.

“We talk about you Saturday mornings—on whether we’ll see you there that day,” he continued. “You’re our model we’re working toward.”

I couldn’t help but be flattered “Nearly nineteen. You’re a bit too trendy to be working here—as a bag boy—aren’t you?” I asked. I wasn’t sure he really was nearly nineteen—but he did look it, or younger: small, slender, narrow waisted, really nice, supple body from what I could see with him dressed. My urges were kicking in. It always was a risk. But I’d found it always was worth it—at least it had been so far.

“My dad manages this Lowes. It’s the Christmas rush season. He needs the help. He doesn’t pay me, but, hey, he’s my dad. I get room and board—and tuition. I go to the Purdue University tech college here in town.”

Bingo. I called college, but more a trade school than a think tank, I guess. Doesn’t have his nose in the air about scud work. “Well, then,” I said, reaching for my wallet. “You helped me get the tree to the car. How much—?”

“I don’t want your money,” he said. “Not for helping to carry a box.” The look he gave me told me he might take something else from me for money, even if I was a good fifteen years older than he was. I had a lot of experience with young guys in their late teens who were contemplating their sexuality and weren’t sure what they wanted. I sometimes helped them decide. Someone helped me decide when I was eighteen. This was a kid who looked like he knew what he wanted, and he was looking at me. What I didn’t usually get was a kid who was this decisive—and forward. He had “will do it for money” written all over him.

“What would you take money for?” I asked.

“I think you know.” Then, before I could comment, he went on. “Do you ever go to the gym on Saturday mornings?”

“Sometimes I do. I certainly can.”

“I’m going to go to the gym this Saturday morning. My parents are going over to Indianapolis to visit my aunt’s family, but I’m not going. I’m riding my bike to the gym.”

So, he still lived with his parents and he still rode a bike. He did look like a bike rider, or a runner—a small guy, slim but tightly muscled. I liked my guys small. He wasn’t hiding from me that he was on the young side, either. “Are you now?” I asked. “That’s good to know. Your transportation is a bike?”

“My license is suspended for a few more months. A DUI. My parents have to drive me when I need a car to get to where I’m going. Kokomo’s a small town, though. I can get most everywhere by bike.”

“Ah, tell me . . .” I paused, not know his name. He wasn’t a dummy, though. He supplied it.

“Gino,” he said. “It’s short for Liugino, my grandfather’s name. My family’s Italian.”

“Is it? Tell me, Gino. Have you ever been with an older man before?” He was being forward and pretty obvious, so no reason I shouldn’t take the shortcut.

“Yes. And Craig, Craig Walton, he’s a friend of mine. He says you have toys.”

“You like toys, Gino?”

“I don’t know. They haven’t been included before, but I’ve been thinking about them. Craig says he likes them when you use them.”

I’d fucked Craig Walton. He was a good lay. And he was nineteen. I had done it all to Craig Walton. He surely will have told Gino all that would be done. This kid—this Gino—was signaling he wanted to be trained. He was asking me to train him, but also to pay him. I didn’t mind. I had money. If he was reasonably fresh and not trained to toys yet, he’d be fun. “You sayin’ you’d go with me, for a fee?”

“Yes. Craig says you’re the best. He says you pay well too—for the younger guys.”

He came in close to me at the back of my Jeep. I think he wanted a kiss, right there in the parking lot. But I wasn’t a romantic or one to express myself like that in public. What I did was more demonstrable than that, though. It was dark and snowing. We were beyond the lights reaching out from the storefront. I ran my hand under his waistband at the small of his back and went for his hole with my middle finger. Some guys use their middle finger to tell people off. I use it to get cuties like Gino was off. I reached for his hole, getting into his crack, but I didn’t get all the way to the goal. He yelped and then laughed and danced away from me.

I pulled out my wallet again and doled out five hundred-dollar bills. I liked to carry a thick wad. Five hundred was what I’d paid Craig Walton to submit to the toys. I’d saved two-hundred dollars off the regular price of the Christmas tree, so I’d just think of this as a three-hundred-dollar lay. He’d work for it too. His eyes opened wide.

“I’m working now. Maybe later I could . . .”

“For this, I bet you’d come into the backseat of the Jeep and let me do you right here,” I said.

He didn’t demur, but I let him off that hook. “I’m not in the mood right now, but take this. I’ll let you know when I’m in the mood.” I was pretty much always in the mood, but I wanted to set this one up and not fire it off quick and short.

He smiled and took the money. I watched his bubble butt shimmy as he walked back toward the lights of the Lowes. This was going to be fun.

“Maybe some Saturday,” he called back over his shoulder as his body was enveloped by the falling snow. “Maybe this Saturday, at the gym.”

I was looking forward to getting some of that for myself. But eighteen—nearly nineteen, he’d said? My favorite age, but you’ve got to move really slowly on that—at least I always had done so before. It was a real risk. They could be skittish and scattered and get emotional when they had to give it all up at this age. This kid wasn’t set on slow, though.

I’d bought the tree on impulse, but now I had some sort of idea why I did. I went home humming—not thinking of any plan in particular or any path for getting there, but just working toward something as a goal. It was Thursday. I was working a full shift and a half the next day, Friday. Saturday was the day after that. If this place was going to be spruced up, it would be tonight.

It took a good three hours and four beers to get the tree put together in the corner of the living room, by the fireplace, and the lights and ornaments on it that my dad had sent. My dad had sent other boxes too, and I began humming again, for no particular reason, when I thought of what was in one of them. It took several minutes but I found the bearskin rug from the bear my dad shot in Colorado when he was younger than I now was. I laughed, again with whatever I was thinking I was doing at the back of my mind, a little afraid of coming forward, as I spread it out in front of the fireplace. It brought forth memories. My first time. I was nearly nineteen then myself. I’d had to give it all up that first time. It had been a complete education. Then I went outside and brought in several logs of wood and laid a fire in the fireplace for whatever future one might be needed that I quite purposely wasn’t thinking about.

At the master bedroom door, I stopped, turned, and went to the linen closet. I changed the sheets on the master bed and put an extra towel in the master bath. I opened the medicine chest and pulled out a couple of packets of condoms—Trojan Supras, extra thins. My brand. I liked it as raw as I could get it, and the other guy got it “ginormously” big.

Returning to the bedroom, I put the condoms in the nightstand drawer, checking to make sure I had lubricant in there too—and a couple of bottles of poppers. I tucked the restraints attached at the four corners of the bed under the mattress so they wouldn’t be seen until I needed them—if I found I’d need them. The dildos, the flogger, and the string of tear-drop beads went under the bed. Then I stripped down, took a shower, dried myself off, and went into the guest room. I’d sleep in the bed there for the next two nights. The sheets on the master bed would be clean and fresh on Saturday. That bed had now become an altar for the next couple of days.

Everything was prepared for no particular reason, I was thinking. Except maybe that I thought of it as a ceremony—a sacrifice on an altar.

Then I went to bed in the guest room and then, and only then, I went through the trophy case in my mind, thinking of each and every late teens young guy I had seduced, played with, mounted, fucked the shit out of, and made into a total, fully experienced submissive. While I reviewed, I masturbated.

I wasn’t thinking of Gino, not really—certainly not yet. And talk was cheap. It would hardly be fair to include him, even afterward, when thinking in terms of a campaign ending in a ceremony of sacrifice. I’d had to work hard for most of those young guys. Gino had just about thrown himself at me. But Gino could just be a tease. When I’d put my hand down his pants, he’d danced away. We’d just have to think about Gino—Gino with the bubble butt and sexy smile. And Saturday. I hadn’t even looked at the calendar to know what I had on for Saturday morning. And I’d bought the tree to put up anyway, because of the Christmas ornaments I now had. And the bearskin rug . . . well, the bearskin rug. I laughed a low laugh, deep in my gut. Yeah, the bearskin rug.

When I came to the end of the “accomplished” list and my memories of the bearskin rug and being penetrated and taken for the first time and what had come immediately afterward and had shot my load, I closed my eyes and slept, visions of sugarplums not dancing in my head. I actually was dreaming of getting head from a cute young guy—an Italian, maybe.