Dancing with the Matadors

I was wrong in my thinking why my father-in-law brought me on this business trip to Portugal. I’d thought he couldn’t chance me staying in Texas with my wife, his daughter, Janis, with him gone—that I’d tell her what we’d been doing, my boss, Buck, and I. Not just what he had been doing with me, but what I, only nineteen to his fifty-four, had eventually willingly let him do. I hadn’t done it too happily because there was nothing romantic in the land baron’s doing it. When I surrendered, there was no affection involved. He was a conquering master. I laid back, fully open to him, and he took what he wanted by brute force. But it wasn’t fully a case of forced taking. I was content enough in getting attention that I didn’t get otherwise—certainly not from my wife of convenience. All of her attention went to our baby, which was not even mine.

But I wasn’t ignored by Buck Thornton, my father-in-law. He’d always paid attention to me, even when he was buying me for a daughter who was pregnant and without a man. Sometimes I thought he only picked me for her to get to me. I hadn’t made it all that hard to get me. I liked men. Besides, he’d blackmailed me. My unusual name, Jai, Jai Jensen, pointed to the issue. My father had been a missionary doctor in India; my mother was a native of what was then Bombay and is now called Mumbai. They came to the States and never bothered to become citizens. I was a student in animal husbandry at Texas A&M University north of Houston when, while going to college, Thornton hired me as a ranch hand on his gigantic cattle ranch near the Sam Houston National Forest and Huntsville.

Thornton found me attractive and exotic, as many others had found a mixed Indian and Danish eighteen-year-old, and when his problem with becoming the grandfather of a bastard met with his discovery that I was, essentially, undocumented, it all came together with him getting me into his bed. Subsequently, as his son-in-law, he was grooming me, or so he said, to take more responsibility in the family cattle-raising business.

Now, however, in Lisbon, sitting in the president’s box of the Campo Pequeno bullfighting stadium, sitting between my father-in-law and the man he was here to close a business deal with, I understood why I was here. Senhor Enrique Mendes was an important man here in Lisbon, and especially in the bullfighting world. He was an impresario. He managed bullfighters and the bullfights themselves, here in the main stadium and elsewhere in Portugal, as well. And he acquired the bulls, the special bulls of specific bloodlines, to run in the arena. Portugal, in contrast to Spain, didn’t kill the bulls in a bullfight, but most of them wound up too wounded from the succession of spearings that defined the progress of the spectacle or became too savvy in how to face the bullfighters to be used more than a couple times before they were butchered for their meat, which, I was told, only the Portuguese knew how to make tender enough to chew. Sometimes, for bulls becoming famous, they are restored to health and set to stud. This is rather rare, though. So, there was a continuing need to procure the special bulls.

Men like my father-in-law and Senhor Enrique Mendes could be said to be the human equivalent of such special bulls. And I wasn’t entirely innocent in being covered by such men.

Raising a special bull to put in the ring was a highly ceremonial and expense operation in Spain and Portugal. Some impresarios, like Senhor Mendes, were looking for a cheaper source for the bulls. My father-in-law was interested in accommodating this need. He raised a special breed of fighting bulls, Vegahermosa bulls, on his ranch in Texas, and he wanted Mendes to buy them for use in the ring in Portugal. He had tried to sell them to Spain, but they weren’t interested in any but Spanish bulls there. Mexico wasn’t picky enough on the breed of the bull to put into the ring to make selling there profitable, although this prospect is what had led my father-in-law to invest in the bulls to begin with.

Senhor Mendes had visited us in Texas to inspect the bulls. He stayed with us, and it became quite clear he inspected me too. I now know that he had my father-in-law’s acquiescence for doing so and that my tail was on the line and was tied up in a possible deal between the two men. He had been bold enough to say that he had no idea what parentage had made me small but well-formed, brown as a berry, but with blue eyes, Anglo-Saxon features, and blond highlights in my black, curly hair, but that he found the combination fascinating.

Somehow, I now was learning, I had become part of this bull-buying deal. Mendes wanted to be a bull with me and was making having me under him a contingency in the negotiations. My father-in-law wasn’t objecting to that. I might have been interested—I was exploring my preferences and Thornton had helped develop those—but Mendes was old and ugly—and fat. And he was hairy and sweated easily and he couldn’t keep his hands to himself.

That’s how I knew why I was here, in Portugal, for a deal between the two human bulls. We sat, watching the many-faceted show in the ring, me being seated between my father-in-law and Senhor Mendes. The man kept touching me. I looked over to my father-in-law to see if he saw how familiar the man was getting, and I was shocked that he, indeed, saw it and signaled to me to cooperate with it.

Until I realized what my role was on this business trip, I had found the trip very interesting. Even though my citizenship in the United States was a bit uncertain, although improved, as I’d married an American, I’d never been anywhere else, anywhere outside the United States, to this point. I had been afraid that, if I left, I wouldn’t be able to get back into the States again. My father-in-law had assured me that this was all taken care of for this trip.

Lisbon was an old city that was very different from anywhere I’d been in Texas. It seemed so much older and the buildings so much fancier. But, then, it did have so much more history that Texas did. We had arrived just the day before and we were staying at Senhor Mendes’s mansion in the city, very close to the stadium. The land baron, Thornton, lived in a sprawling log house that was luxurious but had always come a distant second to the construction needs of the ranching buildings; Senhor Mendes lived in an ancient palace, one with many well-appointed bedrooms, and there he housed the toreos, those who worked for him in the bullring, not all of whom were matadors.

The palace was crawling with young men. Senhor Mendes introduced or pointed to them as we were shown through the place as men working for him in some capacity or other, either in maintaining his lifestyle in the large mansion itself or in the various roles as toreos in the bullfighting events. He was as familiar with all of them as he was trying to be with me, and they all took it with smiles. I was surrounded by young men who serviced Mendes. What defense did I have against his intentions in this venue?

His urban palace was fascinating, but it wasn’t anything as strange and wonderful as the nearby bullfighting arena, the Campo Pequeno, that he brought us to on this day, was. The stadium, in the center city of the ancient Portuguese capital, was well over a hundred years old. It was built of orange bricks and had octagonal towers with domes on top of them—all very exotic, which Senhor Mendes explained was the Moorish influence on architecture on the Iberian Peninsula, which had once been under the control of the Arabs.

The spectacle of the bullfighting was even more ceremonial and involved in Portugal, where it was called corridas de touros, than it was in Spain, and the Portuguese version didn’t often have even a single matador facing the bull, which wasn’t killed.

There were two parts of the entertainment here—the spectacle of the cavaleiro, where horsemen in fantastic costumes from two hundred years ago toyed with the bull and with danger to themselves and during which the bull is stabbed with three or four decorated spears, called bandeirilhas. Following this, the horsemen leave the ring to be replaced by eight costumed men on foot, the forcados, in the pega, during which they take their chances toying with the bull as well. Normally, in the Portuguese version, these men have to wrestle the bull down and exhaust it, after which trained oxen come out and guide the bull out of the ring. On rare occasion there is a matador at the finish, though, dancing with the bull and stabbing it with the bandeirilhas. These matadors usually come from Spain and are the most dashing of the performers.

It was just such a matador, half Spanish and half Portuguese, Juan Falcao, who was performing today and who Senhor Mendes managed. He was being hosted at Mendes’s palace, just as we were, but he had been preparing for today the previous night and I’d only gotten glimpses of him then. He was a very handsome man, though, trim; moving like a dancer; dark, with flashing eyes; twenty-nine years old, I was told; perfectly formed; and quite proud of himself, as he had every right to be. I had found him mysterious and arousing. He already had given me knowing smiles from afar and briefly, which had sent my body shimmering. As Senhor Mendes had handled the young man’s career, I had to assume that the matador had sex with men—I had already come to understand that was necessary if Mendes handled you.

This was the sort of man I went with in my fantasies.

Today, costumed as a matador, and dancing with the bull in the Campo Pequeno bullring, he was exquisite, masterful, and god-like. I melted to him. I’m afraid that Senhor Mendes was thinking it was him I was melting to.

The performance of the horsemen, the cavaleiros, with two of them being women, was so exciting that the spectators were often on their feet, cheering or groaning at the danger the riders were putting themselves in with the bull. It was then that I became sure not only of Senhor Mendes’s interest in me but also that my father-in-law encouraged me to let the man enjoy his interest. Mendes had already been touching me and whispering to me how nice I was—how young I looked, how slender, how narrow my hips were, that he thought dark-skinned youths with blue eyes were the most beautiful men in the world—and my questioning looks to my father-in-law were not receiving sympathy. The man spoke very little English, but what little he could convey to me in language was augmented by what he could convey to me in looks and with his hands. I had no trouble understanding his wishes and intentions.

“Have you found a particular affinity to young men narrow at the hips, Senhor?” he had asked my father-in-law across me, touching me on the hip with fingers and speaking as if I wasn’t there? To this my father-in-law had just grunted, but the man had taken that as assent. “Especially if you have something extraordinarily large to force between them.” My father-in-law had just grunted again, leaving it there as a flurry of activity had risen in the ring.

When the activity had quieted down again, with the changing of the bull in the ring, Mendes, touching me on the hip again, told me he liked his men very young and asked if I understood what he meant. I shrugged, not wanting to say that I did know what that meant. He asked me how old I was, knowing, I’m sure how old I was. When I told him, he said I looked younger but that it was good that I was nineteen. He wanted me to ask him why, I think, but I didn’t.

“I know what you do with Senhor Thornton,” he said. “You can do that in America because you can say yes at that age there. Did you know that you can say yes much younger here in Portugal?”

No, I didn’t know that. I was hoping not to have to say yes to this man, though. I knew he wanted me to be the first one to mention—and say yes to—sex.

“Tell me,” he went on to say, “How many centimeters—inches—are you around the hips? Do you know? I don’t know when I’ve seen a young man with such narrow hips.”

I didn’t have to answer because just then the cavaleiros performed a spectacular movement with the bull in the ring and everyone was up on their feet. When we went back down, though, Senhor Mendes reached between my thighs and gripped my crotch, pulling me back down into my seat beside him. What was going on in the bullring was exciting to all of us. I was as excited as anyone, but not excited in the same way Senhor Mendes was. The working with the bull seemed to arouse the man sexually. He was panting, and whereas he was touching me earlier, now he was pawing me—and unzipping me and putting his hand inside my fly.

Mendes was leering at me, knowing that Thornton controlled me and this was OK with him. I looked to Thornton in panic, but he just murmured, “Take it,” in a hard voice. Mendes took it. In resignation, I slouched back into the seat and spread my thighs.

I was small and young looking. No one around us seemed to notice me being manhandled this way. We could just be seen as a man and his son being close in sharing the excitement of the bullfighting. There was nothing for anyone else, other than my father-in-law, the only other person in the box, to see because the president’s box had a wall around it to chest level when we were sitting and a wall behind it going up to the top of the stadium so whoever was sitting here was protected from behind and above.

It became even more intimate. Senhor Mendes unzipped himself. He flared his trouser fly. He was doing something with my shorts too, trying to pull them off, I think, before moving me over into his lap. I thought the man was going to fuck me right there in the stadium. I resisted that and he gave up, but only to change tactics. He had a hand cupping my neck and I think he was going to pull my face down to his lap and make me take his shaft in his mouth.

He was murmuring, “You do it for Senhor Thornton. He says you’ll do it for me. Luscious. Such narrow hips.”

Thornton was just sitting there beside us, playing like all of his attention was going to what was unfolding in the bullring, but I know he was watching Mendes manhandle me as well. He was just smiling, showing no sign of intending to intervene. I was only saved by the exit of the cavaleiros and the entrance of the forcados, the eight men who would play with the bull on foot. The crowd welcomed them by rising to their feet and cheering. I used that to pull away from the senhor’s grip, zip myself up as I did so, and move up to the pathway above the boxes.

I remained up there and, when the matador, Juan Falcao, pranced into the ring and danced with the bull, I became as mesmerized as everyone else in the stadium and forced any thoughts of Senhor Mendes’s intentions from my mind.

My father-in-law and I were sent back to the palace after the bullfight in Senhor Mendes’s black Mercedes. Mendes remained at the stadium to close out on the event. The drive was short, but I made an effort to ensure my father-in-law knew of the liberties our host had tried to take with me. But there was no comfort in that direction.

“You do it for me,” he said. “You are in the family business now. We need this deal. You will do it for him too.”

I turned my head and looked out of the window. There was a difference. My father-in-law was a handsome, fit man—and, though forceful and cruel, he didn’t smell and he wasn’t crude. The Portuguese man was old, ugly, fat, and crude. But in the end, I suppose, there wasn’t really a difference. One cock was much the same as the next one. I was already learning that.

I was wishing it would be that sexy matador, Juan Falcao, though.

My hips were thirty-five inches. My buttocks weren’t bulbous, but they were well rounded. It was the first time I thought of the narrowness of them being a sexual fetish for some men.

* * * *

I soaked for an hour in the tub of my en suite bedroom at Senhor Mendes’s palace that night. I’d been given a luxurious room with a sitting area, an alcove with a four-poster canopy bed, and a huge tiled bath with a large soaking tub in it. I was somewhat surprised that my room was nicer than the one given to my father-in-law and I almost said something at the time, but there really wasn’t anyone to say it to. The attendant who showed me to my room and pointed to where my father-in-law’s room was didn’t appear to speak English. Thornton didn’t seem to mind. It was only later that I understand why I was given the nicer room, and it wasn’t a mistake. I needed the soak. I was bruised—not badly enough for it to show; he was always careful about that—but enough to ache. The most noticeable bruises were on my hips, where he had grasped me so firmly to hold me in place that there were bruises where his fingers had dug in.

I had displeased my father-in-law and when I retired, early, saying the day at the bullring had been too exciting for me after the flight from Texas the previous day, Thornton had followed me upstairs a half-hour later, chewed me out, slapped me around, and fucked me. He said it was to show me who was boss and to bring me into line, but I knew he liked to fuck me and that he particularly liked doing it when it could be passed off as discipline. When he’d watched Mendes try to assault me in the bullring, I could tell that it turned him on. He wanted the man to carry through and do it. He wanted to do that too. When I went to my room, he came and did that. The Texas ranch owner was quite authoritarian that way. He’d slapped me around after saying I’d spent too much time mooning over the matador, Juan Falcao, at supper and then afterward and hadn’t given enough favor to Enrique Mendes.

Well, he and Mendes were tucked away in the man’s study after dinner. I could not have shown favor to Senhor Mendes then. It wasn’t my fault that Juan Falcao didn’t go out to find his friends.

“We are here to strike a deal with Mendes, not for Falcao to dance around with you as he does with the bulls,” my father-in-law had said. And he slapped me around, and he put me over his knee, and spanked my bare buttocks like I was a schoolboy—spanking me seemed to be one of his favorite fetishes as was fucking younger and smaller men—and then, while I was bent over his lap, he penetrated me with his fingers. That put him in heat, and he bent me over the arm of an easy chair in my bedroom, mounted me, and fucked me.

I don’t think there was much I could do at supper that I didn’t do to be a good guest. I didn’t try to stay Senhor Mendes’s hands when he was touching and fondling me. And I didn’t determine the place sittings at the table. Apparently, Falcao was blessing us with his presence to be here after his day in the ring. Matadors only were included in Portuguese bullfights a couple of times a month during the bullfighting season, and there were several matadors performing in the country, most of them brought here from Spain where the work was more steady. On a night after a bullfight in the Camp Pequeno stadium, a matador usually went out on the town, taken out to carouse all night by his fans. Falcao had plenty of fans in Lisbon. But on this day he attended the supper hosted by Mendes instead.

I heard them arguing in the foyer when Falcao arrived, but I didn’t speak Portuguese, so I don’t know what he and Mendes argued about. When they came in where we were having drinks before dinner, Mendes said that Falcao would be there for dinner but would join his fans again afterward. Falcao looked irritated when we went to the table, but he sat across from me, and he became progressively friendlier and conversant with me. Mendes didn’t seem to mind. He spoke English with an effort that, after a while, seemed to irritate him, and I spoke no Portuguese. We could say simple sentences to each other in English, but that was a chore—Mendes obviously had become tired out in trying to speak English with me when we were at the bullring—and language barriers didn’t encourage small talk. Falcao, conversely, spoke beautiful English, and we chattered away. Both my father-in-law and Mendes spoke good Spanish, so they entertained each other in that language during the meal.

That didn’t stop Senhor Mendes from touching me and squeezing my knee or running the back of his hand up my cheek while he talked with my father-in-law. But the forwardness of the attentions paid to me were subsumed in him doing exactly the same with the small army of young men who were serving us our dinner. Anyone coming with reach of him had their bottoms patted or a hand run up the hem of their white shirt, and the young men just wiggled their butts and smiled for their benefactor. Mendes had established a specialized world of his own in this palace. It was a world in which I was being enfolded within his sexual privilege and control. I’m sure what he was doing to me was seen by him to be done by right—and with the sufferance of my present father-in-law.

Immediately after dinner, Mendes and my father-in-law withdrew to the impresario’s study to discuss their business deal, which left Juan Falcao and me at the table. I expected him to excuse himself and leave—to go meet his fans—but he didn’t. Instead, he suggested we withdraw to a lounge and he’d put some music on.

“Do you dance, Jai?” he asked. “You move like a dancer.”

“I’ve had some lessons, yes,” I answered, but then as he started swaying to the music he’d put on, and I added, “but I don’t dance like you do. In the ring this afternoon, you looked like you were dancing with the bull—teasing it, but coaxing it to dance with you. And the bull did. I was delighted. I think everyone in the ring was.”

“Yes, you have to be a dancer to be a good matador, Jai. The bull isn’t your adversary in the ring; the bull is your partner—your dance partner. Come, dance with me.”

“Dance with you?” I asked. “Two men dancing together?”

“Certainly, and why not? There is much that two men do with each other in this house. There is no one here to see us. There are no women here to dance with, and I want to dance.”

I was embarrassed at the offer and the contact with such a beautiful man, but I also was transported. I rose and went to him and we danced, close together. As was natural, he held me in his arms and he led in the dance. It was like this, the two of us dancing to the waltz music, that Senhor Mendes and the baron found us when they returned.

Juan had just whispered, “You are a beautiful boy; I know you are a man now, but to me you are a beautiful boy. Now, though, you are free to do as you like.” He then kissed me lightly on the throat, but I don’t think my father-in-law and Senhor Mendes saw that as they were coming into the room. Mendes didn’t seem to see his matador and the youth he was trying to cover dancing together as anything to be upset about, but my father-in-law was visibly angry. Juan immediately pulled away from me and went over to a bar and fixed himself something to drink.

Red faced, I said that I was tired and perhaps should retire to my room early. None of the men objected to me going. Senhor Mendes and Juan spoke to each other in Portuguese, but the tone was friendly. My father-in-law had a smile on his face for the other men but turned to me briefly and scowled as I fled the room.

Buck Thornton was the only one who didn’t seem pleased. We weren’t there to make any business deals with a pretty-boy Spain matador, he said later in my room, when he was slapping me around. I was there to impress Mendes, he admonished me.

“You didn’t tell me I was here to give myself to a fat, old man,” I said. Thornton slapped me again then and said, “Your job here is to make him think he is a sexual god.”

I’d gone straight to the tub when my father-in-law left me. When I dried off, I wrapped a fluffy robe around myself that had been hanging on the back of the bathroom door and came out to the bedroom. The lights were turned down low and the ceiling fan was languidly turning overhead. I went to the dressing table and sat down at it, looking at myself in the big mirror on the wall behind the table, looking to see if there was any damage to my face from Thornton’s slaps. There wasn’t. He liked to get physical in sex but that meant he was an expert in enjoying it but not going too far—not letting evidence of it show. As far as I knew, my wife had no idea what went on between me and her father at the ranch in Texas. Of course she was obsessed with her baby by another, absent, man. I didn’t really exist for her other than a ticket to hold her head up in Texas society.

It took me the longest time to realize that the matador, Juan Falcao, had come into the room while I was soaking in the tub. The first I became aware of it, I saw him, in the mirror, standing behind me. He was wearing a fluffy robe, just as I was, but it was unsashed and flared open. What I could see revealed was hard-bodied, tanned flesh. He was a decade older than I was, but probably fifteen years younger than my father-in-law, the man regularly covering me, and probably twenty-five years younger than Senhor Mendes, who my father-in-law was intent on giving me to.

To me, Juan was a young man. His body was magnificent. There wasn’t an ounce of fat on him. He had the sleekness and tight musculature of a man who was an active bullfighter. There were scars from encounters with the bulls, as well, but that only added to the mystery and sexiness of him. When he’d seen that I had noticed him and hadn’t bolted from the bench in front of the dressing table, he put his hands on my shoulders and leaned down and kissed me in the hollow of my neck.

“I enjoyed dancing with you,” he whispered.

“I too.”

“There are more intimate forms of the dance, you know?”

“Are there?” One of his hands, the fingers long and sensuous, glided down onto my chest and palmed one of my breasts. I gave him no resistance, only sighing and leaning back into him. I’m sure that told him I would let him fuck me.

“You left us early this evening,” he murmured.

“I understood you would be leaving—to celebrate with your fans—after supper. I thought the evening would be too dull after you were gone.”

“I didn’t leave.”

“So I see,” I answered. “Your fans are celebrating without you?”

“They could be. I don’t give a fuck if they are. I stayed because of you.”

There didn’t seem to be a need to say anything else after that. He brushed my robe off my shoulders with his hands, and it cascaded to the floor, surrounding the bench I was sitting on. I was naked now. Before putting his hands back on my shoulders, he shrugged out of his robe as well. When the hands came back, they glided down my chest, hesitated on my pecs again to rub my puffed-up nipples briefly, and then moved on down across my belly and into my trimmed patch of pubic hair. I felt him hard and pressing into my back between my shoulder blades, needy and insistent.

As he had done earlier, he whispered to me, “You are a beautiful young man to me,” this time adding, “I must be inside you.”

“Yes,” I whispered. “Dance with me like you did with the bull. Fuck me. Take what you want.”

“You have been with a man before? Do you have experience?”

“Yes.”

One of his hands encircled my erection and stroked me. I moved one of my hands back between us and returned the favor. I turned my face to his and we kissed . . . deeply.

Like the smooth dancer he was in the bullring, Falcao raised me from the bench with an arm encircling my waist. He somehow had the bench pushed aside and we were standing there, in front of the mirror, my body pressed into his, his arm encircling my waist, holding me close. The insistence of him was pressing at the small of my back, his face was buried in my throat, and his free hand stroked my cock. He wasn’t a tall man, but he was taller than I was. He was olive-toned and slender and dark. I was boyish and berry brown—exotic to him with my partial Indian heritage. I lay comfortably, relaxed, in his embrace, watching the two of us in the mirror while he possessed my throat with his lips, his silky black hair brushing my shoulders, and stroked my cock.

I gave a little cry but offered no resistance when he lifted me with the strength of the arm around my waist and settled me back down on his cock, the hardness of him allowing him to put himself in position, breach my entrance, and then pull my channel down on the shaft.

“Open to me. Take it,” he murmured. Then, he emitted a long “Ahhh,” as I did and he easily penetrated and stretched me. He gasped and sighed as my channel muscles undulated over and squeezed his invading shaft. I had enough South Asian in me to have discovered some of the special techniques in taking a cock.

“Yes, yes, yes,” I whispered. I raised my feet, hooking my ankles on his calves, and moved with him as he fucked me—as we fucked each other. I flung my arms back, locking my fists behind his neck, and there I was, both of us facing and looking into the mirror, my body hanging on his, back arched and belly projected forward, him holding us both up with the strength in his legs and arms.

“Você é tão flexível. Seu corpo é lindo,” he whispered.

“What? I don’t understand.”

“I said that you are so flexible. Your body is beautiful. I am in lust in being inside you.”

With the strength of his arm, he raised me and lowered me on the cock, achieving new depth each time—raised me, lowered me, raised me, lowered . . . He paused, revolving my channel on the shaft, exploring each crevice of me, making me sigh and groan. No man had made love to me as the matador was. Raised me, lowered me.

“I fuck you good, no?”

“You fuck me good, yes.”

The man was strong, and virile, and increasingly vigorous. He stretched me and fucked me deep, picking up speed and intensity. I gave him whatever he wanted. He took what he wanted. He moved us to the bed, putting me down on my back at the foot of the bed, holding my legs raised and spread with a grasp of my ankles, crouched between my thighs, and fucked me while leaning his face down almost to mine, capturing every reaction showing in my eyes to what marvelous work his cock was doing inside my channel, his long, silky, black hair cascading onto and swaying against my shoulders.

“É adorável. Leva-o tão bem.”

“What? What are you saying?”

“You’re lovely. You take it so good.”

And he fucked me in a side split on the bed, exhausting me, coming deep inside me, and staying in me as I drifted off to sleep.

I woke with a start, in an entirely different world. Falcao was gone, but I still was being fucked. I was on my belly and a heavy man was on top of me—a very heavy man. He was inside me, pumping hard, stretching me even more than Falcao did and even Thornton did before that. He was sweating and fat and smelled of the garlic our supper was laced with. He was grasping my wrists in his fists, holding my arms over my head, immobile. He was too heavy for me to get out from underneath and it was all I could do to breathe as he panted in my ear, chewing on my earlobe, and fucked me and fucked me and fucked.

But, fuck, he was a master with the cock.

I was being fucked by Enrique Mendes. Sometime in the night, he had exchanged places with Falcao. It had all happened smoothly without waking me. I realized that this meant Falcao had just been sent in to prepare me for Mendes, to exhaust me and to be there for Mendes to take over and get what he’d wanted since he’d visited us in Texas.

I also realized that he was doing this with my guardian’s blessing. Thornton was aware of this and expected me to cooperate with it. When I realized what was happening and that it was going to happen without my cooperation or with my acquiescence, I gave in to it and let the man have his fuck. He was in, deep, stretching me to the limit and he held me securely in his grip. He already had me; there was little use in struggling against him. When I murmured that he was smothering me, I was able to get through to him, and he took more of his weight on his elbows and his knees.

Then he rose off me and stood at the foot of the bed, holding me, belly down in front of him. That’s when he seriously moved into his fetish, grasping my hips between his beefy hands, digging his fingers bruisingly into my flesh, moving to be able to touch the fingers of his hands in spanning my narrow hips, holding me securely, tightly in place, positioning himself between my hips, penetrating me deep again in the ass, and fucking, fucking, fucking.

After that, it wasn’t so bad. He was big inside me and knew how to stroke, in an offbeat rhythm, to take me up into the clouds of completion. I settled down and concentrated on the shaft expertly working my channel. I managed to reach my cock with a hand and stroke myself off, and I came for him twice.

“Ah, sim, agora é bom para ti. Agora quer a pila do Enriques.”

“What? What did you say?”

“I said now it is good for you. Now you want Enriques’s cock.”

I couldn’t say he was wrong.

By the finish—his finish; he’d been able to bring me off more than once—he’d lost his own nervousness and the sweating had stopped. I’d had the same garlic dishes he’d had at supper, so that wasn’t onerous either. The rolls of fat just became his problem in adjusting to enable deep penetration. I appreciated the deep penetration when it was achieved.

In the night, he fucked me again, and this time he didn’t need guile or forceable embrace. I surrendered to him, acknowledging his privilege and control in his own house. He rolled me onto my back, grasped my ankles, raised and spread my legs, and kneed his way in between my thighs. Arching my back, stretching my arms out in a sacrificial position, and raising my pelvis to him, I gave no resistance as, whispering, “Doce menino. Menino bonito—Sweet boy; beautiful boy,” he penetrated and fucked me again.

I even gave him more in the morning. He suggested we shower together and I suggested that, instead, we bathe in the oversized tub together. I realized then that I had been given a superior room with a large soaking tub by design—by a design that my father-in-law had known about and acquiesced in. Fucking in the tub helped me accommodate the man. I could take him more easily clean of sweat. He lay back in the large, marble basin, smoking a cigar and luxuriating in the attention, as I saddled myself on his pelvis in the tubful of soapy water and created waves by fuckin myself on his cock.

That was the nicest thing about him—his thick, long cock. I made the most I could of the situation. I knew now that the young men buzzing around him, letting him take liberties with them, weren’t doing it all for money—they were also doing it for the high quality of his cocking. When I’d dried him off, given his shaft some sucking work with my mouth, and he’d pulled on his robe and left my bedroom—the bedroom he was hosting me with—I went back to bed, closed out the world, and slept for three more hours. He left satisfied. I remained, bruised, used, but, even at nineteen, much more world wise than I had been before I left Texas.

* * * *

When I came downstairs in the morning, my father-in-law and Senhor Mendes were still at the breakfast table, but they clearly were finished eating. I could see that my father-in-law was beaming as I gathered food from the sideboard.

“We are about to sign a contract on my farm providing bulls for Senhor Mendes’s bullfighting, Jai. Then he’s taking me to inspect where they keep the bulls before they go into the ring. We will be looking at some land near there while we are out. You are to stay here. Enrique wants to take you out on his boat this afternoon.”

I’ll just bet he does, I thought, as I sat at the table and the two of them rose to go into Mendes’s study. I presumed that the “looking at some land” would take time. Thornton had already told me that, if we got the contract, we most certainly would have to buy land here in Portugal. We’d have to be able to convincingly claim the bulls were raised in Portugal and we’d need someplace to put them for a short time before they entered the ring after shipping them from Texas. It would all be terribly illegal and hush-hush, of course. I suspect that the underhanded nature and risk of all of this was what enticed Buck.

As they walked off, the Portuguese bullfight promoter gave me an “I’ll eat you up” look and said, in broken English, “Just the two of us on the water. We will have such enjoyment.” He reached over and touched me affectionately on the cheek before ushering my father-in-law away. Already he was treating me as his property. Thornton pinned that down as they were moving off.

“Enrique has asked if you can stay on for a week or so after I’ve returned to Texas. You’re on your school summer holiday and are working on my dime, so I agreed.”

Such a holiday, I thought. I wondered if the actual number of days the man would have complete access to me had been closely negotiated in their bulls deal. I went on to replay what my father-in-law had said about the deal as I was gathering my breakfast. He had referred to it as his deal and his business. When he was explaining to me that I would have to let the man paw and fuck me, he had referred to it as our deal and our family business. The deal was done; I no longer had to be considered a partner in it—just an element in the negotiations.

I ate in gloom and then, not being able to stand roaming around in Mendes’s palace, waiting for him to return and fondle and fuck me, I went for a walk in the city. Senhor Mendes and Thornton were still holed up in Mendes’s study, celebrating their new alliance, when I left. They would not miss me for hours.

* * * *

I walked north along the Campo Grande, through a park running between the legs of the avenue, winding up, when I was tired and thirsty, sitting on a low wall by what I was told was the Alvalaxi shopping center. There was something of a square through which a road ran in front of me and a line of cafés with covered outside seating on the other side. As I sat, many of the men passing me by gave me the eye. A line of soldiers went by more or less in formation and two of them turned their heads toward me, one of them giving a wolf whistle and the other popping his tongue in his cheek.

Across the shallow square I noticed another man, at one of the café tables, watching me too. He was a handsome man, but not young. He had a fine head of wavy, dark hair, but it was shot through with gray. He was well-dressed, in khaki trousers and a white, well-tailored long-sleeve shirt, rolled up to the elbows, revealing tattooing covering both forearms. The shirt was open almost to his navel, showing a hard body with more tattooing. He also was muscular, looking fit and commanding in attitude. Although mature, he exuded sexy. I tried looking away, but he was such a good-looking man, with an air of confidence about him that I kept looking. I wondered how old he was—perhaps in his late forties.

As I watched, I saw him call a waiter over and both of them looked across the street at me. The waiter nodded and came over to me.

“O homem do café deseja que você se junte a ele.” I presumed the waiter was speaking to me in Portuguese.

“I’m sorry, I don’t understand,” I answered. “Do you speak English? I don’t speak Portuguese.”

“Ah, yes, doesn’t everyone have to speak English these days?” the waiter said and laughed. “I said that the gentleman in the café, drinking coffee, is asking if you would join him.”

“Join him?”

“Yes, if he finds you pleasant in sharing a coffee, he would like you to service him.” He then named a price the man was willing to pay. I was beginning to understand.

“You do know why young men and boys sit on this wall, don’t you?” The waiter was giving a little smile.

I understood why now, yes. And I thought, why the hell not? The money being offered was quite generous. My father-in-law wasn’t giving me anything for pimping me to old, ugly men. And this man was not old and ugly. I’d surrendered to Senhor Mendes last night and this morning—this morning he’d just laid back and I rode his cock, doing all of the work myself. And he didn’t pay me. If I was going to be pimped, I might as well get the benefit from it.

“I know now, yes,” I said.

“But you didn’t know before? If not, I’m sorry to be so forward.”

“That’s fine,” I said. “I think I like the idea of sitting on this wall.”

The waiter laughed. “You do know who that is, don’t you?” he asked, a bit of a twinkle in his eye.

“I have no idea,” I answered.

“That’s Dom Manola dos Santos, perhaps one of the most famous matadors of all time in Portugal. Now retired.”

Ah, another matador. I wondered whether this one was a schemer like the last was—but at least this one was willing to pay me. Both of them were beautiful, though—the young Juan and the more mature Manola. I wondered if all matadors were this handsome.

“It is quite an honor to be requested by him—in case you are so inclined,” the waiter said.

“Then I must indulge the man, mustn’t I?” I answered.

When I reached the table, the man said, “The waiter tells me you don’t speak Portuguese, but you do speak English, so perhaps we can converse in that. You are a beautiful boy. I suppose all of your men tell you that, though. Not Portuguese obviously. You intrigue me because of your exotic look. What ethnic are you? Moroccan?”

“No, Sri Lankan,” I answered. I don’t know why I lied or why I picked Sri Lankan. It was just the first land of generally smaller-than-average berry-brown people that came to mind, and I liked the sound of the words. I think I was just going to play at the prostitute game with this man and make it up as I went along.

“Perfeição,” he said, and then, when I gave him a quizzical look, he repeated it in English. “Perfection. I’ve never fucked a Sri Lankan before—to my knowledge.”

He’d said it so matter-of-factly. But then he was a famous matador in his element. I guess he was accustomed to getting what he wanted.

“Do sit down and tell me how you come to be in Lisbon,” he said, gesturing at the chair beside him. “Espresso and water?”

“Yes, please,” I said, as I sat, and the man, whose voice was a deep, rich bass, motioned to the waiter in an elegant hand gesture. I proceeded, because it kept his interested, to spin a tale of woe for him. My mother was an English missionary in Sri Lanka who had been raped by a Sri Lankan Catholic priest and I was raised in a church orphanage in Kandy—another word that I liked and knew was the name of a city in Sri Lanka—where a priest had initiated me last year as I had become of age to leave the orphanage and sold me to a German planter of coconut palms. My name was Shiva, for the Indian god. I’d been brought here by my lover, the German planter, who was a man of about the same age as Manola, but not nearly as good-looking. Helmut had brought me to Lisbon but he’d abandoned me here, and I’d had to sell myself for the past three weeks or I would have starved. Sometimes I’d slept in parks. Other times I’d slept in men’s hotel beds.

“But you are just a boy,” Manola said, his voice full of sympathy, but I understood that he wanted to know how old I was. I knew that the age of consent in Portugal was fourteen and that I might have looked almost that young to him.

“I’m nineteen,” I said. I wasn’t going to lie about that. “Does that mean I’m too old for you?”

His eyes lit up and he smiled. “Perfeito—Perfect,” he said. “You say you’ve had to go with men since you were abandoned by this Helmut. He was you lover, did you say? He fucked you often?”

“Yes. But he was cruel. He was very Germanic.” I was thinking of Buck Thornton, of course, who always seemed Germanic—authoritarian—to me.

“So, you will go with me? You will let me make love to you?”

That was just a flowery way for him to see he wanted to fuck the hell of me, I assume. He looked like a man who would fuck a young guy like me silly.

“Make love to me or fuck me?” I asked.

“Both, of course,” he answered and laughed.

“Will you be a cruel lover?”

“Do you want me to be cruel with you?”

I shrugged. “It is your money to be what you want to be.”

“Then you will go with me?”

“Maybe, if you say it to me dirty—in Portuguese,” I said.

“You will deixe-me foder; deixe-me ferrar—let me fuck you? Let me screw you? You will lay down for me, open your legs to me, and I will fuck you in your very core?”

“Yes. How do you say, ‘Yes, I want you to screw me,’ in Portuguese?”

“Sim, eu quero que você me ferrar.” He was smiling on putting a possessive hand on my arm.

“Yes, that,” I said, returning the smile.

His nearby flat was not large, but it was very expensively outfitted. I’m sure it was a very expensive building to live in. The artwork on the wall was mainly sketches of matadors with the bull. The ones in his bedroom were of matadors in various stages of undress. Some were of nearly undressed matadors masturbating. A couple of those obviously were of Manola himself, and, if they were true to life, Manola had had a magnificent body and an extraordinarily long cock when he was young—when he was dancing with the bulls. If the sketches didn’t lie, his body also was covered in a riot of colorful tattooing. As far as I could see when we entered the bedroom, he still had the body depicted in the sketches. It didn’t take long for me to know that he still had the tattooing and the extraordinarily long cock too.

The large sketch over the headboard of the bed was of Manola, a younger Manola, fucking another man—a young man—a youth with a small, willowy body, like mine. The youth of the sketch was depicted as enjoying the experience.

“I don’t bring many into my bedroom,” he said, his voice amused, as I stared at the sketch.

“No women?” I asked.

“There was a time, yes. There was a time I could have anyone I wanted, and my wants were universal. But now? No. Only beautiful young men—when they will go with me.”

“Like the young man in the sketch?”

“Carlos. Yes, Carlos was my young man—for several years. But I got older, and Carlos didn’t.”

“You don’t look old to me,” I said, reaching out and touching him on the arm—on the forearm where his flesh was bare. I traced the tattooing there with a finger. “Will you do with me what you are doing in the sketch—with Carlos?” I asked.

“Do you want me too?”

“Yes. Fuck me. Screw me. Say it to me again in Portuguese. What do you want from me?”

“Quero foder-te. Quero lixar-te.”

He had me undress in the bedroom and pose for him. He took photos and, for the price he was paying, I didn’t mind. I was just visiting Lisbon. I didn’t care what I left behind. I found it exhilarating that he seemed so enchanted by my body. He had gone to full erection almost immediately. When I asked him to give me the camera, he didn’t balk, and I took photos of him as well. Of course, it was his camera. He had control over the photos.

He undressed as well, and he took his time fondling me and exploring my body with his hands. He promised to be, even at his advanced age, as arousing to me sexually as the younger matador, Juan Falcao, had been. I was learning that I had a fetish for matadors. At his age, he seemed even more of a master at this than Juan had been.

He had me panting and begging for the cock in murmurs of “Fuck me; screw me,” when he put me on my knees in front of him and made me take him in my throat and suck him. When he was rock hard again and throbbing, he raised and turned me, bent me over the bed, and went down on his knees behind me. Just when I thought he was going to mount me, he, instead, pressed his face between my buttocks cheeks, pulling them apart with his hands, and I writhed under the attention of his tongue. No man had done this to me—for me—as totally before, and when he rose and I thought this was going to be when he penetrated me, I was panting and groaning and not wanting anything else in this world but that.

Even then, though, he didn’t take me. Laughing, he pulled me up from the bed and led me back out into the living room. “Deixe-nos dançar—Let us dance,” he said. “I love to dance with beautiful young men like you. You do dance with matadors, don’t you?”

I laughed, and blurted out. “Why, yes, I was dancing with Juan Falcao just last night.”

He, of course, took that as a joke—but a good one—and I did not further explain, as he had turned music on—a waltz just as Juan had played the previous evening, gathered me in his arms, both of us naked, and guided me about the floor. All he said was, “So, you know our matador of the moment. You know something of our bullfighting. That once was me in the ring with the bull. I once had the world in my arms, just like Juan Falcao does now.” It was said almost wistfully and I had a stab of regret for him for the fame he’d once had that now was only a memory to him and muted adoration from his fans.

“Now you have me in your arms,” I murmured.

“Yes. And, for now, that is enough. For now, that is more than enough.”

“Ah, well,” he said. “Enough of that. We’re here to dance and to fuck,” and he did not allow himself to sink into a mood.

It was obvious that he wanted to dance—and that he wanted to fuck. We were both hard and were swaying against each other. I was boyish and short. Although muscular and filling out a bit since his slender matador days, he wasn’t a tall man either, but he was taller than I was. He was poking me in the belly with his shaft as we danced, but within a short time, he was lifting me with an arm around my waist, lifting my feet off the ground, and his long, long, hard cock had penetrated under my balls and between my thighs, and he was gently, rhythmically dry fucking me under my ball sac to the sway of the music.

He moved us to a wall of the living room, putting my back against the wall. With his free hand, he bent my right leg, hooking my knee on his hip. The hand in the small of my back rolled my tailbone up pressing my hard cock up his belly. He moved his cock into place, and I arched my head back and cried out, “Yes! Fuck me!” as he entered me, deep, in one long glide. I had been fucked by a thick shaft that morning—thicker than his—and was still open. He had no idea how long it had been, but he gave a little smile that I took him so easily. He would have known I was dilated, though, because he had just been tonguing me.

But then he thought I was a rent-boy, bought off the wall anyway.

He took my lips with his, and we held there, still swaying a bit to the music, as I opened and stretched to him and sheathed him. When he was in to my soft core and I had relaxed and stopped shuddering, his lips moved to the hollow of my throat. I clutched his shoulder blades, digging my fingernails in and groaned deeply, as he moved inside me—in, out; in deeper, out; in even deeper—fucking me, coaxing the muscles of my channel walls to clutch at the cock and undulate over it. In and out; in and out. Slowly, a long slide in and equally long withdrawal, until, as the beat of the music that was still running increased, his thrusts increased in speed and vigor, until I was writhing under him, crying out, being drilled hard and deep.

“Sim, sim, eu sei. Como aquele—Yes, yes, just like that,” he murmured. “Such a good boy.”

He fucked me in that position for a while and then turned me, cheek and palms to the wall, an arm encircling my waist and lifting my buttocks and jutting them back, as he stood behind me and fed his long cock deeper inside me, reaching even deeper than he had when we were face to face, lifting my feet off the floor, fully in command of the coupling. He fucked me interminably in that position, finding and exploring every nook and cranny inside my tender channel, fucking me completely, believing I was a seasoned male whore when I had only known four men, three of them within the last night and day. But I wanted this and I wanted him, so I lay, docilely in his embrace and took it and took it and took it.

Fucked by my dancing matador.

Later we did fuck in his bedroom, on his bed, too—in the same position initially of the sketch hanging above the headboard. He was a master of positions and patient in teaching them to me. After the conventional ones of doggy, missionary, and side split, he lay on his back, with me on top of him, my eyes counting the squares of tiles in the ceiling of his bedroom, working on not coming too soon. He held my arms trapped over our heads, my fists grasping the rungs of the brass headboard of the bed, his legs bent, feet flat on the mattress and my legs bent as well, my feet splayed out on his knees, as, taking advantage of the extraordinary length of him, he held steady inside me and I moved my hips, languidly, up and down, up and down, fucking myself on his shaft.

“Você é um menino lindo—You are a beautiful boy,” he whispered in my ear as we fucked. “But I’ve said that before, haven’t I? I’m sure all of the men say that to you. To be so beautiful, such narrow hips, brown as a berry, but with blue eyes and with a perfect, willowy body in Lisbon is to be desired by men. I could fuck you for weeks. And so open for a man, stretching to meet a man’s need.”

The narrow hips “thing” again. I’m glad I had them, but I hadn’t realized before that that was a fetish for some men.

Yes, all of the men who had had me—Manola now being the fourth—had said I was a beautiful boy, so it must be true. And if I could make money from men as masterful and handsome as Juan and Manola . . .

If I could just be permitted to choose my own men.

“You have no one in the world to go to?” he whispered.

“None that I want,” I answered, honestly. None until, possibly, now. Juan had been closest and he’d betrayed me—he’d fucked me just to hand me over to Senhor Mendes. Buck Thornton, my employer and father-in-law? He used me more than either of the others did. Manola was a master and he was paying me. And he was a matador—a man of bravery and mystery. And, though he had chosen me, I had chosen him as well.

“I sail for my home in the Azores tomorrow,” he said. “You can come with me. I will take good care of you. You will not have to sleep on the streets again or pimp yourself to other men than me for your supper.”

What was it with men who wanted to take me out on the water, I wondered. For that matter, what made matadors want to dance with me—and to possess me? But what did it matter as long as I wanted that too?

Of course I said yes. But I didn’t want to live in lies. “You should know, though, that my name isn’t Shiva. It’s Jai, and I’m a mix of Danish and Indian, not English and Sri Lankan.”

“I don’t give a fuck about that,” he said.

“Perfeito. Say it to me again in Portuguese. Say what you want from me.”

“Quero foder-te. Quero lixar-te.”

And then he fucked me again.