The Aviators

They told him they put him in the conservatory on sunny days because the doctors had said he needed the sunshine. Autumn had arrived and it was too cold for him to sit, immobile, on the terrace. Immobile was Alex’s only option these days--at least for a while. A broken arm and leg and being blind--it was hoped only temporarily--meant he wasn’t going anywhere on his own for a while. He’d been lucky, they said. Inexplicably, they said, he’d been thrown from the plane and landed on strong, leaf-cushioned tree branches. If he’d remained with Lucky Linda, he would have been burned to a crisp. They’d said it was inexplicable, but Alex knew it was because he’d been sloppy about strapping himself in the plane on takeoff. He’d said nothing about that.

He’d said nothing about the sloppiness and the lack of following ritual, because he knew that had a role in what had happened. They--his aviator compatriots at the aerodrome and even the Taylors here--had, in turn, not responded to his questions about what had happened to Pete. Their nonresponse was all the response he needed.

Angela Taylor was giving him a sponge bath on a wrought-iron chaise in the glassed-in conservatory. He was stripped down and embarrassed at all the areas she was touching in giving him the bath--this in spite of being in her bed every night. It just wasn’t the same--what happened in a glass room in the day and what happened in a bedroom in the dark of the night.

He was at their mercy--both Angela’s and Curt’s--at night too. Just a cock and a bung hole for their pleasure. Not that it didn’t give him pleasure too--it’s just that he was completely submissive to however they wanted to use him with the constraints of his wounds.

The bright flash when Pete’s plane exploded had blinded Alex. It had fried his retinas, they’d said. They also said that should be a temporary issue--that they’d rejuvenate themselves and when his arm and leg were mended, he’d be able to return to the air. They’d said it like Alex wanted to return to the war--to raining death down from the skies over Nazi-held territory on the continent. And he supposed he did. He couldn’t think of anything else he had to live for until he fell out of the sky again. Pete was dead. And he hadn’t fully realized what Pete meant to him until Pete wasn’t there anymore.

He’d had to convalesce somewhere, and the Taylors had stepped up to take over his care. The doctors and the squadron commander, Major Flint, had thought they were bricks for doing that--that they, as displaced Americans, not able to travel over dangerous waters back to the States, were doing what they could for the war effort here in taking a wounded American airman in to care for. Although he was, certainly, grateful for the care, Alex knew the Taylors had really taken him in for the use of his cock and bung hole beyond the public recognition of their contribution to the war effort.

While Angela worked his cock up now, as he lay on his back on the iron couch, under the guise of giving him a thorough sponge bath, he could hear her humming. And then he could feel her climbing up onto the chaise; settling herself on his hips; holding his cock in position; and then impaling herself with a quickness of breath, from both of them, making deep moaning sounds, and rising and falling on the staff, as his breathing became belabored and he felt the sap rise, until, increasing her gyrations and urging him to be good to her, he gave her his seed.

She spoke of it, with amusement in her voice, as his exercise time. But in more serious moments she spoke of growing older, coming close to no longer being about to produce, and of how important motherhood was to her. When she was drunk, she spoke of the waste of Pete and of how she’d wanted his child. She was more circumspect when sober, talking of how Curt was sterile but they both wanted to be parents--that they could afford children, that she wanted to have Alex’s baby, no strings attached.

Alex didn’t really care if this was true or if she was just trying to rationalize wanting to be fucked regularly. If she wanted to ride his cock nearly daily and take his spunk, that was OK with him. He didn’t care much about anything these days. She rode his cock and he took Curt’s cock. In exchange, they housed him, fed him, and were nursing him back to health--so he could go back up in the air, bomb more Germans, and fall out of the sky again. Well, OK.

With slight embarrassment on his part, she sponged and jerked him off and rode his cock by day, and by night, he slept between them, him inside Angela and Curt inside him--him blind and in splints entirely at their mercy and manipulation. It was OK with him until he was well enough to take to the skies again. They were arousing enough; he could get it up with them and they all were satisfied with the results.

What he actually looked forward to were the visits by the viscount, Nigel. The young ballet dancer came every other day, it seemed, and read to him--and asked him questions about the Pete Alex knew before those few days that Nigel and Pete had been together. Alex initially was jealous that Nigel obviously had had something with Pete, if only briefly, that Alex and Pete hadn’t achieved. But sensing how important this was to the young man, Alex painted for him the Pete Alex thought the young man wanted to know. He didn’t come close to telling him of the Pete--the forceful, total master--who Alex had known and only now realized that he had loved. He sensed that Nigel had genuinely--and hopelessly--loved Pete too, and he didn’t want to steal the young man’s memory of Pete. He sensed that Pete would not have wanted him to. But Nigel’s Pete obviously had been a different man than Alex’s Pete had been.

Still, this was just a holding pattern. Alex knew it would all come to a head one day--and it did, partially because of Nigel’s need and partially because of his own. In bringing a new novel by Somerset Maugham to read to Alex, Nigel brought it all out into the open. It was only while the Taylors were gone on an excursion, leaving Nigel to visit with Alex and as Nigel was reading from The Razor’s Edge that Alex realized how close Maugham had come to describing him--and his underlying struggle. Despite their generosity, he had been put off underneath it all by the Taylors and their lifestyle ever since their sex-driven garden party earlier in the summer. And that had brought forth something that existed as a barrier between him and Pete too.

The Razor’s Edge was about Alex himself, he realized, as Nigel read it. He, Alex, was on the razor’s edge and had been ever since he’d arrived in England and came under the sway of the patrician Peter Porter. Alex was anything but patrician. He was living a lie here, stretched out on a fancy iron couch in the glass conservatory of a fancy manor house, with a notable actor and best-selling novelist in his bed--well, their bed.

Larry Darrell, Maugham’s protagonist in the book, was a World War I aviator who had been wounded and who fell into high-flying society and traveled the world, taking construction jobs and trying to live an authentic life at his natural level, but always being swept up into society. Pete and the Taylors had done this to Alex under strikingly similar circumstances. As Nigel read, Alex’s frustrations grew in seeing himself in Maugham’s new book. Maugham could be writing about him, he thought. For a brief moment he wondered if Curt and Angela knew Maugham and that, indeed, Maugham had written about him. But then he realized that the book must have been written before he met the Taylors, even if it only recently had been launched.

He didn’t realize that tears were streaming down his cheeks from underneath the blindfold he wore to protect his eyes, until Nigel pointed it out. “You’re crying,” he said. “It’s Pete, isn’t it, because this Darrell character is a fighter pilot and so was Pete?”

“Yes, I suppose so,” Alex said, not wanting to reveal that the connection to the book was closer to him than that--that Nigel seemed incapable of seeing beyond Pete and that his only true regard for Alex was in his past connection with Pete.

“I miss him too,” Nigel said. And from the way he said it, Alex realized Nigel was crying too.

Then Alex felt it--Nigel’s hand on his crotch, feeling him up, causing Alex to harden. Alex had no more trouble hardening for Nigel than Pete ever had, but he was shocked by what was happening now. Nigel was unbuttoning his fly and pulling his cock out.

“Nigel?”

“I can’t stand it anymore--not knowing. You are an aviator too. You were so close to Pete. You are so much like Pete. I’ve wondered . . . hoped . . .”

“Nigel?” Alex said again, but then he was moaning as Nigel took his cock inside his mouth and gave him deep-throated suck.

“Nigel, Nigel,” Alex whispered, as he took Nigel’s head lovingly in his hands, held it in position, and began to move his hips. He realized that, for the moment, he was Pete for Nigel, that Nigel was only doing this because of that illusion. But Alex had wanted to fuck Nigel from the very beginning too. If he had to be Pete for the moment to do that, so be it.

When Alex was hard, Nigel was moving up the wounded aviator’s body with his tongue, licking up the trail of fine hair leading up Alex’s flat belly and on up sternum to expand out to cover his pecs, as his fingers unbuttoned Alex’s shirt, flaring it open. Alex realized that Nigel already was naked. Nigel sucked on one of Alex’s nipples while thumbing the other one. “Your chest is hairy, like Pete’s,” he said. “But blond.” He ran his fingers through the fine, downy hair and licked the hair around the nipples into a swirling pattern.

“Yes,” Alex said. What else could he say? He realized that Nigel was using him as a surrogate for the unattainable Pete. He felt guilty taking advantage of that, but he ached to fuck the young man.

“And you’re big, like Pete. Hung.” His hand encased Pete’s staff, stroking it and thumbing the slit in the glans.

“Yes,” Alex answered, flinching as he felt Nigel hold his cock in position and descend on it.

“Pete said all American men are hung.”

“Did he? Oh god, oh shit.” Nigel was fucking himself on Alex’s staff. Alex was hard as a rock for him.

“And so far he has been right.”

Alex didn’t answer because Nigel had lowered his face to go into a passionate kiss, and Alex was lost for the rest of the fuck, using his more serviceable hand to stroke Nigel off as the small ballet dancer rode him to an ejaculation.

It was nice, but, disappointing and deflating, nothing earth-shattering for Alex. It obviously was the same for Nigel, as the young man came off the cock with a sob. “I’m sorry. It was good, but not the same. You’re not Pete.”

“No, Nigel, I’m not Pete, nor will I ever be Pete.” At this moment Alex realized he didn’t want to be Pete. He didn’t want to be in Pete’s league. And he didn’t want to be in the Taylors’ league either. He didn’t want to run along the razor’s edge. He wanted to be Alex.

“Nigel,” he said, wanting to give the young man comfort but also wanting to help him to see reality--no, all Americans weren’t sexual gods. Nigel had to find his own gods now. But Nigel didn’t answer. He wasn’t there anymore.

But someone was there. The Taylors couldn’t be back yet, surely. But Alex could hear the heavy breathing. He felt the hands on his thighs. Calloused hands; a strong grip. A gag or some sort was wrapped around his head, covering his mouth. He was being roughly treated. His wrists were being bound, pulled above his head and secured at the top of the iron chaise. His legs were being gripped in those strong, calloused hands and were being raised and split. No quarter was being given for his casted arm and leg--now in just tightly wrap bindings--and the sharp pain when they were jerked caused him to shriek through his gag. It also brought flashes before his eyes, giving him the first hopeful clue that his eyes were on the mend.

A mouth was at his ass, sloppily, but very effectively eating him out, and Alex groaned at the crude pleasure of it, of the slurping noises and grunts, and dirty mutterings of the man, who obviously was taking great pleasure from this.

It was a man, he now knew, because the man had his cock out and was positioning it between Alex’s thighs and was slapping it on Alex’s stomach and thighs. The man had pulled Alex’s buttocks up off the chaise and had run Alex’s legs up his chest. Alex could tell he was both heavy and muscular.

Alex arched his back and screamed through the gag again, as the man thrust something hard and thick inside him--not as flexible as a man’s cock--twisted it full circle. and then fucked Alex with it. Both he and the man  doing this were panting hard.

“You be needin’ this to take me,” a deep, peasant’s voice whispered in his ear, and, indeed as the hard, slickened-up dildo-like object slid in and out of him, Alex felt his passage walls give into it and his muscles undulate across it. The man felt him relax to the rhythm of the penetration and something more flexible than the dildo, a man’s cock, was inside him and immediately started to pump. He was huge, thick and long. Curt was large too, so Alex was able to accommodate to him, but not without some initial pain and difficulty. The man was growling in a thick, nearly indecipherable accent and obscene words what he was going to do to Alex with his dick, and then Alex understood what it was, screaming in pain-passion through his gag, as the man did it again and again--and again.

The pumping was suspended but the hard cock was still inside him deep, when the man leaned over and bit Alex on one of his nipples before sucking it hard. Alex cried out again. He now knew the man was bearded, as the thick, kinky hair was brushing on his sternum. The mouth came up for a brutal, possessing kiss on the lips. He smelled of garlic and of the earth. He put his mouth close to Alex’s ear and growled, in a heavily accented bass voice, “This is what you want. You be wanting a cocking like I can give you--like I am giving you. I know this is what you want. You taint a laud-dee-dah pansy like the others. You be wanting a real man between your legs, giving it to you honest and hard. Tell me.” He jerked the gag off.

“Yes, this is what I want,” Alex screamed. And, in fact, it was exactly what he wanted.

The man went back to grabbing Alex’s hips between his hands and pulling Alex’s pelvis into the thrusts as he plowed him. Alex very vocally let the man know that this indeed was what he wanted. This is something like Pete gave him, but cruder, crueler, more satisfying. This was so much more of Alex’s class and needs. This was a down-to-earth, primeval fuck.

When the man had come, blasting Alex inside with a prodigious wad of cum, which was after Alex had, he quickly whipped the restraints off Alex’s wrists and was gone. The aviator was still lying there, moaning in his completed, satiated pain-pleasure when he heard the Taylors’ cheery return.

“Oh, dear, you look like you’ve been wrung out,” Angela said, as she came into the conservatory. “Where’s Nigel? Have you two been naughty boys?”

There’s been a naughty boy in here, that’s for sure, Alex thought, but I don’t know who in the hell he was. But then it hit him. It wasn’t all darkness inside his blindfold. He ripped it off.

“What is it, love?” Angela said, coming over to him.

“I can see color and make out blurry forms,” Alex said.

“And it’s about time,” she said. “I’ll go have your doctor fetched. Oh, I see Nigel has left his book. The Razor’s Edge. I haven’t heard of it. Is it good?”

“It’s very real,” Alex said, busy turning his head here and there, willing himself to make out what objects in the conservatory--indeed, in his life--were. He was searching, if truth be known, but unsuccessfully, for the form of a crude, totally dominant peasant with a magnificent cock, lurking in the shadows where Angela couldn’t see him--where Alex couldn’t see him today either. But maybe tomorrow or the next day. A blinding charge of realization told Alex where to look for him--when he was able.

* * * *

Alex had to escape the lounge. If he heard Bing Crosby’s song, “White Christmas,” one more time--even though it was a Boxing Day party at the Taylor mansion, he’d go mad. No one would miss him anyway. He’d overstayed his convalescent time with the Taylors, and they hardly noticed he was around anymore. Well, he’d be gone in the new year. He’d have left earlier if the Duxford Aerodrome hadn’t been virtually closed down during the week between Christmas and New Year’s.

The usual assortment of writers, theatre people, and titles were wandering around in the mansion’s public rooms, grazing on the spread in the formal dining room and gathered around the drinks tables nestled into the corners of other rooms. There was a decorated tree in every room, with the tallest and most majestic one located in the glass-walled conservatory.

That Alex could walk a straight line at all wasn’t because he hadn’t dipped into the holiday punch--he had remained sober as a defense against the guests such as the bear of a older man thinking he was younger and more attractive than he really was, the London impresario, Felix Nelson, who was specializing in Gilbert and Sullivan this year. Curt had owed the man a favor or two, had told Nelson about the charms of Alex, had told Alex about the needs of Nelson, and then, not too subtly had reminded Alex of how much he and Angela had gone out of their way to bring Alex back to life--this during a period when Alex wasn’t sure he wanted to be brought back. He was over that depression and thoughts of guilt now.

And he knew he owed Angela and Curt favors--and that he’d prostituted himself enough to them that a few more times wouldn’t make any difference. To them having a good-looking American aviator at their beck and call was a valuable chit they could play to maintain their social standing in England.

Alex had missed an early half hour of the party because Nelson was fucking him in the bedroom the impresario had been assigned upstairs for the holiday week. It had been a straight, hurried fuck, with Alex bent over the side of the bed, his back arched to provide an indentation for Nelson’s beer belly while he crouched over Alex’s back and fucked him from behind. The impresario had predicted slower, more inventive fucks in the days to come before New Year’s, and, before he rejoined the party, Alex said he could hardly wait to experience Nelson again. He didn’t know what was more noxious--mingling with Angela and Curt’s bovine and pretentious guests or pretending that Nelson’s small dick was doing something arousing inside him.

No, Alex was able to move about the party freely because he was cured. His arm had been the first to come out of the cast, and by the time his leg was healed, his vision was coming back strong. He saw everything differently now than he had before he’d lost his sight, but it was a matter of naiveté having been turned to cynicism than one set of colors being turned to another.

He’d probably always have a slight limp, but Angela had declared that to be sexy and to add to his allure. She said he’d always be viewed as a war hero. He didn’t disabuse her images about how heroic the circumstances were that had put him into the casts to begin with. To the guests who came to the Taylors’ parties, he indeed was both heroic and tragic--a beautiful young-in-age but old-in-life figure worthy of a movie plot all his own. It didn’t detract from the image that he was sexy as hell and could enthusiastically be bedded by women and men alike. He was the Taylor’s pet whore.

He craved a large room with breathing space, the conservatory being the largest one on this floor, and passed Angela in the wide center hall en route there. She was holding court in the space where everyone had to traverse in moving to any other room on this floor. She was mastering a small group of guests, but she smiled at anyone who passed and placed her hand on the small bulge of her stomach. She wasn’t pregnant enough to be making a fuss over, but she was pregnant. Alex had asked her outright who the father was and she had coyly replied, “Curt, of course.” Alex knew that he could be the father but so could Sam Bolton, a recently arrived American aviator at the Duxford Aerodrome and the Taylors’ new bed partner. Alex, more often than not, was made available to warm the beds of their guests, and Alex had become expert in the conversation of offering his services without using crass words.

Alex hadn’t been in their bed for nearly six weeks--not since they’d moved on to new man flesh from the aerodrome. He didn’t mind a bit. He enjoyed having his own bedroom when there were no seeking guests in the house. It had made him an extra wheel, though, and was smoothing his transition back into the life of an air jockey and into a class that suited him better.

Nigel wasn’t at the party. He had returned to London after he had tested Alex as a replacement for Pete’s role in his life, and Alex hadn’t heard from him again. The American had made the mistake once of asking Angela what Nigel was doing and had received the response, “Oh, you didn’t know? He begged the ambulance corps to take him, and the last I heard he was somewhere dangerous in France.” This had depressed Alex a bit, and he was sorry he had asked. He couldn’t help thinking of it as other than a suicidal decision. It made him feel guilty about having come to terms with Pete’s death. It was depressing evidence that he hadn’t loved Pete as much as Nigel had.

Bolton was there, in the group holding court with Angela. He put a hand lightly on her arm as Alex passed and gave Alex a slight, smug smile. Don’t look to me for competition, Alex tried to silently convey to him as he went past. I’m well out of this, and you’ll eventually regret you’re in it. Bolton, like Alex, had come from humble beginnings. They would light him up and snuff him out in this rarified aristocratic air.

He almost cut around the corner of the formal dining room en route to the conservatory, but he saw Curt in there. He was conversing with a tall, ascetic-looking man in Arab dress. This was another guest Alex had rather pointedly been asked to accommodate sexually this week. Alex wasn’t ready for the first round of whatever that entailed.

Spying Alex out of the corner of his eye, Curt called out to him. “I have Doctor Musadeq here, Alex. He says he’d like to see the stables. Could you--?”

But, pretending he hadn’t heard Curt, Alex moved on. I’ll bet there’s something the Arab wants to see in the stables, Alex thought. He wants to saddle and ride me on a hay bale, and indeed Alex had seen the hopeful and hungry look in the hawk-nosed man’s eyes as he passed.

There weren’t many people in the conservatory even though it was the largest room in the mansion. It also was the coldest one, considering the late December low temperature outside and the expanse of badly insulated glass that brought the cold seeping inside this room. The Christmas tree there was magnificent, Alex had to allow, but it wasn’t what caught his attention. He looked beyond that to the glass wall, and beyond that yet to the man standing on the other side of the wall and looking in. The gardener, Toby, had come to take a look at how the upper crust was faring the day after Christmas. He and Alex locked eyes. Toby gave an almost imperceptible gesture, and Alex made one in return. Toby turned away from the window and disappeared into the shrubbery. Alex turned and walked through to the kitchen area and the mud room beyond, where he retrieved a coat, and quietly exited into the chill of the evening.

If it had not been for Toby, Alex would have declared himself cured a couple of weeks earlier and would have returned to the aerodrome earlier than he should have medically, but freer than he had become here.

* * * *

Rubbing his wrists to lessen the chafing of the leather bonds and to return circulation to them, Alex turned over on his back on the rope bed, looking out into the room, not much larger than his bedroom at Stanford Hall, from whence he could still hear the music from Angela and Grant’s Boxing Day party. Bing Crosby was still singing on every other record, but not always “White Christmas.” As the war was showing signs of drawing to a conclusion and the German units were being pushed back, Bing Crosby had become the singer of hope and determination. The laughter and rumbling of the guests’ conversation was slowly losing out to the sound of the music.

Although small--and apparently the only room in the gardener’s cottage--and humble, the furnishings were comfortable and functional, and Alex felt more in an agreeable element here than up at the main house--this even though he’d just had the shit fucked out of him. Even the rope bed had a give to it that made it almost a participant in the bouncing rhythm set in motion by the strength of Toby’s thrusts.

The wooden dildo--a ship’s belaying pin, all slicked up with grease--that Toby had used to open his ass up with was laying on the nightstand just inches from Alex’s face. Behind that was a photograph of a young, blond man in an army uniform. It didn’t take much study for Alex to see the striking resemblance of the young man to himself.

Toby, naked, squat but muscular still in his late forties or early fifties, and solid as a rock, veins popping out as there was no fat on his body for them to run through, was standing over a stove top in the line of cupboards that must serve as his kitchen, watching a kettle coming to a boil. Other than the nakedness, he looked domestic. A plate of cookies he would call biscuits lay on the cabinet top beside him. Who would have guessed that he’d had Alex trussed up and gagged on his bed not more than twenty minutes before and had been banging the stuffing out of him?

He’d said the gag was necessary so that they didn’t hear Alex up at the big house--a custom Toby had followed for years, Toby said, and hadn’t raised investigation yet.

“So you have brought men to your cottage and fucked them silly before?”

“Aye, I gave them a good fucking. I’ve gotten no complaints for that.” With Toby, the sex act, and his domination of men like Alex, was given as natural, which Alex found disarming and needless to argue with.

Alex had protested, though, that a loud party was going on up at the main house, but Toby only answered. “It’s how I do it. It’s how I’ve always done it.” As he was tying Alex’s wrists over his head to the brass headboard and his ankles to the corners of the brass footboard, Alex belly down to the bed, he’d added, “You like it this way.”

And Alex had liked it that way, struggling helplessly against the bonds as the old man sat below him and screwed his channel open with the belaying pin. He’d liked that, the total loss of control, the crude, unyieldingly hard wood screwing. Then he’d loved when Toby had eaten his ass out as he writhed and moaned through his gag and then had mounted him and fucked him like a dog in high heat with that impossibly thick cock of his. There was nothing refined about the fuck. It was a crude working man’s taking. It’s how Alex realized he wanted to have it from another man--totally controlled and totally fucked. He wanted to know he’d been fucked. Pete had approached that; Curt didn’t. Most of the Taylors’ guests were hopeless.

Now everything was peaceful and quiet in the cottage while Toby made up “something fortifying before we have another go at it.” Alex had trembled at the image of having another go at it. He watched Toby set a bottle of whiskey out on the table by the kitchen area, so being fortified for another go wasn’t going to be all tea and biscuits. For the first time in years, strangely, Alex felt like he was home, where he belonged. It was weird feeling at peace after he’d been bound and had his ass pounded, but so much had been fucked out of him by the rough gardener that only the peace and contentment remained.

“The photograph. Is it of your son?”

“My son? Oh, my no. That be Daniel--Danny to me. He was handyman here from the time he were in diapers to when they took him for the army.”

“He was . . . you had him in your bed?”

“Yes, had him were right. Had him hard, just like I had you--like I want to have you again. And a right good lay he was too. You’re good too. See the likeness, do you? It’s there in the lying under me and taking the cock too. Loved that lad, I did.”

“You fucked him like you just fucked me? You tied him up, opened him with this wooden dick, and fucked him with no mercy?”

“We called it makin’ love, not fuckin’. We saw a difference. The lad loved it. Couldn’t get enough of it. Down here in the garden we tain’t as delicate as those up at the main house. When we fuck, we like to feel it. You took it like you can’t get enough of it either. He were a screamer, though. I had to stop him from being heard up at the main house.”

“And he’ll be back?”

There was a pause before he turned toward Alex, a tear in his eye, and said, “Nay, the lad won’t be coming back from the war.”

After the tea and biscuits and most of the way through the whiskey, a somewhat morose Toby said, “You can be goin’ back up to the main house now, if you want. There still be a party goin’ on up there of your kind. I can give you another good fuckin’ tomorrow.”

“They aren’t my kind,” Alex answered.

“You be right there,” Toby said. “’Tis a good thing you be seeing that for yourself too.”

“I don’t want to go back to the party yet. How is it . . . how did Danny like it best?”

“You want it as Danny liked it best?”

“Yes. That’s how I want it.”

Toby walked around the small room on bent, sturdy legs, bearing the weight of Alex, facing away from him, on his thighs. He embraced Alex around the waist with one arm and palmed one of Alex’s pecs with the other, while he bounced a groaning Alex up and down on his cock. They wound up on a braided rug in front of a fire in the fireplace with Alex on all fours and Toby covering him and fucking him like a dog.

“Danny liked it that way. It were good for you too,” Toby said as they stood beside the table, each with a glass of the dregs from the whiskey bottle in his hand. “It be what you needed.”

“I think it’s what you needed too,” Alex said in a low voice.

“Aye, it were. Been some time since I got a good piece of a young looker like you. The way Danny liked it is a way I like it too. Haven’t done it that way since until you asked for it.”

“It was very good for me,” Alex admitted. He also agreed it was what he needed. “But I should get back to the party now. The guests will have thinned out enough that I will be missed.”

“Just remember now where you belong,” Toby said. “And remember where to come to get what you need.”

Alex went over to the nightstand and picked up the photo of Danny. “Was the relationship with Danny good?--I mean not just the sex part but the sex part and the other parts as well.”

“It were the best.” The sadness had returned to the man’s voice.

“Did he ever stay the night? Here? In your bed, with you?”

“That were the best part--just sleepin’ together, he in my arms, concentrating on our breathing so that we were one. Spent from the hard fuckin’--he did like the hard fuckin’--but not needin’ it ere more just then. Not needin’ the fuckin’ to be breathin’ as one. But if more fuckin’ came, more tender, more lovin’.”

“I wish I could stay the night.”

“I dinna think you’re ready for that. You still owe the Taylors, don’t you? You still be needed and wanted up at the main house. You think on them takin’ care of you, but you been takin’ care of them too. In many ways, they be lost souls. They need lovin’ as much as the next man or woman.”

“Maybe not all night quite yet. Could you try it with me--but for a short while? Try to let me become one with you? Work together on our breathing?”

Toby came back to the bed and gently pulled Alex down with him, stretching them both together, cheek to cheek, beating heart to heart, cock resting against cock, thighs touching close, and Alex concentrated on the beating of the two hearts, working at bringing them into synchronization, feeling both the power and hardness of the older man, knowing and appreciating that he could be a cruel and demanding lover, but, at this moment, only knowing of peace and contentment.

He had nearly dozed off in Toby’s arms when he sensed that Toby had gone hard again and the man’s heart seemed to be racing.

“I want--” he whispered into Alex’s ear.

“Please, yes,” Alex answered, “the way you would do it with Danny after becoming one in breath and heart beat with him.”

Toby gently turned Alex in his arms so that the young aviator was spooned into him. Toby’s insistence was hard and thick. Alex felt it rising up the small of his back, until the stronger man reached down and pulled Alex’s thigh on top of his. The positioning of the cock head was then at Alex’s hole. Toby rubbed the cock head across Alex’s rim and on his inner thighs until Alex was panting and begging for the cock. Then Toby pressed in, starting the invasion that came in peace this time rather than his previous battering down the walls into defenseless taking no prisoners. Alex sighed and moaned as the muscles of his passage walls rippled over the shaft, pulling it in. He opened to it and went soft to the core for the invader. If Toby took him hard now, he’d be split asunder.

But Toby took him in peace.

The cock slowly, surely, went into the hilt, and, groaning, Alex moved his pelvis in consort with the wave-like rhythm of Toby’s deeper penetration. Gently still, Toby turned Alex onto his stomach, gripped the young man’s wrists with his hands, pushing Alex’s arms above his head. Alex grabbed hold of the brass rungs of the headboard and Toby, his lips next to Alex’s ear, covered Alex close from above and began taking long, slow, deep strokes inside Alex’s passage. Alex went even softer at the core; Toby gained girth and depth, riding Alex’s ass like waves surging up onto the shore, retreating, surging again, reaching deeper into the soft core each time.

“I’m coming,” Alex murmured and then did.

“I be close behind you,” Toby whispered, and was, the prodigious flow coming in peace.

Alex felt the beating of Toby’s heart on his back and was sure that his was in synch. It was so quiet in the cottage that he could hear the gramophone in the main house again. Bing Crosby was singing “White Christmas” again. But now it didn’t irritate Alex. Now he felt totally mellow and at peace. This. This was that finishing of the satisfaction, that journey into the realm of love, that he had craved from Pete but only now was getting from Toby.