Interrupted Escape

I avoided lunch in the dining room just as I had breakfast, this time with a growing list of people I didn’t want to mingle with just then. Instead, I made use of the limited-offering buffet that was set in the Rhine Lady lounge, eating early and departing the ship while the others were at lunch. I hadn’t intended to leave the ship that day after what I’d done with Tom in the morning, but the more I thought on that, the more I thought I had to get off the ship. I couldn’t backslide into the submissive role. If nothing else, I most certainly was getting too old for that in terms of hooking up with desirable tops. Younger men would make me seem needy. That would be pathetic. But men with good bodies were important to me. There wouldn’t be many older men eligible for that. I didn’t know how much longer I’d qualify for that. Tom had been something else in that department, especially in terms of stamina and drive at his age.

I needed to do something to drive this morning—and how easily I’d succumbed to it and to having taken pleasure and comfort from it—out of my system. So, I’d do what I had decided earlier not to do—but not all of it. I wouldn’t try for a hookup; I’d just check out the center of the old city.

Horst saw me pass by to the gangway from the dining room and came out to see me off. He was looking smug, as if he knew what I’d done that morning. But he most likely did know. He was surely thick as thieves with Tom and Sean already. If Tom hadn’t lied, he and Horst already were sharing Sean.

“So, you’ve decided to check out the cathedral,” he said.

“I’m going to do some walking in the city. I don’t know about checking out the cathedral. Perhaps I’ll pass by it.” At that point, this wasn’t a lie. I was planning to give the cathedral and the pat little assignation Horst had set up for me in theory a wide berth.

“From here, you can’t miss the cathedral,” he said. “All paths from here go there before you can go on to anywhere else. Have a good time in the city. Remember the hotel I recommended, the A&O Koln Dom, just up Komoedienstrasse from the cathedral square. And don’t forget that it’s all back on board at 5:30 for a 6:00 p.m. departure. Happy hour in the Rhine Lady lounge starting at 5:00. I’ll be giving a preview of Rüdesheim, our destination for tomorrow.”

There was a twinkle in his eye as he turned from me to pass the same information—minus the gay-friendly hotel recommendation—to the elderly couple that had been lost on the wrong deck in Amsterdam and that had decided to depart the River Princess at the same time I was.

I had intended not to fall in with Horst’s plans for me that afternoon, but of course I did. He had been right that whatever pathway I could take from the ship seemed to head for the tall spires of the Cologne Cathedral. Less than a seven-minute walk and I was in the cathedral square.

Using his advice on what young men or women were cruising the area, I easily was able to pick the prospects out. I found him almost immediately. He was tall and willowy, a blond—almost platinum—and had striking blue eyes. The hair was long, put up in a bun at the back of his head now, but I could envision it let down, reaching to his shoulders, the way I liked it. He was perched on the steps up into the cathedral, a bit apart from a group of other young men, who gave me a close once over as I passed. Cologne wasn’t any different from any other city in some respects. The looks I was getting from the young men told me they were available. He was a bit more aloof. He was playing a guitar, rather badly, but more just random chords to attract attention. He had charcoal sketches displayed in front of him, which I assumed he was selling—and probably using to sell himself, but the looks he gave me also were familiar in intent to anyone who had shopped for flesh before.

I stopped in front of him and looked down at the sketches. His talent here was rather greater than it was with the guitar, but nothing to rave about. His smile and the confidence and almost arrogance that he exuded were what attracted me. It was as if, with some half dozen young men loitering around the cathedral steps and obviously on the make, he knew he had the advantage.

“Mögen Sie die Kunst?” he asked me, his voice a rich second tenor—as a music professor I paid attention to a man’s vocal tone. When he saw my quizzical look, though, he switched to English. “Ah, you speak English instead?”

“Yes,” I said.

“English or American?”

“I’m an American,” I said.

“Wunderbare—Wonderful. I asked you if you liked the art work.”

“It’s . . . very interesting,” I said. And the closer I looked at it, the more interesting it was. It wasn’t that it was good; it was that among the sketches of the cathedral itself, there were a few of young men in evocative poses. I’d seen him pulling those sketches out from underneath his guitar case and putting them out as I approached. They were just for me—and for other men he assessed to be interested in young men.

The young man’s eyes followed mine. He smiled, reached under his guitar case again, and brought out a folder. He opened this for me to see—nudes; nudes of young men. And there were a couple, as well, of young men, singly and in pairs, in sexual positions. He moved a couple of older men covering younger men to the top of the pile. As I looked at the sketches, he positioned a hand where I could see it, curling the fingers and touching them with his thumb, making a sheath for the thumb of his other hand to move inside—a universal signal of anal fucking. He popped his tongue in his cheek. What he was selling was quite clear, and it wasn’t the sketches.

Taking my time, I sorted through the sketches, spending as much time perusing the ones showing graphic gay sex as any of the others. Playing his game, I lingered over those of older men—older, but still in good shape, as I was still in good shape—fucking young men. I isolated to one where the young man was a blond, with hair cascading to his shoulders.

“Any in particular that you like?” he asked. I think he fully knew which ones I gravitated to—and why.

“This one and that one are intriguing, and I’m drawn to them.” One was of two men in a lotus position together and the other was the missionary position. Both were of an older man on a young blond, with long hair.

“Is it the ages of the figures or the positions they are in?” he asked.

“Yes,” I answered and gave him a smile.

“Ah, very good choices, I think.”

“Do you think so?” I asked. “Are those ones you would pick for yourself?”

“Yes, certainly.”

“Do you think it would be possible for me to purchase something like those? How much are they?”

He named an astronomical price in terms of the quality of the art, but not too bad in terms of rented flesh.

“That sounds quite reasonable if you are selling everything I am assuming you are,” I said. “Would you be able to deliver it to a hotel nearby. The A&O Koln Dom has been recommended to me.”

He smiled broadly. “Natürlich—Naturally. I know where that is and I was about to take a break from here. And the artwork. Are these of the most desirable position for the sketch you would like? Maybe I have sketches showing other positions that you would like better?”

“I like this one fine—the one of an older of the pair driving from the top. That’s what I prefer. Do you have a favorite yourself of those positions? Would this position be to your liking?”

“But of course it would. My name is Ryker. This is a sketch I think I like best.” He was pointing to the lotus position one. And, with that, with a nod from me, he started to gather up his sketches and reached for his guitar case.

* * * *

When I came out of the hotel bathroom, showered and naked, and condom packet and tube of lube in hand, Ryker was sitting on the side of the bed facing the window, away from me, still dressed. He had just turned on the radio on the nightstand beside the bed. Wagner was on the radio. “Ride of the Valkyrie.” The overture to Act Three of Die Walküre, the second of the four operas constituting Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen. I knew it well. I specialized in Wagner and taught him in college and wrote what I thought were very erudite commentaries about him in obscure music journals. I had unaccountably been nervous about this encounter, probably because I hadn’t cruised like this—taken a young stranger off the streets to fuck—for a good many years, and, despite the boisterous nature of the music, it calmed me down.

I came up on the bed behind the young prostitute and tugged his T-shirt up and over his head. He didn’t resist me, lifting his arms up over his head as I pulled the shirt off. He had been smoking something, marijuana, I surmised, from the odor in the room, and I saw him pop a pill as I positioned myself behind him. He was listless, not reluctant in any way, just not showing any enthusiasm. This was a contrast to the Ryker of the cathedral steps, where his vitality shone out above the others there and had been what had focused me on him.

Perhaps he reasoned that this was my money so he should give over all control to me, and perhaps he was right to do so. If he were as vital and outgoing here as he’d been in the cathedral square, that might have cried me off carrying forward with a street hookup encounter that had never been in my nature. I had always had sex with men I knew from other areas of life—first with older men who pursued and bedded me and then with younger men I had some sort of authority over in other contexts.

This, despite my age and how long I had been sexually active, was my first rent-boy pickup.

From the kneeling position behind him, I massaged Ryker’s bare shoulders and ran my hands down to his chest, palming his lightly muscled pecs and rubbing his nubs. He gave a combination of quiet grunts and sighs, as closely embracing him from behind, I explore his torso with my hands, moving down to his flat belly and beyond, below his waistband. He trimmed but didn’t completely shave his pubes, and my fingers played in short curls there. His blond head hair had a curl in it too, and I reached up with one hand, the other buried under his waistband, the tip of the index finger pressed against the root of his cock, and released his hair to cascade down to his shoulders.

He shuddered slightly, the only indication he even was there, in the room, emotionally. But then he turned his head, his lips meeting mine, and we kissed—not hungrily but deeply, his lips opening to my invading tongue, giving over entirely to me—his surrender to letting me have my way as I wished. I was paying for this. I’m sure he could feel me between his shoulder blades, hardening up. I was big. I would tax him. There was a long way to go, though, to bringing passion out of him. So far, this was just a trick, letting me build in any heat there would be.

I unbuckled and unzipped him. “Slip them off,” I whispered in his ear, and he slowly shucked his jeans and briefs. I encircled his cock with a hand as I pressed my chin on his shoulder, turning my head now and then to nuzzle my lips into the hollow of his throat as I slow stroked his cock. He did harden for me, but still there was little emotion. He did sigh a bit in response to my hand on his cock and the fingers of the other one toying with one of his nipples.

“Do you want me to come before you put it in?” he asked.

“No. I want to enjoy you a bit before you come,” I said.

He gasped, tensed, and then relaxed again as I moved the hand from his chest down and around to his buttocks, finding the crease and then the hole, and then penetrating him. He reached around with his arms, cupping one of my buttocks cheeks with one hand and my balls and the root of my cock with the other.

“So gross,” he murmured. I didn’t need a translation to know he’d found me to be an above-average size. I wondered how many cocks he’d taken in his career on the cathedral steps. Many, I assumed, but I asked anyway.

“And have you had many men?” asked.

“Yes, many. Not many as big as you.” I took that response as more or less being what I wanted to hear—but I was, in fact, big.

I continued working his body with my hands, and he lay quietly in my arms, panting a bit. He was in erection, though, so he wasn’t completely playacting. I wondered if he was as lethargic and docile with all his johns as this. I wondered what the German word for “johns” was. I felt myself going a little soft again, realizing that I was as nearly detached from this as Ryker was—despite making moves that both of us should respond to with increased heat.

Perhaps feeling me flagging, Ryker turned his face to mine for another deep kiss and pressed his thumb into the piss slit of my glans and pulled on my shaft. I immediately came alive and put some passion into my kiss. He yielded but did not increase the heat from his side.

With a sigh, I got on with it. Grabbing up both pillows from the head of the bed, I moved back from him, and as I placed the pillows under the small of his back, I coaxed him to recline on them, which arched his back and pressed his shoulder blades to the mattress on my side of the pillows. Kneeling at his head, I took his head between my hands and arched it back.

“Open to me,” I whispered. Understanding my intent, he opened his mouth wide, I penetrated into his mouth cavity with my hard shaft, and to every third beat of the furious music of the Valkyries, I fucked his throat. If I’d kept on the beat of the music, I would have ruptured his throat. He opened for me and took it deep. He took it, not trying to push me away. He lifted his arms as well and cupped my buttocks, holding me in place. Beyond that, though, there was nothing from him but assent. He lay there docilely, an open vessel for my lust. Nothing else.

I didn’t lose heart, though. I hadn’t come into this with more than a curiosity of what options were open to me in life. I just lowered my expectations on buying it off the street. He was still a luscious young man—blond and beautiful. Tall and willowy. Willing and yielding, if not full of fire and passion. I would be expecting too much to receive that from a street whore I supposed.

He was here, I had a need, I could get it up and march to a release. I was paying to get my rocks off, and that should be enough.

I moved my body on his without losing the depth and rhythm of the face fuck, matched to the third beat of the stirring music of Wagner on the radio, which had moved now from the “Ride of the Valkyries” to other wild and invigorating sections of the Ring series. I laced a hand through his balls, took his cock in my mouth while he was sucking mine, and rolled and squeeze and distended his ball sacs as we sixty-nined to the strains of Wagner unleashed.

We were both panting, me still well ahead of him in arousal, lust, and need. I pulled away before either of us came and sat on the edge of the bed, where Ryker had been when I’d entered the room. I reached for and applied the lube and the condom to my erection while Ryker knelt beside me on the bed, getting the idea that it was time to fuck—for me to fuck him.

Again he was completely docile—I almost thought disinterested or at least aloof—and yielding to my direction as I turned him and brought him down into my lap, his bent legs encasing my hips. His hand went under us—mine were holding his narrow waist between them—held my erection in position, and with a groan, descended into my lap, skewering himself. Still using the beat of the Wagner music, although controlling the rise and the fall that was slower, bottoming at every fifth staccato beat of the music rather than attempting to fuck on the third beat, I fucked the young whore.

Leaning back from me, his hands pressed into my knees, his head flung back, and his eyes closed, Ryker took the deep penetration, at first letting me do it all, taking my pleasure as I wished, the submissive there just to submit and let me have value for my money.

As we fucked, though, the heat rose in the blond iceberg.

“Mein Gott, es ist so tief!—My God, it’s so deep!” he cried out.

“Open to it. Stretch. Relax,” I commanded. Then, without warning, I lashed out and slapped him across the face. He gave me a shocked, hurt look, and I slapped him again. That got to him. I felt him giving way, relaxing, expanding internally, and I sank that last inch. I had felt he was holding me away from him, his body denying me the total access he wasn’t otherwise according me. But when I was in deep, moving languidly in and out, deep in is core, he gave way to me in total surrender.

He leaned forward, pressing his chest into mine, encircling my chest with one arm, and moving his other hand between us, grasping his cock and stroking. I felt him tremble, his rocking against me coming into the fifth beat of the music—and into my own melding with Wagner, having fucked to him frequently.

He turned his head to the ceiling as I buried my lips into the hollow of his throat and cried out, “Ja, Ja, Frick mich. Frick mich hart!—Yes, yes. Fuck me. Fuck me hard!”

It wasn’t just me fucking him; it was the two of us in synch, becoming a smoothly moving fucking machine. I was in deep, into his soft core, which yielded to me, spongy and pulsing. His head snapped forward, our lips met and opened together, our tongues dueled, each of us hungry for the other. There for a good ten or twelve seconds we were lovers, fucking each other, at the height of shared ecstasy. He shot off up our bellies and I filled the bulb of the condom.

And that was it. A wad of euros and an hour and half departure from my river cruise, and ten or twelve seconds of transport to nirvana. A brief, if explosive, fusion of just pretend lovers. It wasn’t the positions we—or, rather, I—had used. That had been hot. I could have kept it up all day with that sort of technique. The spark wasn’t there. I didn’t have enough of it either. Paying some stranger for it wasn’t allowing me to go to that level. Well, for enough time to make it worthwhile. There for ten or twelve seconds, Ryker and I were on the beam. Just long enough, though, to know what we were missing.

Was that—engaged in every couple of weeks or so—enough for me in life going henceforth? Somehow I didn’t think so.

Showing that it was just a Sunday afternoon for him, Ryker extricated himself from me and went to the bathroom. He didn’t bother to close the door as he pissed in the toilet and then took a shower, not closing the curtain.

I lay back in the bed and watched him through the bathroom door. This is where, if Ryker were my lover or even my potential lover, when the heat and passion and tense fucking would begin, not where getting our rocks off ended.

When he’d dried himself off, Ryker came out of the bathroom and gave me only brief looks and thin smiles as he dressed, took the money he’d earned—not enough for a generous tip, though—he hadn’t moved mountains for me or assured me that this would be a sexually fulfilling option for the next phase of my life—picked up his guitar case, and left the room. He hadn’t left the sketch that I’d paid for. I was just as happy he didn’t. It was amateurishly—if anatomically correctly—drawn, and I had no idea what I’d do with it if he had left it. It had done its job, though, if not any more sparklingly than it’s worth as art.

The only thing he said to me after we’d fucked was, “You are so big. You fuck deep inside.” He didn’t say anything about me striking him. I bet he didn’t even realize what had turned the tide on us finally clicking in the fuck.

I didn’t know if he meant that as praise or as a criticism—or, perhaps, as an indictment, like maybe I should have paid more to fuck him that deep.

I still had an hour left of the room rent and two hours before I needed to be back on board before the raising of the gangplank and the beginning of happy hour and Horst’s talk on the next day’s stop in Rüdesheim. Ryker had only begun to smoke the reefer now perched on the top of the night stand, burned end hanging over an edge etched with multiple previous cigarettes only partially smoked. I lit it up, leaned back, and smoked it as I took my cock in hand and dreamed of the fuck that I could have had with an enthusiastic Ryker.

When I returned to the River Princess, the happy hour was in full swing. Entering the room, I grabbed a white wine and waded into a sea of gray and blue hair, acting the erudite and charming not old comparatively music professor. I continued that for the next five days as we steamed up the Rhine, finding that I had no trouble pulling that role off.

I didn’t fuck Sean as offered—or anyone else for that matter—during this time. I was experimenting with an escape into a life of celibacy and what others would consider to be normal and proper. I was exploring the idea that I didn’t need sex at all anymore—that the admiration and flirting from and with the gray and blue hairs would be fine for the rest of my life. I responded to Sean as an offered bottom and Tom and Horst as hopeful tops as the temptation I was resisting. It wasn’t as if the temptation wasn’t perpetually there. Sean was fucked almost constantly during the voyage—by either Tom or Horst, or, on a couple of occasions the two of them together—temptingly close to me, just beyond the thin cabin wall. I could have slept on the other bunk, across my cabin, of course. But I didn’t. I welcomed the challenge and celebrated each time I was able to defend myself against the siren call from beyond the cabin wall. And I was never able to resolve, although I thought on it, whether the temptation of covering Sean or being covered by Tom was the greater of the two. Horst didn’t arouse me.

By the time when, on the sixth day, the River Princess reached Volkach, in the heart of the Franconian wine and picturesque rural villages country, I believed I had found a workable option. The trip was helping me come to grips with life and an eventual contentment escape after all.

TO BE CONTINUED