Arena Stage

Gil

I hadn’t planned on letting Masters get to me—it was perhaps the last thing I’d ever say I’d do. He didn’t fool me a bit, the pompous, egotistical user. But there was a reason he was able to bend so many to his will. He had charisma. He also had a championship dick and could fuck like no one else I’d ever met.

I only found that out by a crooked route, though. One night, three weeks into rehearsals for Defiance at Arena Stage, I came back aboard the Boxoffice late in the evening, having spent a couple of hours on the prowl, building up my escape fund at the expense of horny men at the Bachelor Pad who wanted a bit of what I could give. The boat was deserted from fantail through the main salon. I have no idea where Creighton Masters had been lurking. When I got to the owner’s stateroom, however, Lenny was on the bed, naked. And, when he saw me in the doorway, he beckoned me to come onto the bed and earn my keep.

I’d actually been more than a little worried about where I stood in the earning-my-keep department, because Lenny had been spending much of his fucking time—and, yes, I mean that literally—with Masters. I got the distinct impression I was being forced out. And I felt like I still hadn’t saved up enough money on the side to make my escape from this life. I don’t want to even start getting into the wounded pride bit. But there was that too. Masters was a good thirty years older than I was. The very idea of having to compete with him burnt me to a crisp—little did I know then just how fucking good he was.

Anyway, I was there on top of Handelsman, having dragged him to the foot of the bed and made him stand on the floor there, bent over the bed, and I was servicing him deep and in rapid strokes, when I suddenly felt a hand palming my belly and the thick fingers of another one greased up and forcing themselves into my asshole.

I turned my head and saw that it was Masters and that he was naked. He and Handelsman must have already been at it and Masters had wandered off somewhere before I got there and come back, seen I’d arrived in Handelsman’s asshole, and decided he wanted to play too.

I made threatening, growling noises to warn Masters off.

“Ride with it Gil,” Handelsman muttered through clinched teeth. “It turns me on.” I was being reminded who paid my bills.

“Well, it don’t turn me on, Lenny. Get your fucking fingers out of there, Masters.”

Masters laughed at that, and when I think of it now, I have to laugh too. Fucking me with his fingers was exactly what he was doing. But I didn’t think it was all that funny at the time.

Lenny just hissed “behave” between groans, and my position with Lenny was too precarious to challenge that demand.

Within minutes, though, I was beyond caring—or complaining. Once Masters got his cock inside me and began to perform his magic, I was lost. I could understand now why Sean was so willing to put up with his dominating crap. The man had some of the best fuck techniques I’d ever felt.

Sometime during the next hour, Lenny had disappeared altogether, and it was just Masters and me, Masters working me like the master he was.

Then Lenny returned to bed, and we spent the rest of the night together, entwined in each other’s arms and workin’ our hips in unison from time to time.

My first regret when I woke up the next morning—not my only regret, because I wasn’t so gaga over Masters’ cock that I didn’t regret being caught up in that particular whirlpool—my first regret was for Sean. That I was now muscling in on his food bowl just as I had been fearing Masters was muscling in on mine. And I still had a twinge of regret toward Sean when I reasoned my way out of that, telling myself that Sean was quickly becoming the moneymaker of that pair and that he deserved better than Masters. And maybe he’d see that in Masters hooking up with me, and I could be the conduit for him escaping his situation. But when I still couldn’t shake the regret, I realized I had to start thinking about my own feelings toward Sean—just protective, or did it go farther than that?

That was the first full night that Masters had stayed away from the 7th Street townhouse. Sean had certainly looked perplexed the next afternoon when he arrived at the stage rehearsals and found Lenny and Masters there already, pretty as you please, no explanations from Masters on where he’d been all night. Sean, of course, knew where Masters had been. What he didn’t know was that Masters had been with me on the boat and in Lenny’s bed as well.

The big shock came then, five days later. By then the pattern had been established. Masters would come back to the Boxoffice while Sean was at the stage doing the script rewrites. Lenny and Masters would have drinks on the fantail and discuss the day’s rehearsals, and then they’d have a late supper together in the salon. Lenny would leave Masters in the salon to drink his after-dinner brandy and smoke his cigar, and Lenny would retire to the owner’s stateroom after knocking on the door of the cabin where I had been spending the evening, waiting to be summoned—or, if I’d gone out while they were having their drinks and supper to pick up a bit of tail that would pay for it and add to my escape fund, I jolly well needed to be back on the boat before Lenny retired.

I would go into the owner’s stateroom with Lenny and fuck him for a while, and then Masters would appear and fuck me while I was fucking Lenny, and Lenny eventually would go off for a shower, leaving Masters still plowing me. That was part of the Masters’ mystique—he could fuck for hours.

Except for the first night, though, Masters would end up going back to the townhouse.

But that fifth night, when I returned to the Boxoffice, Lenny was pouring two snifters of brandy and breaking out a set of cigars and proceeded to sit in a chair near where Masters was sitting and joined him in the brandy and smoke.

When I entered the salon, I saw the change in pattern and started back toward the corridor leading to the cabins.

“I’d prefer that you stayed, Gil,” Lenny said. “In fact, please come over here and service Creigh’s cock.”

I stood there, shocked. I’d let Masters fuck me; I hadn’t given him a blow job before. The guy had to be really something special for me to give him a blow job.

“I don’t think so, Lenny,” I said.

I don’t know what had gone on between Lenny and Masters that was making Lenny act this way, but he was suddenly all hard assed.

“Do you like your job, Gil?” he asked. His voice was very cold.

“It’s OK,” I said. “Nothing I couldn’t replace, though.”

“Where do you go of evenings, Gil? When you leave here. Where could Jack have seen you, say two nights ago? And what could he have seen you doing?”

Jack was the head lighting guy at the theater. I thought maybe I’d seen him in the Bachelor Pad gay bar a couple of times. So this was it. This wasn’t about Masters at all. This was about me and fucking with other men, men Lenny hadn’t selected. This was punishment.

I could have brought it to a head, ignored Lenny’s demand, not accepted the punishment, and seen if he was bluffing. Lenny never had it so good. He’d never had cocking to equal mine. Except, maybe, until Masters had come back into his life. And, now that I thought about it, he’d been with Masters before he employed me. Suddenly the balance wasn’t looking all that much in my favor. And I didn’t think I’d put together enough money yet to comfortably give up this job.

Also, I looked at Masters, and he had his cock out of his fly and was holding it up for me to see in all its glory. That was a little hard to deny as well.

I went over and knelt in front of Masters and sucked him off, as Lenny and Masters leaned into each other and kissed and cooed.

When I was done with Masters, I started back toward the cabins again, but they weren’t finished with me.

“You’re going with Creigh tonight, Gil,” Lenny said in a soft voice that still had a hard tone to it.

“Lenny—” I started. But I saw the hard look in his eyes, and Masters was standing and holding a hand out.

Sean hadn’t returned from the theater when we arrived at the 7th Street townhouse, and so the first he knew that Masters was cocking me at all was when he came home and found us in Masters’ bed—in his, Sean’s, bed.

I almost died at the look on his face when he came into the room, and I hated myself when he turned and quietly went downstairs and began making up the sofa in the living room as a bed. But I hated Masters more.

For a couple of weeks after that, I would go back to the Boxoffice over lunch hours and do Lenny in his bed and then, at night, I’d be in Masters’ bed being done by him.

The hate I had for Masters and what we did mounted in me, and it became virulent as I watched what this was doing to Sean. And then the morning Sean admitted to me that it was he who had been the resurgence in Masters’ success in the theater, Sean who had been doing most of the work on the newer, better received scripts, I’d had enough.

That day, before stage rehearsals started, before Sean came to the theater, I told Lenny that Masters was a fraud, that he hadn’t recouped his writing genius at all, and that Sean was the real writing genius now. And there, in front of Lenny, when Masters appeared in the theater, I told Masters that my days in his bed were over.

I had no idea what Lenny would do, but by now he’d apparently accomplished the punishment he wanted to inflict on me, and he’d probably gotten tired of sharing me with Masters, and the revelation—which he should have figured out himself—that Sean was the one responsible for the high quality of the play and the sustaining of that quality through rewrites. And he said nothing when I lowered the boom on Masters.

Masters, the egotist that he was, also said nothing. He just laughed it off—played like I wasn’t anything to him anyway and he’d only been fucking me in his bed because Lenny had said he wanted it to be that way. Before he’d left the building, I’m sure he’d convinced himself he was the one who cut it off with me.

Later I made sure that I had a nice little chat with Jack, the senior lighting technician. I couldn’t blame him, really; he owed me nothing, and he owed Lenny everything. He probably thought he was doing the right thing for Lenny. And maybe it only didn’t look right as seen from my perspective.

I was holding the long ladder for him while he was adjusting lights above the stage after the rehearsal had started. Lenny wanted to see how the actors were highlighted in the lights at several points of the stage to serve his blocking concepts—and he’d said this would be the extent of the rehearsal that day, that he was giving the actors the rest of the afternoon off.

When Jack came down the ladder, I didn’t move away, and he came down more or less inside my embrace. He was mortified when I told him I knew he’d sussed me out to Lenny on my visits to the Bachelor Pad.

“God, Gil, I am so sorry. I just mentioned it in passing. I had no idea Lenny didn’t know you went there . . . I . . . I . . . oh, god, Gil, I wouldn’t do that to you on purpose for anything. I—”

It hit me then that Jack had the hots for me—probably enough that it was true he wouldn’t have ratted me out to Lenny on purpose. And Jack had been in the Bachelor Pad too, or he wouldn’t have seen me there. Jack wanted me. I leaned in closer to him, more intimately. Out of the blue, I’d had an idea. I felt so miserable about Sean, and I’d already thought a hundred times that I could escape to someplace like the Bachelor Pad to blow off the frustration of this four-cornered sex thing we were having with Masters and Handelsman—but Sean hadn’t had a day away from this ever.

“You said you saw me in the Bachelor Pad, Jack?” I asked. I was palming the small of his back with one of my hands, and I let that wander down to his buttocks, as I so often did as my signal of interest. “What were you doing in the Bachelor Pad?” I asked.

“Same thing you were, Gil,” Jack said. He stammered this out, but he was looking at me like he wanted to eat me alive.

And then, when I suggested we might make a little trip back stage if he did me a favor—and that I’d certainly forget about anything he said to Lenny getting me in trouble—I let him do just that. We went back to one of the dressing rooms, bumping off the stage, carrying the long ladder together, natural as you please, and leaving it outside the dressing room door, running up the side of the corridor. And then I unzipped my jeans and pushed him down on his knees in front of me and gagged him with my cock. He loved it. And after that, I bent him over a chair and fucked him. And he loved that too.

And at the end of the fuck session that he had been dreaming of and had no idea he’d ever get, he was more than willing to say that I could borrow his Mustang convertible anytime I wanted to.

We went to lunch then—in Jack’s Mustang—and we ended up at his small apartment across the river in Rosslyn, where I fucked him again in his own bed just to make sure his loyalties would be to me, not Lenny. When I did borrow his car, I didn’t want him telling Lenny I had it.

When I returned to the theater, I found the stage deserted. Lenny had carried through with his promise and released the actors. I entered through a stage entrance and I just walked on through the theater and up the elevated rows of seating and out into the lobby. Masters was there, preparing to leave out the front door. He turned as he heard me call out to him.

“The rehearsal broken up?” I asked. There was something unusual about seeing Masters in the lobby.

“Yes,” he said. He was giving me a smile, a strange smile, as if there was some joke I wasn’t privy too.

“Have you seen Lenny?” I asked. “Do you know if he’s gone back to the Boxoffice?”

“No, I’m fairly certain he’s still here,” Masters said. And then he chuckled. I had no idea what he thought was so fuckin’ amusing.

And then it hit me, what was unusual. Sean wasn’t in tow. He was always there, walking a few paces behind Masters and carrying all of Masters’ stuff. At least whenever Masters hadn’t sent him off somewhere. But here was Masters, leaving the theater, carrying his own briefcase and water bottle and sweater. And Sean wasn’t here.

“Where’s Sean?” I asked.

Masters didn’t answer. He just gave me that “I’ve got an amusing secret” smile. My blood turned to ice. And as Masters turned and opened the door to the chilly wind blowing up Maine Avenue, I swiveled, ducked into the darkened theater, and raced down the aisle and across the stage and onto one of the ramps running down into the backstage area.

I opened the door to Lenny’s office, and there they were. Lenny, gazing over Sean’s shoulder, his eyes slitted in lust, saw me and smiled. But Sean had his head bowed, looking at the floor, head and arms just hanging listlessly as he sat in Lenny’s lap, facing me on the edge of the chaise lounge, and Lenny raised and lowered Sean’s small, beautiful body on his cock. Sean was naked, his clothes strewn on the dressing room floor, and he was moaning softly and emitting a snuffling sound that made me think he was also crying. Lenny wasn’t naked; he was in his shirt and trousers, but his fly was open, permitting his impaling cock to skewer Sean’s channel. Sean’s body was perfectly formed, a well-muscled, dancer’s body. But of a small size. He looked almost like a boy in contrast to Lenny’s broad chest and the large hands he had wrapped around Sean’s waist to permit him to work Sean’s torso up and down on his cock.

I felt a moan rising in my own body—and my own cock hardening up in arousal—and I quietly stepped back and silently shut the door again. I turned, my back to the wall next to the door, trying to compose myself, trying to regularize my breath and to will my cock to behave. I was disgusted with myself. And I was mostly disgusted not because Sean was obviously being suborned into letting Lenny fuck him by some nasty understanding between Masters and Lenny, but rather because I wanted to be fucking Sean myself.

* * * *

I kept to my resolution and neither went to Masters’ bed again after that or came close enough for him to touch me and override my resolve. And in an attempt to save Sean, I stuck close to Lenny and fucked him so often that I was sure he was perpetually exhausted and milked and couldn’t take advantage of Sean again.

But I couldn’t protect Sean against everyone—and I knew I couldn’t protect him against me if I got half the chance to have him.

The day after I’d seen him in Lenny’s office being worked by Lenny, I once more found him absent from the theater when I arrived late for the afternoon stage rehearsal.

I entered the row behind Lenny, which was three rows in front of where Masters was sitting, and I leaned over and whispered in Lenny’s ear. “Where’s Sean? You know now that you can’t give recasting notes with just Masters here.”

“This scene is well blocked; I don’t plan on any changes,” Lenny whispered back, not bothering to turn his head but a bit and not taking his eyes off the stage.

“So, where’s Sean?” I asked again, that being the real question I wanted answered. “Do you know?”

“He’s in the dance studio. Cersenka’s auditioning him for a spot in the dance troupe for Defiance.”

My blood was running cold again. I knew exactly what this meant. I knew as well as anyone that Cersenka controlled his dancers by dominating them sexually—that no audition with him would be successfully completed without taking Cersenka’s cock.

I jerked my head around so that I could see Masters, sitting behind us. Lenny and I hadn’t been whispering loud enough for him to hear us, but I knew he knew what I had asked. He was smiling that amused smile of his.

I jerked away and rose and moved swiftly down the side of the stage and down a ramp to the backstage area and then started into a run for the annex building that housed the dance studio, the very dance rehearsal hall where I had first seen Sean in what now seemed to be ages ago. It had been long enough, certainly, for me to change from seeing Sean as just another cute little piece of ass I would fuck and forget to seeing him as so much more—seeing him as a vulnerable young man being misused and taken advantage of, someone I owed protection to because I too had hurt him. And more than this, maybe. More than just the need to protect him. I didn’t want to think what more than this I could be feeling—but I couldn’t kid myself; there was more than just protecting him on my mind.

I heard discordant music coming from the practice piano as I approached the door to the dance studio. I pushed open the door and took two steps inside the room, and then halted and moved to the side and leaned back against the wall next to the door.

There were only two of them, and they didn’t notice me from start to finish. The piano was against the opposite wall. There was a line of ballet costuming strewn haphazardly from the center of the dance floor back to the piano. Red leg warmers, a black ballet unitard, a man’s dance belt.

The second half of the dance master, Miloslav Cersenka’s, audition was in full blossom.

Sean’s butt was playing the keys of the piano, and his back was arched against the back casing of the piano. I could see the heel of one of his hands dug into the keyboard at the bass clef end, and his other hand was wrapped around Cersenka’s neck, both doing what they could to hold himself steady. His legs were spread and lifted up from around Cersenka’s waist. His small feet were still clad in ballet shoes, and his toes were daintily pointed toward where I was standing. That’s essentially all that I could see of Sean, although there wasn’t a doubt in my mind that it was Sean.

Standing between Sean’s spread legs and facing him was the backside of a wiry, sinewy-muscled dance master. His black, form-fitting leotards were pulled down around his knees, and he was naked above that. His muscles bulged and strained as his pelvis rocked back and forth and his butt cheeks contracted and expanded in advanced stages of the fuck. His arms were on either side of Sean’s slight torso, and the heels of his hands were buried in the keyboard. One of his legs appeared stiffer than the other in the motion of the fuck, but, barring this and the discordant music being coaxed from the piano by Sean’s buttocks bouncing up and down on the keyboard in the rhythm of the fuck, the two were making beautiful music together with their lithe, flexible, highly trained bodies.

From the harmony of grunts and groans and moanings, I felt assured that Sean was passing his audition into Cersenka’s dance troupe.

There was nothing I could do here. I knew that it was Sean’s dream to dance for Cersenka. And I knew that Sean was aware of what was required to do that. Masters may have thought this was just another indignity being forced on Sean for his own amusement and yet another manifestation of his control over Sean, but I saw it as more than that—I saw it as an act of defiance, as the start of Sean’s liberation from Masters.

I could have turned and left. I should have turned and left. But I didn’t. I leaned back against the wall, unzipped my jeans, pulled out my cock, and pumped it in the rhythm of the audition fuck, joining their coupling to the extent that I could. I was finished and gone before they were done.

* * * *

My plan to give Sean a bit of relief came three days later. The rich-bitch backers of the production were gathering for a lunch at the Willard Hotel, where they expected to see the director, playwright, and dance master they were paying such a lot of cash for on display. Not only were these guys out of our way for three hours in the middle of what was an unseasonably warm and gorgeous day, but neither Sean nor I had been invited to the party.

So I decided to make a party of our own.

I had a luncheon basket made up at the Gangplank restaurant, secured the use of Jack’s Mustang convertible, and told Sean about the outing at the last possible minute, not entertaining any demur or indecision, Then we were off, using the suggestions Jack had made to me on the quickest route to scenic—and private—beauty, over a Potomac bridge and onto the George Washington Parkway, headed west. When we hit the Beltway, I jagged off onto route 193, a winding road, where the lush trees met over the roadway, and multimillionaire mansions peeked out behind dogwood and oak trees at two-hundred-foot intervals. This route, which put us instantly into the rolling Virginia countryside, led out to Great Falls, a network of rapids on the Potomac River above the capital city of Washington, D.C. The river itself was navigable higher than this, but only if you could get past the rapids. In the early years of the American republic, a consortium headed by George Washington himself had dug a canal on the Maryland side of these rapids to give access by boat to the upper Potomac. But that canal was a dry bed now.

The most glorious thing about Great Falls Park was the foliage and the rocks and the many very private nooks and crannies tucked alongside the trails and the river gorge itself.

The great weather had not been predicted, so we had the park almost to ourselves. I searched until I found the perfect spot, close enough to the river to hear the dull roar of the rapids and see glimpses of rushing water between the trees, but off the walking path, in a small, moss-covered dell surrounded by protecting granite outcroppings and verdant tree coverage.

I had no trouble discerning that I had guessed completely correctly—that Sean had been yearning to get out of the theater environment. I could see that he wanted to relax and enjoy something different.

I hadn’t actually intended on making love to him here—I’d tried doing it in the car in the parking lot, but he made me wait, while promising it might happen—which just heightened my desire for him. He was relaxed and happy and vocal, and he only objected mildly and only at first, when, after we’d eaten the box lunches while sprawled out on a blanket and drunk the beers I’d brought along, I embraced him and we began to kiss.

He murmured his “we shouldn’t be doing this” objections while I slowly unclothed him, covering all revealed flesh liberally with kisses. But he just lay there, panting, and looking up at me all wide-eyed and shuddering as I stood over him and stripped down, showing him how much I wanted him, how much I had to give to him.

And then, surprising even myself, I showed myself how much farther beyond just protector and brief fling I thought our relationship was moving by coming down to him and covering his face and neck and nipples and belly with kisses and then voluntarily lowering my mouth yet farther and making love to his cock and balls and channel entrance with my lips and teeth and tongue until, writhing and groaning and moaning and sighing under me, begging for what I would eventually bury deep inside him, he released his hot, milky nectar for me to devour.

After he had come for me, he was putty in my hands, just lying there, panting shallowly, his eyes slitted as he watched me, kneeling between his spread thighs, roll the condom on my cock. Then I just pushed my knees under his buttocks, raising his pelvis to me to provide a good angle for a deep slide, and wrapped my arms around his waist, pulling his torso off the ground. He arched back, his shoulder blades touching the ground, his arms trailing away from his body, hands touching the grass, and his head turned to the side, with a dreamy look in his eyes. He gave a little jerk as I entered him, but then was reduced to low moans and sighing as I slowly pumped him to an ejaculation.