Arena Stage

Sean

I could tell that Mr. Masters was nervous about this first meeting with the director and dance master at Arena Stage that afternoon. He had been peevish and snappish all morning—well, more so than usual—finding fault with everything and being detailed about the clothes he wanted me to lay out for the meeting and then rejecting them and upbraiding me for what I thought went together and was appropriate. And mostly I knew he was on edge because he had accosted me on the upstairs landing, taken me down to ground like a lion pouncing on a gazelle, stripped my trousers off, and fucked me hard and cruelly, giving no heed to whether or not I was comfortable, and not noticing—or caring—that my head was bouncing off the stair railings.

But this was not new to me. Mr. Masters was always like this before an important performance. Nervous, overcompensating for his unacknowledged flashes of self-doubt, and randy. I could smell the sex on him—his precum and musky “marking” scent, the building of lust—as he built up to preperformance nerves. I knew it was coming, and I knew that when he grabbed me wherever I was, I was to open my legs to him as I tumbled to the ground or the table top or over the chair arm or on the bed, to relax and open myself to his thick master’s tool as he plowed up into me in one killing thrust—like a lion. And a lion he was, and there was many a young man in the theater who envied me for having Mr. Masters’ cock stretching and punishing my channel. He was a lion of the theater, a Pulitzer-winning playwright. A great talent. Still. Or at least there still were those who granted him that status. I celebrate that status and being permitted to live in his shadow. I wouldn’t say I granted him anything. He took whatever he wanted from me.

I could understand why Mr. Masters was nervous today. We had nothing else coming up on the schedule other than this special production at Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., to mark the venerable, highly acclaimed regional theater’s closing for two years for a total rebuild of facilities. The theater had contracted a first-rate New York director, Leonard Handelsman, to stage a high-profile closer play, and Handelsman, over some opposition, had insisted that my employer, Creighton Masters, pick one of his own plays for that production.

Mr. Masters had the necessary name value, but he was considered past his peak. And he was taking a risk in what he was going to propose today, because Handelsman no doubt was expecting a revival of one of Mr. Master’s highly successful early career plays. But Mr. Masters was going to propose a new play—and although his last two had done well with the critics and the box offices, he had a spate of “not quites” before that and since the staging of the fifth of his acclaimed “D” plays. The sixth of the “D” plays, Descent, had been the first of his “not quite” nonsuccesses.

I ascribed his “down” period to the auto accident that killed his former assistant and live-in lover, Lawrence. It took several years for Mr. Masters to recover from that loss—only surmounted when he took me on in the role Lawrence once had fulfilled.

What he was going to suggest—no, demand—today was the staging of the seventh and last of these plays—he had always said there would be seven, and when asked by the press “why seven?” he’d always shot off a flippant, “there were seven deadly sins.”

But after the nonsuccess of the sixth “D” play, no one ever expected this series to be completed.

Defiance was his seventh play, and, as I knew and no one else did, he hadn’t done much of the work on it at all—in fact, he hadn’t written more than barebones outlines for years. The well seemed to be dry. Both he and I were counting on a success with Defiance to start his creative juices again. So, there was every reason for him to be nervous about selling himself at this meeting; we were near the end of the road.

No one but me knew how long we’d been near the end of that road. The polishing of those last two stage successes and even the bulk of Defiance were my writing, not his. He still had the spark of genius. He still knew the hooks that grabbed the theatergoer and inspired the actor to deliver his or her best work. But he could do no more than paint with a broad brush now. I had been filling in the detail work.

Still, it was his genius and in honor of his early brilliance that brought me to him and that kept me with him despite his extraordinary demands on my life, not the least the sexual demands. But that’s what you do for a lion of the theater. You live in his shadow and do all you can to keep his armor burnished. And I lived in hope—in the hope that he would regain his greatness for the detail work as well as the brilliant broad brush.

We weren’t broke, but, given Mr. Masters’ lavish lifestyle, we perpetually were close to that. Everything about the man was bigger than life—not just his physical presence and his charisma and robust body and good looks, which he had maintained into his late fifties, but his living and spending as well. He was a legend in the theater and had knowledge of that and every expectation of living up to it.

A case in point was this townhouse on 7th Street in Southeast Washington within a short walking distance of Arena Stage on the Washington Channel waterfront. When Mr. Masters heard that Leonard Handelsman, the director, had brought his quite large yacht in and docked it right on the waterfront near the theater in the Capitol Yacht Club, Mr. Masters had been determined we weren’t going to be upstaged and insisted on renting this small townhouse—just a wedge of a two-story place in fifties’ style modern. Mostly glass, with a living, dining, and kitchen combination downstairs and a loft bedroom above. All for an astronomical price even by New York standards.

But I had to admit that it would be convenient to the stage, if Mr. Masters was able to sell his idea of risking it all on the concluding play of the “D” series. If.

I worried a bit about Handelsman. He could have gotten any playwright he wanted for this production. It was guaranteed to be highlighted in theater circles this coming season. Why had he chosen Mr. Masters? They weren’t contemporaries. Mr. Masters was a good fifteen years older than Handelsman, and Handelsman was at the height of his theater world presence. He was in the theater stratosphere and still climbing. Mr. Masters was on the descent, and the question of whether he was still in the stratosphere was moot—and even more a question to me, who knew our true position.

But there seemed to be some advantage Mr. Masters had with Handelsman.

As we entered the dance practice room in the Arena Stage complex, where the all-important initial planning meeting was to take place, I saw at once that there was more to the Masters-Handelsman connection than I had supposed. Handelsman was reacting toward Mr. Masters as if he was a visiting god—which, of course, encouraged Mr. Masters to act even more the part. I could sense his reassurance building. And that would mean more sex after the meeting. Mr. Masters celebrated his ups as vigorously as he compensated for his nerves. Mr. Masters was still vigorous and oversexed for his stage of life—and he was built for it.

I couldn’t help but turn my attention to the third person at the flimsy card table in the middle of the vast, dimly lit, polished-floor dance studio as I settled in a folding chair a good six feet behind Mr. Masters and just out of the periphery of his vision. Placed just so, I could “hop to” to meet his frequent demands for documents and scripts from the overwhelming collection of items he had insisted I manhandle over to the meeting—most of them purely for show and bravado.

I was in my element here. A dance studio. And the third man sitting at the table was the dean of Broadway dancing, a legend in his own right, Miloslav Cersenka. I was actually a little taken aback at seeing him. Rumors were floating around Broadway that he was dead. And, indeed, he hadn’t worked a show there in two years. And yet here he was, in the flesh, although the flesh these days was weak. He was still powerfully built, but his body was gaunt and almost cadaverous, only his dedication to dance seeming to enable him to hold on to muscle tone. His skin was translucent, and there were blotches of bruising on his arms and on one cheek and on his bald, cadaverous scalp. More damning—for him, at least—there was an ivory-headed cane propped up against the table by his side. If some leg ailment prevented him from dancing, he might as well be dead. Not dead perhaps. Not yet. But not far.

I had once worshipped Miloslav Cersenka. It was he who brought me to New York from my Midwestern town. Not he himself, physically, but the legend of him. I was a dancer. Tatesville, Ohio, was no place for a young man to be a dancer. Tatesville, Ohio, was a bedrock of high school football. I was built slight and said to be “too pretty” to try to make it on the football field, especially as dark-skinned players were supposed to be big bruisers with dreadlocks on the line. I had been drawn early into the world of dance instead. That was no talent to have in Tatesville. It flagged you as a pansy. And sure enough, shortly after my eighteenth birthday, the vice principal of the school trapped me backstage in the high school auditorium late one afternoon, and when I went home that night I no longer was a virgin.

The problem was that I enjoyed it.

And that, coupled with my love for dance, meant I had to leave Tatesville. I saw movie musicals at the local theater, and I noted that, more often than not, Miloslav Cersenka was credited as the dance arranger and director. I read up on everything I could find on Cersenka, and then, when the opportunity came, I went to New York to break into the theater, hopefully in one of Cersenka’s productions.

As I auditioned, never reaching the heights of a Cersenka production, I heard that you had to devote yourself totally to Cersenka to be one of his production dancers. Totally. It was said that he insisted on fucking all of his dancers, male and female, and that only through this level of control would he trust a dancer to work in his troupe, to surrender all to him and to deliver exactly what he commanded.

That was no problem for me, but I’d never managed to land an audition with Cersenka himself.

Before that ever happened, I landed an audition with Creighton Masters. An audition of a similar kind, but without the hope of dancing at the end.

I was dancing in the off-Broadway launch of one of Mr. Masters’ “not quite” plays three years previously, a play that didn’t get to Broadway and didn’t make much of a splash off Broadway either. I was glad to get the work, but I knew my dancing wasn’t getting me where I wanted to go.

I was vulnerable. Creighton Masters was a big deal to me. And he was such a sad figure then, always looking almost lost through prolonged mourning of his assistant and lover, Lawrence. When he suggested we lunch together one afternoon, several hours before the show, I was thrilled.

I assumed we would be in a group, but we weren’t. He turned all of his charm on me—just me. I doubt anyone but those who have come under Mr. Masters’ spell would understand how flattering and disarming that was. He asked me if I wanted to see his suite. Then he had wine delivered and told me to amuse myself—that he felt like taking a bath. Then he asked me to come in and scrub his back. Then he asked me to undress and join him in the tub. And I said yes to it all. Without a second thought. This was Creighton Masters, the lion of playwrights. He was on his back in the tub and pulled me down onto his lap, facing him, and embraced my chest tightly in his arms and thrust up into me with a cock I never could imagine that he had. And while I moaned and groaned at the taking—a possession more filling and vigorous and deep than I had ever known before—he marked me as his. As he fucked me a second time that afternoon, he offered me the position as his assistant.

I danced that night, in pain, and my legs not able to close. But that was my last appearance on stage.

I had been practicing the last several months, preparing for a return, if our financial circumstance dictated that would be necessary. Not knowing if I could ever again be even as good as I was when I stopped. But knowing we needed contingencies. I, of course, hadn’t let Mr. Masters know this. He would have been outraged. He would have considered it treasonous, I knew, at the thought that I doubted in the least that he could continue as he always had.

It was this thought of maybe returning, however, that made me melt at being in the same room with Miloslav Cersenka, not more than ten feet from where he was sitting. I had never hoped to be this close to the dance master.

I handed out scripts at Mr. Masters’ direction, and he asked the other two not to open the covers initially. He was waiting for his moment, this man of high theatrical drama. And in the interlude, I had been reminiscing—on how Mr. Masters had come into my life—rather how I had come into his—and how drastically my life had changed at that point. My attention went back to the men at the table when I heard Handelsman and Cersenka gasp. Mr. Masters had let them open the covers and see the title—Defiance.

“Can this be?” Handelsman was exclaiming.

“I said there would be seven,” Masters answered. “I know it’s been a decade, but this is my proposal for the production.”

“I don’t know what to say,” Handelsman said. “You could take this directly to Broadway. Any producer and any theater on Broadway would clear time and space for this. You would have no trouble finding financial backing, on the strength of the concept alone, even in these tight times.”

“I believe the occasion is worthy of it,” Masters answered in that dismissive voice I knew so well. I knew even more about that voice, though. I knew it was the product of desperation.

“Another of the ‘D’ plays? A new play? I expected a revival of one of your many Broadway triumphs. But another ‘D’ play? We will eclipse Broadway for its run.”

“That is the idea, yes,” Masters said. “And not just another ‘D’ play—the last ‘D’ play. Its premier. Here in Washington . . . at Arena Stage. I do believe they will remember that for two years at least, if I do say so myself.”

It was then that I discerned another presence in the room. It must have been some movement in the shadows over by the practice piano that had arrested my attention. I looked over there, but it was just too murky. But, yes, there did seem to be another man, a tall, dark man, leaning on the top of the piano at the far side of it from here. I wondered why I couldn’t see him better.

I heard the name of the seventh “D” play, and my attention went back to the animated discussion between Mr. Masters and Handelsman and the dance master.

“Defiance?” Cersenka was saying, a question mark in his voice.

“Precisely,” Masters said in a voice that told me he thought he had won them over now. “The unexpected. I always intended the unexpected at this point. I know what everyone was thinking, what they were thinking the final title would be—”

“Death,” Cersenka whispered in a hollow, faraway voice. And then everyone stopped whatever they were doing, as Cersenka was coughing a deep-throated cough. Bringing something into the room that hadn’t been there before. A sense of reality? Of inevitability?

After a minute, Masters sniffed and said, “Yes, well. I know what people thought. But I always thought that would be a bit too obvious.”

“Obvious, yes,” Cersenka said. “But it’s there, isn’t it? It’s there in all of them, all of the ‘D’ plays, lurking in the background. Death.”

I knew then that Mr. Masters was in his element. They had been won over. They were looking deeply in the play, taking it seriously. Our play. Well, now, I couldn’t think that—not “our” play; I was being presumptuous. My contribution couldn’t have been significant—and it certainly couldn’t be voiced. Mr. Masters’ play. His concluding masterpiece of the “D” series. He looked Cersenka directly in the eye then and said, “Perhaps yes, perhaps no. You have not read this last script.”

It wasn’t long before Cersenka had made his exit of the room, leaning on his cane in a heartbreaking, slow progression to the door, and stopping beside me and embarrassing and pleasing me deeply by guessing correctly that I was a dancer and by offering me an audition for the play. And then the other two men at the table, oblivious to how momentous it was to me to receive that attention from Cersenka, were rising, scraping their chairs on the polished wood floor. The stage director, Handelsman, scooped together the papers strewn on the table top, and I saw him motioning toward the piano in the shadows.

My breath stopped and I gasped inwardly as a black giant emerged from the shadows. No wonder I hadn’t been able to see who was lurking back there. He was ebony black and was wearing a black turtleneck and black trousers. He was a hulking muscle man, but he moved gracefully on the balls of his feet as he came over to the table at Handelsman’s summons. He was a handsome man. He could have played a tribal African chief on stage. And all eyes would have gone to him whenever he was there. I wondered if he was a dancer or an actor.

But then Mr. Masters snapped his fingers at me, and I started gathering up all of that gear he had made me bring over for appearances sake, pushing my selfish dreams of dancing for Cersenka into the back of my brain.

Handelsman was speaking to the black giant, who was being attentive to him, although I felt by his bearing that the black man saw himself as in no way subservient to the stage director. “I have invited Creigh and his assistant to the yacht, where we can discuss this more comfortably and over drinks and dinner,” Handelsman said. “Show his assistant to the ship, will you, Gil? Creigh and I will be along shortly, after we have broken this momentous news to the theater director.”

“Sure thing, Lenny,” the black man answered in a breezy tone, which I then got the impression he was using to impress me—to show me the difference between me as Mr. Masters’ dogs body and him—because he introduced himself to me as Gil Johnson, Leonard Handelsman’s assistant.

Johnson was giving me “that” look—as if he could see straight through me and the relationship I had with Mr. Masters, as if he knew I was nothing better than a sex slave to Mr. Masters. And, disconcertingly, as if he, the big black man, already owned me as well.

I turned away from him in embarrassment and not wanting to let him see that I was impressed by him, that something at the center of me was showing interest in him. I gathered up the rest of the paraphernalia I’d brought into the room. When I was upright again, he pointed to the doors at the back of the room.

As we turned to walk out of the room, he laid a hand on the small of my back to guide me in the right direction, which I enjoyed. Then, outside the room, when we turned right to go down a dark flight of stairs that led to an exit out on 6th Street, the black giant moved his hand down to cup my buttocks. Just like he knew he’d made me already.

Out on the street, he turned to me and smiled. “They won’t need us. We can go to the yacht later rather than sooner. You’ve got the keys to this townhouse of Masters’, don’t you?” He squeezed my butt cheek in his broad hand and was leaning in close to me. I liked the feel of his hand. It burned right into my ass. But I wasn’t free to do what I wanted. Masters demanded exclusivity. He never wanted to wear a condom; he said he did everything on the spur of the moment and condoms disrupted the moment. I wasn’t free to fuck anyone else—no matter how inviting this obvious offer was.

“Mr. Masters will expect me to be there when he arrives,” I said.

“This Mr. Masters owns you, I take it?” the black giant asked. But he was still smiling and seemed to be amused.

“Pretty much so, yes,” I answered. There could be no meeting, no relationship. So there was no reason for me to be coy.

“OK, I’ll take you on over to the yacht. But I don’t think I’ll stay around very long. And I don’t think you will either.”

I wondered what he meant by that as we walked the two blocks over to the waterfront, but then, when I saw the yacht, I was mesmerized. It was one of those old fantail yachts from the 1920s, all polished teak superstructure on top of a glistening white hull. Pretty long, but small enough to get into a channel like this. I figured it made a pretty nifty home away from home, though.

Gil Johnson waited with me, asking me about my background and being guarded about his in return, until Mr. Masters and Handelsman arrived, all animated talk. Once embarked, they walked right by us where we were sitting in the semicircle of cushions at the stern of the ship, entered the salon, and disappeared down a corridor at the far end of that toward the bow of the ship.

“Have a nice wait,” Gil said, with a smirk on his face, as he rose from the cushions. “When you get tired enough to want to go home, go take a look. I’m outta here until nine. If you want to stay around until I’m back and then want to go do something, the offer’s still open.”

I thanked him through pursed lips and then watched him saunter off up the dock and onto Water Street and over toward the bars near the Gangplank restaurant. He looked mighty fine from the back, moving like he was totally confident, in self-assured strides. I regretted more than somewhat my pledge of constancy to Mr. Masters. I well knew there weren’t many black people in the theater, but, with this man’s presence, he could rule the stage.

I sat there for the better part of an hour, on the fantail of the yacht, Boxoffice. I’m sure many thought that was a funny name for a ship. But it made sense for Leonard Handelsman. He’d probably paid for it from the big box-office returns of his plays on Broadway.

Then I started thinking about Mr. Masters and Handelsman. Handelsman had been so deferential back there in the meeting room at the Arena Stage, and the longer Mr. Masters had been there, the more self-assured he’d become. There was about a decade and a half between them; I couldn’t imagine when they would have met. Then I noticed an album out on a table near the door into the salon. It was open, as if someone had been reviewing it out here. It wouldn’t be something you’d leave out on the deck of a ship, with all of the salt-water breezes around, even though this area was covered. I got up and picked up the book, and brought it back to the bench seat, and started to scan through the pages.

It was a scrapbook history of Handelsman’s Broadway productions. And there, in the first few pages, where Handelsman started his rise to acclaim, there were playbills and photos that answered my question. Handelsman’s start was at the height of Mr. Masters’ stage hits. The playbills and photos alike explained it. Mr. Masters had given Handelsman a leg up. So, it stood to reason that Handelsman was giving payback now. Just what a young, rising star would do for his mentor. But the photos were a bit more disturbing. They were group photos, but there, always, were Mr. Masters and Handelsman together, touching—intimately so. Nothing for sure, of course, if you didn’t know Mr. Masters intimately yourself. I recognized those expressions, the possessiveness of the way Mr. Masters held his arm around the young Handelsman’s shoulders, the way he put his hand on Handelsman’s forearm.

So, I wasn’t that surprised when I heard the faint, but not unfamiliar sounds wafting up the corridor leading toward the bow on the other side of the salon.

Slowly, silently, not really wanting to do it, I entered the salon and started working my way down that corridor. Immediately after the salon, there were staterooms on either side. Two on the left. Just one at that depth on the right. No doubt the owner’s stateroom. The sounds were more distinct now. They were coming from the open door beyond the stateroom on the right.

It was a small cabin. Not much more room available than for the sling suspended from an iron hook in the center of the ceiling. Handelsman was in the sling, his head pointed away from me, toward the outside wall, his legs trussed up in hoops high on the chains nearer to the door that attached the black leather sling to the hook in the ceiling. He was naked—and in great shape for a man in his forties. The soles of his feet were moving back and forth, his head was lolled over the far end of the sling, and he was moaning deeply—the way I’m sure I moaned when Mr. Masters was fucking me.

Mr. Masters was standing, between Handelsman’s spread and trussed legs. The sight was as mesmerizing as it was horrifying to me. There was a good rhythm going to it. I could see Mr. Masters’ butt cheeks expand and contract in rhythm to the movement of Handelsman’s feet. And with each contraction of Mr. Masters’ butt cheeks, representing the slide of his cock deep inside Handelsman’s channel, Handelsman emitted a moan.

I turned and retraced my steps, walking smartly, but silently. And I didn’t stop when I got to the fantail. I moved on to the gangplank and crossed it and walked across the concrete apron on the quay and up a little grassy rise to where there were park benches, set inside the sidewalk on Water Street, pointed toward the yacht basin.

There were few others around, it having gotten a little nippy out as night had fallen. The lights in the rigging of the boats tied to the piers and the view beyond to the Haines Point park, separating the channel from the Potomac River, and the lights of the runways of Reagan Airport across the river should have been cheering. But I wasn’t in a cheerful mood, and the lights were bleary as they reflected off the tears welling up in my eyes.

It wasn’t just the betrayal. A man of Mr. Masters’ importance and standing doesn’t betray. He just lives, and everyone around him adjusts. And it wasn’t the hypocrisy of demanding constancy from me and not exercising it himself or even the horror of what it could mean when he had unprotected sex with me and was fucking other men. It was more because of my weakness, because of my own irrational connection to him. I wasn’t blinded by Mr. Masters’ self-centeredness or some of the realities behind his “great man” façade. In fact, I loved him all the more for it. He was one of the great men of the theater—and he had let me into the center of his life.

I realized it was jealousy I felt. The obvious prior relationship with Handelsman. The swift and easy way they just drifted matter-of-factly back into a sexual relationship. Leaving me to cool my heels on the fan tail of that son of a bitch’s yacht. I felt so, so small.

“You OK?”

I turned and looked up. It was the black giant, Gil whateverhisnamewas. Gil Johnson, I guess. He plopped down beside me and turned to me.

“What are you doing up here? Isn’t it warmer down on the ship?”

“I . . . I couldn’t.” I was having trouble saying anything.

“They’re fucking, aren’t they?” He asked, obviously not the least bit surprised. “They just walked on by you and went in to Lenny’s special room and started fucking, didn’t they?”

“Yes.” I tried not to make my answer sound desperate. But there was no way I brought that off.

“You didn’t know, did you?” He continued. “You didn’t know anything about Masters and Handelsman’s shared history before you came down to Washington, did you?”

“No,” I squeaked. He put his arm around me then. And I let him. He was warm. And he smelled nice. I could feel the strength in his arms. And apparently something about that conveyed to him, because his next question was directly related.

“Hey. Firm shoulders and biceps. And I saw you move back in the meeting room. Dancer are you?”

“Yes, yes I am . . . or was,” I said.

“Masters make you give it up?”

I didn’t answer, which gave him the answer. Instead, I tried to redirect. “You move like a dancer too. You a dancer too?”

He laughed. “No, I’m a kick boxer. Reaches a similar result, but that’s a whole other bag, I can assure you.”

He was putting me in my place. Just like they did back in Tatesville. Separating the athletes from the pansies. But I’d come a long way since then. I just let it roll over me.

“But you work for Handelsman,” I said. Trying to get a little of my own back.

“Yeah, he gives me my paycheck. But it’s not a bit like you workin’ for Masters, I can assure you of that too.”

Masters was fucking Handelsman. So this big black guy was fucking Handelsman too. I was feeling weak in the knees. My body wanted him. And Mr. Masters had thrown me a curve.

He might have had me nailed right then and there, but he veered off the subject.

“You dancin’ in this production?”

“No,” I said. “I haven’t danced in a production for a few years.”

“Since you started workin’ for Masters then?”

I didn’t answer. Which, again, was an answer.

“You’re hard bodied, though,” at which he took the opportunity to give me a good feel here and there, “so you’ve been practicin’.”

“Just recently,” I answered. “I . . . I’m thinking of going back to it—to dancing on the stage.”

“Does Masters know?”

“No.” I said it softly, but he heard me.

“Do you think he’ll let you go back into it?”

“I don’t know.”

He turned my face toward his then, and he put his lips to mine. I let him do that, but he became more aggressive and moved to slipping his tongue in past my lips. I broke away from the kiss and turned my head to where I was looking away from him, up the channel, toward where it joined with the mouth of the Anacostia River into the wider Potomac. While he was kissing me, he’d placed one of his big paws on my basket. I didn’t have to tell him that I found him attractive.

“He fucks you, doesn’t he?” Gil asked softly.

“Yes,” I answered. But my face was pointed away from him and the answer was caught in the wind.

“What was that?”

“Yes,” I said louder and I turned back to him. I’m sure he could see the tears in my eyes.

“Whenever he wants, right?”

“Yes,” I answered. But I couldn’t leave it like that. “He’s Creighton Masters. He’s a lion of the theater.”

“Big cock has he?” Gil asked. He was smiling a sloppy grin. I should have taken that as mocking, but the way he said it encouraged me not to. It was like he was chipping at ice here, trying to get me.

“No . . . yes.” I was flustered. “I meant that he is a legend in the theater, and my whole life is the theater. He’s big and I’m small. Insignificant. And without him, I’d be even more insignificant. But yes . . . yes, he’s got a cock to match his fame.”

The smile stayed in place. “I got a big cock too. A legendary cock. I’d like to fuck you.”

That moment had passed. He’d had me there for a few seconds. But that was way back in the conversation. Maybe it was because he was being so cocky, so sure of himself—although, god knows, how I was reacting to his paw cupping my cock and balls gave him every reason to be sure of himself. Being cocky and sure of himself, and I’d just been brought to the brink of that cockiness by Mr. Masters back there in Handelsman’s “special” cabin.

I pulled away and stood up from the bench. But my legs weren’t in on the program. They didn’t carry me right away. Maybe I thought Gil required some sort of explanation. Because in other circumstances . . .

“I can’t. Sorry, I can’t. Mr. Masters requires exclusivity.”

Gil laughed. Obviously my attempt at an explanation had hit his funny bone.

“Your Mr. Masters is back there banging the wadding out of my Mr. Handelsman, and you’re worried about him demanding that you be exclusively his?”

“I don’t expect you to understand,” I said. I was feeling better now. The spell was broken. I was passed whatever I was being tempted to do.

“What’s to understand?” Gil asked in an incredulous tone.

“Mr. Masters is Mr. Masters, and I am me. It nice that you have a different arrangement with Handelsman, but that’s between you and him. Now, could you just go on back to the boat? That’s where you sleep, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” he said. “I sleep wherever I want on the boat. But I usually sleep in the master’s cabin with my dick up Handelsman’s ass. So, who do you think that makes the master?”

“Who signs the checks?” I asked.

He stood up now too, and I could see that what I’d said had gotten to him. But he didn’t strike out. He just started walking off in that sexy lope of his, down the grassy embankment, toward the Boxoffice.

At the bottom of the incline, he turned and looked up at me. He was standing between streetlights, a dark man in the shadows. I couldn’t tell what expression was on his face.

“After what you’ve seen, you’re going to sit there, waiting for Masters? In the chilly air?”

“Yes,” I answered.

“Why?”

“Because he told me to.”

I heard a harsh laugh, and he turned and took a step, but then stopped and turned again.

“That’s a difference. Even if Lenny tells me to wait, I don’t if I don’t want to. But I’ll tell you something else. I’m willing to wait for you. Just don’t take too long.”

And then he was gone, walking up the gangplank of Handelsman’s yacht.

I felt relieved when Gil was back aboard the Boxoffice. It was a crazy night. I don’t know what I would have done if he’d walked back up the grassy embankment and told me to follow him—that we were going to fuck.