Edge Running

[This is a five-chapter finished work that will complete posting within two weeks.]

I hesitated before writing the prescription out for Grunge, real name Greg Hunley, which is what I put on the prescription, but it wasn’t worth the risk not to. I had no idea where he got the money to pay for his habit—and I didn’t want to know—but it wasn’t from me. All he wanted from me were the prescriptions. They were for drugs that wouldn’t harm him nearly as much as those he’d buy off the street would. I used that as a conscience-justifying excuse for continuing to serve his need. But the greater truth is that I didn’t want him telling people I provided that service from the free clinic on Chicago’s North Halstead Street in the heart of the Lake View gay district.

That’s who came into our clinic: guys with a habit or guys who had unprotected sex and needed help—either to avoid STDs or to counter them. Luckily in these times, I had access to new drugs that helped avoid them. I gave them out like candy too, although I wouldn’t admit it if I could avoid it. And, like the cleaner drugs I prescribed, my attitude was that it kept guys alive who were going to do what they did anyway.

Working here positioned me to cover my own sexual needs. I knew how to avoid picking up anything, so I was free to get my sexual needs taken care of from a selection men who came to the clinic who invariably were keen to give me what I wanted to get relief for them own afflictions.

I used the new preventative drugs myself pretty freely. I liked to both bareback and be barebacked. I played both ways, depending on what I saw to like in the guy I was going with at the moment. I was more of an “at the moment” guy than anything to do with commitment. That said, I liked the view from the bottom best.

I left the fee clinic, where, at twenty-six, I worked as a newly minted doctor, and walked down North Halstead toward the parking garage where I kept my 2015 Chevy Silverado double-cab truck. At the head of the alley before I got there, I saw trouble that I was all too familiar with. It wasn’t going to be an early evening at Quads Gym on North Broadway followed by a night at the nearby Gay Follies that I’d anticipated, I didn’t think.

As I approached the alley, I caught a glimpse of young Petey Finelli withdrawing into the darkness. Just before that I’d seen another figure enter the alley too—a drug pusher I knew as Stickman. The dirty stuff Stickman sold was much of the reason I’d gotten into prescribing cleaner drugs. I did what I could to keep the guys in this neighborhood alive. Shit, I thought. Petey’s willing to buy off the street. I thought I’d pinned that down.

Petey Finelli was my special problem child—always running the edge, not that I was one to judge that or to have been able to avoid it myself. He was an irresistible honey of nineteen—small and willowy and oh so huggable and more. Always willing to take a tumble as long as his needs were fed. The kicker was that his father, Mario Finelli, was an underworld chieftain in Chicago, with a corner on the protection racket in upstate Illinois and fingers in the prostitution and drugs markets in the city. That didn’t mean he knew or would approve of his son, Petey, snorting the stuff or would look kindly on anyone supplying Petey. I’m not sure he’d forgive my caring excuse of trying to combat killing drugs with just habit-forming drugs.

I had been supplying Petey and laying him since before I knew who his father was. Since I found out his family connections to the underworld, a good part of my time was spent trying to keep him out of trouble and away from the bad stuff. That didn’t mean I had stopped laying him, however. He didn’t want me to stop, and he was somewhat of a wild card on what he’d do and who he’d tell if he wasn’t getting his way.

“Hold on, guys,” I said, as I turned the corner into the alley. “Don’t hand the man that money, Petey. And, Stickman, you know better than that. You know where Petey gets it from.”

“I was just on my way to see you, Denny,” Petey said. Stickman didn’t say anything. He retreated further in the darkness of the alley. He knew better than this. He knew who Petey’s father was and he knew Petey was getting his stuff from me. But he also knew that if Petey ODed on something that could be traced back to him, Stickman was a dead man. He must have been desperate for a higher-drug fix himself to take a chance with Petey like this. He didn’t know, of course, that my serving Petey’s needs wasn’t at his father’s behest or how Petey was paying for his stuff.

“If you were on your way to see me, why were you buying off the street, Petey?”

“Just, you know, to have some backup. And it was being offered real cheap. I sometimes get a better kick from the street stuff too.”

“That’s because the street drugs have stuff in them that will kill you, Petey. How many times do I have to tell you that? You come to me because what I have is pure and as safe as it can be.” Sometimes I wondered about Petey. He wasn’t always the sharpest knife in the drawer. But that was part of his charm and allure, I guess. He always seemed so innocent, so yielding, and so “Oh, gosh, that’s doing me so good.” He was that way with my cock as well as drugs.

“Come with me,” I said, taking his hand and leading him into the next block where the parking garage was.

I always parked in the shadows in the garage. It was just habit. I didn’t want to lead a high-profile life, which was a little surprising considering what I did other than work at the free clinic, but I’d always been sort of an “in the shadows” type guy.

We got in the truck, me in the driver’s seat and Petey in the front passenger seat. I reached over and opened the glove compartment, pulling the thick maintenance folder out to make a shelf there.

“Give me your handkerchief,” I said.

“What? My handkerchief?” he asked.

“Do you have one?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“Is it clean? Have you blown your nose in it?”

“No. I mean, yes, it’s clean.”

“Take it out and fan it out over the folder there. You might be able to get a little off it later.”

He did so. He was acting a bit jittery. I’d noticed that back at the head of the alley. I wasn’t all with it when Stickman had tried to do a sale with him. I knew what he needed now. I reached down to my medical bag, opened the side compartment, and took out a packet of the white stuff. He knew then what I was doing, and he smiled.

“Do you have a bill or do I need to supply that too?” I asked.

“Yeah, I got it,” he said. Another smile and he took a dollar bill out of his jeans pocket and rolled it up to make a straw. I laid out four lines of the cocaine—cut down to not being nearly as strong as he assumed it was—but pure and as safe as it could be—on the handkerchief.

While he snorted the lines of low-impact, but unadulterated coke, I pulled a bottle of poppers out of the medical bag and took a couple of hits from that myself. I didn’t do anything stronger—unless vodka was considered stronger. I felt myself going hard, as I reached over and ran my hands up under Petey’s T-shirt, giving some attention to his nubs, between his snorts. I moved a hand down below the waistband of his jeans and he widened his stance as he finished doing the coke. He was such a sweet, lithe little thing. He purred for me as I worked him up with my hands, but he didn’t let my feeling him up interrupt his snort.

“We gonna fuck, Denny?” he asked.

“Yes, we’re going to fuck, Petey,” I answered.

When he was finished taking the lines, he sat, docile, in the passenger seat, staring down at his handkerchief, as I pulled his T-shirt over his head and off his body and felt him up all over with my hands, heating myself up.

“In the backseat and lose the jeans,” I said, as I unbuckled my belt and unzipped myself.

“I’m not wearing briefs,” he answered.

“Figures. I’ve already found that out.” It was an indication of how much he was just drifting around in the heavens now. He should have known my exploration of his body had revealed there was nothing between the jeans material and his skin. I’d taken the time to cup and play with his equipment and to finger his hole with one hand while stroking myself with the other. He was in as much erection as I was. I just was the only one sober enough to know that and, until the lines had gotten snorted up, Petey was more interested in the coke than in getting laid.

“I was coming to see you. I told you I was already.”

Which explained no briefs, I knew. I knew how he thought. It helped that he had come to get what he was going to get sexually—and not just the cut-down cocaine hit.

I took his wavy-haired head between my hands and brought his face down into my crotch. He came down easily, opening his mouth to take in my shaft. I lay back in the backseat, running my fingers through his curly black hair as Petey sucked my cock. When I was throbbing with need, I reached down, put his waist between my hands, and lifted and twisted him. He was a flexible, yielding lad, coming down on my lap, facing me, gracefully and fully experienced in the transition. Despite the haze he was in, he knew exactly what we were doing and what was expected of him.

His knees pressed into the crease between the seat back and cushion on either side of my hips. He used the knees for leverage when he fucked himself on my cock. He cupped the back of my head with one hand, bringing our lips together, and positioned my bulb at his entrance with the other. As we French kissed, he lowered his butt into my groin, taking me deep in his channel.

“You’re the best, Denny,” he murmured. I didn’t contradict him.

Up, down. Up, down. Rotate around for my bulb to kiss his channel walls everywhere. Up, down.

For the next twelve minutes, we said nothing. He rode me as I grasped his waist between my hands, controlling the rhythm of the fuck, which grew more rapid and intense as the minutes rolled on. We kissed, until he pulled his face away, arched his back, so that the back of his head was resting on the top of the front seat and stared with a hazy glare at the ceiling of the truck. The cocaine had kicked in fully. He was just a loose rag doll now, quiet in my embrace, as I continued to lift him and then pull him back onto me. He was fully open to me and took me deep, bareback. I’m not sure he really was there, in the cab with me, when I fired off, hitting him deep in his channel, again and again.

I liked to bareback. It was a good thing I was an innercity free clinic doctor and had access to pills both he and I now could take to minimize any risk from me taking it from Petey the way I liked to do it.

At the moment of climax I had a flash of “Shit, what would Mario say and do if he could see me spiking his little boy now?” but I was lost in the taking and buried that thought as quick and as deep as I could—just as I’d done with my cock inside Petey.

* * * *

I was standing over the man—he said his name was Craig, but he had just been a day member at Quads Gym—as he knelt in front of me in the cheap motel room he’d brought me to. It was obvious that he was just someone passing through Chicago and he was checked in here for a night or two. He had been guided to me at the gym by one of the regular patrons because he wanted something recreational to use, just for that evening on a lonely night in a strange city, and he’d been told I was a doctor who was approachable for something safe so he didn’t have to take a risk out on North Broadway. When he approached me, though, it was evident that he wanted more—that he didn’t want to be lonely for a couple of hours in the late afternoon.

He made it quite clear when we got to the room and he was putting the wad of cash we’d agreed on on the bureau by the TV set that he wanted to be fucked on the shag-carpet floor, not the bed. I had just planned to work out at Quads Gym that afternoon and to dispense a couple of prescriptions to regulars. I had my second job to attend to that night and I didn’t want to exhaust myself. But a free clinic doctor doesn’t make that much—even my other job paid more in afterwork fees and tips than salary—and Craig had made an offer I couldn’t pass up. He also wasn’t disgusting. He was maybe in his forties, but he wasn’t out of place in a gym. He was slim and well-muscled. He was olive-complexioned and darkly hirsute, but I didn’t hold that against him. He wasn’t good-looking, but he wasn’t an ogre either. He was just a lonely businessman passing through Chicago, maybe wanting something more memorable and adventurism than he could get in his hometown or even in whatever city his business trip was taking him to. Craig probably had a wife, two kids, a dog, and a cat at home in some suburbia.

This afternoon, though, Craig was on his knees before me as I stood, legs apart, and he had my cock in his throat and was running his hands up my thighs and around to my bare buttocks, squeezing and separating and kneading my buttocks cheeks as he rubbed and, eventually, entered my ass with a finger. He could have fucked me, if he had wanted to. He’d paid me enough. But he had made quite clear he wanted to be fucked.

I was naked. Craig was wearing a red silk bra, red silk panties, and red stiletto heels. He’d had a red silk slip on too when he was going down on his knees, but as he descended to the carpet and before his red-lipsticked lips opened over my erection, which he’d helped engorge when we were in a standing embrace, rocking against each other, kissing, and he was stroking my cock, I had pulled that over his head and had twirled it into a scarf. I had this around his neck, holding both ends of it, and holding his head into my groin as he deep-throated me.

I gently pressed him down onto his shoulder blades on the carpet, running my hands down his legs as I did so and lifting his ankles to my shoulders. I grasped his buttocks in my hands, slid his panties up and off his legs, and returned my hands to his buttocks cheeks, holding him there, elevated off the floor, his weight on his shoulder blades, and his ankles on my shoulders as I still stood, but in a crouched position. I pulled his pelvis into my groin, and he writhed under me, moaning and working his imagined breasts with one hand on top of the bra and his cock with the other as I worked my cock inside his hole. And I fucked him.

I had given him his option, willing to sell him more drugs than he’d asked for. He’d taken me up on that, so, both of us pharmaceutically protected, I barebacked him.

Well into the fuck, I turned him over, put him back on his knees, mounted him from above and behind, and fucked him in a doggy. I covered him close from above, running my hands under his bra and working his breasts with my hands.

He thanked me profusely afterward for playing along with his fetish.

“I’m a doctor,” I said. “I’ve seen pretty much everything. It doesn’t concern me.”

“A real doctor?” he asked.

“Yes, of course,” I said. “You would have taken the prescription I gave you from a quack and taken the chance you could get it filled without being arrested?”

“You sold some of the drugs to me directly,” he said, somewhat sheepishly, like he’d been found out. “And it was more than the prescriptions I wanted. I wouldn’t have tried to get them filled. I wanted more from you. Mattie at the desk at the gym said you were good with some kink.”

“And was I?” I asked

“Yes, very good. You’re really big too. I didn’t know if I could take you. I was thrilled when I could.”

“Well, now you know that the prescriptions are good. You can get them filled without risk—at least until I’m caught and arrested.”

“So, you do medicine too . . . in addition to . . .” But then he looked a bit embarrassed again.

“In addition to fucking men for money?”

“Well . . . yes.”

“Yes, the medicine, but other jobs too.”

He asked, so I told him. Then he wanted to take me to dinner, and I was hungry and had another job to go to soon thereafter, so I agreed. We had a pleasant dinner he paid for, and we were very open with each other. He even showed me a photo of his wife, three kids, and two dogs.

“What, no cats?” I asked.

“My wife is allergic to them. This other place you work. I’d like to see it,” he said as we were leaving the restaurant.

I told him where he could do that.

“So, maybe I’ll see you later,” he said, with a smile, as we parted.

* * * *

“So, are you at all interested? Because if you are, I can place you with a troupe in New York tomorrow to train to go to Bangkok. I can get you redocumented while you’re in New York. Part of my interest would be that you could still practice medicine and prescribe wherever you go. I can arrange for you to be documented with the Doctors Without Borders. I know of some of those who are doctors without scruples. They are accepted almost anywhere as doctors, with local privileges.”

“You didn’t come up with this just tonight, did you?” I asked. I was sitting backstage at the Gay Follies, where I danced three or four nights a week as lead in a Chippendales Dancers-style review. That was how I’d paid for medical school—that and being an escort in New York.

Kenon Jackson was sitting on a stool, towering over me. Jackson, a black bull of a man, would tower over almost anyone. He was something north of six and a half feet and 250 pounds. But he was all body-builder muscle. He also was the finances, brains, and muscles behind the Gay Follies and, as he was revealing to me now, the backer of male dancer troupes entertaining worldwide.

“I’ve had my eye on you for some time,” he said. “Not just because you are body beautiful and sex on a stick, but also because you’re a great dancer and I’ve found that it would be a great advantage to have a guy with medical training and credentials in the larger troupes. The one I’m putting together for gay clubs in Bangkok will have seven dancers plus a manager. The reviews will be of from four to six dancers. I’ve found it’s good to have a spare or two.”

“And I’d be the lead dancer?”

“You’ve earned that spot, plus you’d be paid more than the others—both to be the lead and for the medical support. I bring it up now not only because the training in New York for the troupe I have in mind needs to get started but also because I was told about Mario Finelli’s thugs, in the alley outside the stage door, asking for you. I know you’ve been screwing his son, so my guess is they aren’t here on a social call.”

Jackson had that right. I’d been told about the thugs waiting for me—that they wanted me to go see Mario. Mario Finelli hadn’t ever shown interest in seeing me before. This had to be about Petey—and not just the sex; the drugs too. Mario Finelli wanting to see me couldn’t mean anything good. Until I was told about Finelli’s guys, I was having a pretty good evening. There was a good crowd out there and the first set I’d been in had gone real well. I saw Craig out in the audience. He’d come to see me, and he’d gotten to see all of me. We had a freeze frame at the end of the set, where the dancers dropped it all and held pose for several seconds before the lights went out. I always enjoyed the gasps and cat calls that resulted from that—I was in center stage for that. Craig was still there for my next set, looking at me intently, and I’d decided I’d go back to his hotel with him for the night, He had a good body, and I didn’t have anything better to do that night. Or so I thought.

Mario Finelli’s thugs at the door made me think again. During the next interval with other dancers on stage I had my mind racing about how I’d get out of the theater and how much of my stuff I could grab out of my apartment before Finelli’s guys found out where I lived—and, most important, where could I go after the night with Craig? I couldn’t just disappear.

But just disappearing was what big Kenon Jackson, the massive black bull, was sitting on a stool between me and the door to the dressing room corridor and offering me. A bolt out of the blue. Or was it?

“You have a knack for running on the edge, don’t you, Denny?” Jackson asked, sticking out his muscular arm, touching my forearm—I was practically naked, ready for my next set—and stroking my arm with his beefy fingers.

I get the picture, I thought. Jackson had been snuffling around me since I’d started working there. And Jackson had the reputation of having the biggest equipment in the theater—maybe in all of Chicago. Jackson could put a dancer in the hospital in a one-night stand. I’d been expecting a proposition—and a guy didn’t say no to Jackson—and I’d both wanted it and was scared shitless about it. I was versatile, but I bottomed a hell of a lot more than topped, and, what, I’d heard he was ten thick inches. For a guy like me, that was a challenge not to be passed up.

“There’s more to this deal than just getting me out of the country and into one of your international dance troupes, isn’t there?” I said.

“One night. I’d have you for one night,” Jackson said. “All night. Tonight. Don’t worry, I wouldn’t damage the goods—not too much. The job offer for Bangkok is real. My want is real too, though.”

“I don’t know. Let me think about it, Kenon,” I said.

“Don’t think too long. It’s now or never. The thugs are at the door.”

“And the giant is standing in front of me,” I said. Jackson had stood up from the stool. He towered over me. He towered over everyone else coming and going in the dressing room and the corridor outside. I was sitting at his crotch level. His basket protruded menacingly. He had a hard-on, I could tell. And he was a champion.

“Your choice. With Mario Finelli waiting for you, though, I don’t think one of your choices is to continue life as you know it here. I doubt you’ll be dancing on this stage after tonight. I’d like you to be dancing for me.”

“In Bangkok?” I asked.

“And tonight. For me alone. You’ll have a great time. I’ll fuck you like you’ve never been fucked before.”

I believed him, which was why I was hesitating. And then, right after he left, all reason to hesitate went out of the window. I got a cellphone call as I was getting ready to go out on stage for my final set. It was the clinic.

“I’m not supposed to be calling you, Denny,” the night nurse, Kath Grimes, breathed into the phone. “But I think you should know. A couple of police detectives were here an hour ago, looking for you. Bernard told them you weren’t here, but he let them look around the clinic to see that for themselves. He showed them your schedule chart. He had to. They had a warrant. What sort of trouble are you in, Denny?”

The worst kind, coming at about the worst time. Trouble on top of trouble.

Jackson had a private entrance at the front of the theater that we could use. The door was only about six feet from the open backseat door of his chauffeured car.

He couldn’t wait. He fucked me the first time in the backseat of the car, taking his time to stuff himself into me, but stretching me to the limit anyway. It was harder to take a cock in the backseat of a car than on a bed. He made me remember it. He made me suffer.

He sat on the bench seat, with me sitting in his lap, facing forward. My cheek was resting on the back of the front passenger seat, my torso leaning forward, and Jackson pulling my arms back with a grip on my wrists, pulling me on and off his gigantic shaft. With my cheek resting on the back of the front seat, I was facing the driver, a young Hispanic dude, his profile turned to me, his eyes on the road, a grin on his face, as, my mouth in a wide yawn and my eyes bugging out, I screamed, groaned, sobbed, and otherwise let everyone in the car know I’d never had it so big.

He ravished me in a missionary on his bed on the 42nd floor of the 500 Lake Shore drive Apartments until I was docile putty in his hands. After the car, I was reamed for his specifications as long as he got back in there fast. He got back in there fast, carrying me from the door of his apartment to his bed and stuffing it right in again.

Then he picked me up and fucked me in a variety of standing bully positions in front of his full-wall bedroom window overlooking Lake Michigan. The standing fuck seemed to be Jackson’s favorite position. Crouching, he held me facing him, my knees on his hips and my fists locked behind his bull’s neck, his hands clutching and spreading my buttocks, and pulling me on and off his shaft—breeding me, both of us preferring barebacking and me able to provide the protecting pills.

Then, as he had done in the car, he held me in front of him, my torso jutting out to the window, my cheek to the cool glass, and his hands gripping my wrists, my legs crossed behind the small of his back, as I rocked on the cock that was demolishing me deep in my soft core.

I spent the night captive to him and his periodic, relentless lust, in his bed. In the morning, the Hispanic driver was in the kitchen, fixing us breakfast, grinning and leering at me as I stumbled painfully about, unable to close my legs. After breakfast, saying, “Well, if I won’t be enjoying you again for a while,” Jackson bent me over an ottoman in his living area and fucked me again in a doggy. He ran his beefy fingers into my wavy reddish-blond hair and arched my torso back so that I could look out the living room window and count the sails on boats out on the lake forty-two stories below us as he stuffed himself inside me and destroyed my channel yet again. It wasn’t so bad. I was reamed to Jackson’s specifications for any time in the next week and hadn’t had time to close up any all night. At one point he’d gone to sleep still inside me and Jackson flaccid wasn’t much less stuffing than Jackson turgid.

Afterward, I found that the Hispanic driver had gone to my apartment and packed a couple of bags for me.

“When Finelli’s thugs stop monitoring your apartment, I’ll have the rest of your stuff taken out and put in storage,” Jackson said. “I’ll settle your rent bill too.”

Then they shoveled me into the backseat of the Lincoln Town Car and my luggage into the trunk, and the grinning and leering Hispanic driver drove me eighty-five miles west to the Chicago Rockford International Airport, figuring Finelli wouldn’t guess I’d escape that way, and I was on my way to New York, a new identity, and Bangkok, Thailand.

I was running right along the edge of trouble. And it was painful to close my legs.

To be continued.