Troy Tamed

Stefan almost had me that warm afternoon in the summer pavilion of the Eisler country house in the Vienna Woods. We had played two sets of tennis, stripped down to our shorts in the unusual August heat on the mountainside above Vienna, and I knew by the way he looked at me that he wanted me. And, truth be told, I think I wanted him as well. I’d always had those urgings, but I had never pursued them. The one time I’d had sex with a man, it was more or less forced on me by Coach Jacoby. I had accepted it before it happened, but I hadn’t pursued it.

I knew of Stefan’s sexual exploits. I knew that he preferred to be pursued--that he wanted to be begged to give sex.

I hadn’t seen Stefan since we had been on the soccer team together at the southern U.S. university I attended for my junior year. Like me, he had transferred away for his senior year, but it was to a different university than the one I moved too. Even though he was a slightly better player than I was, I guessed right on school transfer and he didn’t. The soccer team of my new university, with me the star player now, won the national championship. We beat Stefan’s team in a semifinal match.

Stefan hadn’t held a grudge. In fact, he kept in contact with me throughout our senior year and when graduation came he urged me to try out with him for the Milan Serie A football--as soccer is called everywhere but the United States--league. He said he had an in with the team, and I was sure he was right. I, of course, was interested in playing professional soccer, and the European leagues were even better than the American ones, so I was sorely tempted by his offer. At the same time, I knew he was trying to get into my pants. But when I told him of my fears, he said that he was just trying to sweeten the deal for the Milan team as much as possible--two American all-stars who knew how to work with each other at one go. He assured me that he was over me.

So, I had come back with him to Austria after graduation to prepare for the football trials in six-week’s time. Taking up Stefan’s offer to stay with his family had been ideal. They were quite wealthy, they came from a titled family, and they traveled all over the region and had been good enough to say they’d take me with them. Since I was coming to Europe, I planned to stay long enough to do some traveling around the continent.

I knew it was a risk to come back into Stefan’s realm. He put himself in front of me constantly in our junior year, obviously wanting me to beg him to take me as so many others on campus were doing, trying to wear my resolve down. But, other than that one time with Coach Jacoby, I had been too strong for him. I knew my inclinations were dangerously close to what he wanted, but I had come from a small southern town and I planned to return there to take over a business that had been in my family since before the Civil War. I couldn’t afford to indulge what Stefan had to offer. I would marry a cheerleader coed from one of the other prominent families in town, live in a southern colonial mansion on a golf course at the edge of town, and raise my allotted three and a half children and one dog and two cats. It wouldn’t be risky or exciting, but it would be safe.

Still, Stefan was not the type to give up, and I was fully on guard against an ulterior motive for his invitation to me to summer with his family. I hadn’t been totally cold to him. He had been raised on his family’s Italian estate, and he was naturally expressive with his hands. I had let him become friendly with his hands--and I had thoroughly enjoyed his occasional attentions in that vein--but other than that one session with Coach Jacoby more than a year earlier, I had not succumbed to his expressed desires for something more between us. He quite well knew what my limitations were and why I had set them.

After the tennis game, Stefan and I dove into the pool, in our tennis shorts, to cool off, and I’d left him there swimming vigorous laps and retired to the summer pavilion down near the small lake and dozed off on a chaise lounge.

I awoke with Stefan’s full lips on mine. He caught me completely by surprise. I had just then been dreaming of someone very like him, so I was slow to draw away--in fact, I was holding up my end of the kiss. He was leaning over me, droplets falling off his hard, heaving chest onto mine, and he’d run a hand under the waistband of my shorts and was fisting my cock.

“No, Stefan,” I exclaimed. “Too far . . . I don’t want . . .”

“Don’t tell me you don’t want it, Troy,” Stefan retorted in a low, guttural voice. “Your dick tells me that you want it.” He began to stroke me, and my cock did, in fact, belie my interest. “Just let me jack you off. You’re driving me crazy.”

“Not what you want, Stefan. You can’t have what you want. You don’t want to just use your hand on me. You’ve been very clear in what you want. And I’ve been equally clear that it won’t happen. That it can’t happen. I’ve been--”

“Just a hand job,” Stefan wheedled. “That’s enough. No more than that.”

His lips returned to mine, not wanting to hear me say no, and he continued to stroke me inside my shorts. I struggled against him, but not for long. I didn’t answer him, but my body answered for me. It started to relax, and I emitted a little moan through his searching kiss. He pulled away from my lips and gave me a radiant smile of victory and moved his lips to one of my nipples as he unzipped my shorts and pulled my dick out.

I was panting and moaning as his lips moved down over my belly.

“No, no,” I whimpered. “Just the hand . . . ohhhhhh.” He’d swallowed my cock. And it felt so good. I’d stop him. In a minute or two.

But then I felt the pad of a finger at the rim of my channel, and that galvanized me into full defensive mode.

“No, Stefan. That’s enough. That’s way more than enough.” I struggled out of his grip and launched myself from the chaise lounge. I stood there, trembling, as I zipped up my shorts.

“You want me; you know you do. I want to fuck you and you want that too,” Stefan said in a hoarse voice belabored by heavy breathing.

“No, it’s not going to happen, Stefan,” I responded, making my voice as cold and as unemotional as possible. “I’ll leave tomorrow, if necessary. But this isn’t going any further.”

“You are a tease,” Stefan spat back. “You can’t be as strong willed as you pretend. You wanted me just now; there’s no question of that. And you couldn’t leave tomorrow. Where would you go? It’s still a month until the Milan trials. You don’t want to give up that dream, do you?”

He had more to say, but I didn’t hear it; I had turned and was moving up toward the house.

“Someday you are going to beg me for it,” he yelled at me as I moved swiftly away from him.

Neither of us mentioned the incident again--and nothing was said about my leaving early--but Stefan was cool and on the edge of being dismissive of me henceforth, and I started to consider my options on where to go for the next month. No, I didn’t want to miss my chance at the Milan trials, but maybe there was someplace else I could go for the next month. I’m sure that I was the first person, male or female, who had ever turned Stefan down. He continued to be friendly to me in front of his family, but there was an iciness in the air that even they could not miss. I decided I’d need to try to make some other arrangements for my European sojourn at the earliest possibility. Stefan wouldn’t be returning to States, in any event, so it could end here--unless, of course, we both made the Milan team. If we did, I’d just have to make sure that I stayed away from him in Milan as much as possible. And with luck, the yearning that I had for what he was offering would die here forever as well.

Less than a week after my altercation with Stefan, he told me that he’d been invited to attend a night of the Wagnerian opera festival down in the Volksopera in Vienna and asked me if I’d like to accompany him.

I jumped at the chance, tickets to the Volksopera being very hard to come by. I wasn’t particularly an opera buff, but I’d come to Europe for the experience, and this would be something I always could say I’d experienced.

The music patron who had extended the offer to Stefan turned out to be an international financier by the name of Klaus Gehler, who had a very good permanent box at the theater. Our seats were in his box--with him. I wasn’t sure throughout the performance if his attention was focused on the stage or on me.

Gehler, a distinguished-looking Austrian not much short of sixty in age, was an excellent conversationalist. He also was an extraordinarily handsome and well-kept man of military bearing and close-cropped steel-gray hair. He had eyes of the palest blue that seemed to penetrate into the innermost secrets of whoever he was concentrating on. I felt that it must have been a tool that served him well in business, but it caused me to turn my eyes away from him. I couldn’t help but find him attractive. It hadn’t helped that Stefan had told me that the man was gay and had been one of the men who had initiated Stefan into that lifestyle.

During the first interval of the opera, Gehler turned to me, fixed those mesmerizing pale-blue eyes on me, and floored me in a rich, smooth baritone voice, “Our friend Stefan here says that you are looking for a broader experience of Europe for a few weeks before you need to be in Milan, Mr. Taylor. Perhaps I have a proposition for you.”

I was looking for a change? I hadn’t said anything directly to Stefan about that at all. In fact Stefan had told me that I couldn’t leave and I hadn’t pressed that further. I felt the anger rising inside me, but I held it in. All I had wanted was for Stefan to keep his hands off me. I know the feeling was idiotic, since I was actually looking for someplace else to be, but I was angry that Stefan would just shove me off like this. But with Klaus Gehler I obviously was in the presence of a highly unusual man. He exuded power and strength--and elegance and refinement. I knew I was way out of my league here, and I felt like I would be moving down a path of no return if I associated with this man in any way other than encountering him at concerts during interval chats. But if Stefan wanted to brush me off, I certainly wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of stepping on my tongue in the presence of Gehler.

“Yes, I was looking into some travel options,” I said. “I came to Europe several weeks before the Milan trials for summer break to see how well I’d like to live outside the United States. The Eislers have graciously shown me a few of the major cities, but I would like to get a deeper feel for the countryside while I’m here.”

“Stefan told me that you didn’t major in sports at the university but studied English and won a few writing awards. Is that so?”

“Yes,” I answered. “In the states, the university athletes usually have to have some academic field of study. Mine was English, yes. Yours was what, Stefan?”

“Geology on paper, but sexual gymnastics in reality,” Stefan answered with a little laugh. He wasn’t helping keeping this discussion in a neutral channel.

But Gehler went on as if he hadn’t heard that suggestive answer. “Ah, It is well that you are a writer. That would fit perfectly. I write too, but something entirely more dull, I’m afraid. In my business I have to keep up a constant and voluminous correspondence. And my secretary, Franz, has had to go off on a family medical emergency. So, I am bereft and just about to leave for my retreat. It would work out marvelously if you could take on the role of my temporary secretary. Just for three weeks or so. I would promise not to overtax you--to let you gain considerable experience of European ways and still have time and opportunity to do the physical training you need to do to prepare for the Milan trials. How would that sound to you, Mr. Taylor?”

“That sounds perfect,” I answered, giving Stefan a defiant look. And I did think it was perfect. I found myself excited with the prospect of three weeks away from Stefan. It was only later, when I was back at Stefan’s house and packing, with Stefan studiously avoiding me, that I began to have second thoughts. I began to realize that it wasn’t so much departing from the situation with Stefan that was exciting me as it was that I was going to be with Klaus Gehler, a fascinating older man. It didn’t escape me, though, that I was finding Gehler fascinating in the same way that I had once found Coach Jacoby fascinating. And that was a fascination that had proved to be quite dangerous for me before and I was trying to reject. Was refusing Stefan and taking Klaus Gehler up on his offer a matter of moving from possibility to certainty? I rather thought so, but I felt powerless to stop it. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to stop it.