Is Capricious the Word?

Sandra had been doing a crossword puzzle as we waited for the visiting author from New Zealand to arrive at our Chelsea apartment.

“You’re the prose man. What’s a word for ‘inconstant’?” she asked, stretching her long legs, in the turquoise pedal pushers, down the length of the white sofa. The tunic she wore over them, showing her cleavage almost all the way down to her navel, was the same white as the sofa. I assumed she’d stay on the sofa as much as possible while the New Zealand author was here—it highlighted her very nice set of tits. I also assumed that the author, invited by her English Department at Colombia, where she taught poetry, had impressed her with more than his best-seller status. Otherwise she’d have worn an Indian caftan. Before she’d wafted off to his lecture, she’d asked me if New Zealand was somewhere near India. Since the visiting New Delhi University professor, Vijay Modi, fucked her on his desk during an office party, she’d been in her Indian period.

“Fickle? Vacillating? Spasmodic? Fluid?” I tossed out from the other side of the kitchen bar while I was tossing the salad. I did most of the cooking. Her friends tittered behind their fans that she had acquired me, when I had taken one of her classes as a graduate student, as a boy toy, but I knew that what she’d needed was a maid. No, more than that. What was a nine-letter word for a convenient husband? Camouflage. That was it. She liked men and women, a variety of them. I liked men, but for a room over my head and food on the table, I occasionally fucked Sandra. She didn’t mind, which I took as a vote of confidence in my skills with women as well as men, because she’d been fucked by a whole lot of both. It had been a convenient—camouflage—marriage for both of us. “Does it give any clue?” I called out.

“It’s ten letters,” she answered.

“Oh, of course,” I responded. “Capricious.”

“Yes, that fits,” she said.

It certainly would, I thought. And then the bell from the street rang, there was heavy trudging on the stairs, and the New Zealand best-selling author, Bram Overby, was in the frame of the entry door. The trudge wasn’t because he was fat. It was because he was large, a hunk, in fact. He lit up the room with his smile and his ruddy rugby star looks, his broad shoulders, full chest, and biceps—and lips for that matter. He was carrying a large bouquet of flowers, which I knew weren’t for me no matter how I ached that they would be. And from how outrageously Sandra was fawning over him, I knew that they would fuck—that they’d fuck again, actually. He’d been here a couple of weeks, so I assumed they’d already fucked. I expected Sandra to move out of her Indian phase as soon as she had time to research the lifestyles of New Zealand.

The meal went well—better for Overby and Sandra than for me, but it appeared to be a winner all the way around. Sandra managed somehow to accept accolades for the food without outright lying about who had prepared it—which wasn’t below her to do—and my reward was that, in the free-flowing conversation, it became clear that Overby, a best-selling novelist, was more on the beam with me, Aiden Macallum, a first-time literary novel writer, than he was with Sandra Gainsworth, the poetry professor. That was just on the professional level. I had no trouble understanding that the robust New Zealander was hard for Sandra.

I left them, wine glasses in hand, in the living area, looking out of a full wall of glass at the Manhattan skyline in the living area and retreated to doing the dishes and straightening up the kitchen clutter after we’d finished eating. Wes Montgomery was playing the romantic guitar loud enough on the stereo to overshadow their discussion. When I was done and moved back into the living area with full wine glass in hand, they were gone. They’d taken their wine glasses with them.

They were on Sandra’s bed in her bedroom—she and I slept separately. She was on her back. Her turquoise pedal pushers were in a puddle on the floor by the bed. Poetically, his trousers overlay her pedal pushers and an opened condom packet crowned the pants. The two empty wine glasses were on the nightstand. Her white tunic was open and spread. The best-selling author lay between her long spread and bent legs, where he was doing groin pushups on her pelvis, they were kissing, and he was squeezing one of her ample tits and thumbing her nipple.

The decibels of her moaning told me that he was hung and doing a good job of her. As I watched, he began taking her in long slides, pulling almost all of the way out and then sliding in, making her jerk and moan each time he bottomed. Then I could see for myself that he was long and thick in erection. I went hard.

I turned, retrieved a jacket from my bedroom, and went out into the night. I didn’t have far to go. I’d given up an invitation to hear the beat poet, Zach Taggert, perform his poetry to his own guitar music at a nearby bar we all frequented to help entertain the New Zealander. Obviously, my help wasn’t needed any longer. The room was dark, save for the spotlight on Zach, where, dressed all in black, he sat on a black high stool on a black platform, backed by a black wall. The room was smoky, despite the obligatory no-smoking signs on the walls. It was that sort of bar.

I settled at a table near the back of a crowd of maybe thirty people. In a room this small, thirty constituted a crowd. It was hard to do a count in the smoky darkness. Still, Zach picked me out in the crowd, smiled his pleasure that I had come after all, and looked directly at me while he continued reciting his poetry and strumming his guitar. I didn’t think it was specially performed for me, though. He was an intense man—all craggy angles and serious stare rangy and long-distance truck driverly, each separate part of him ugly and crude, but weaving into a rough, sexual creature, with an intensity that made each and every one of us sure he was speaking directly to us—and not to the surface of us. He was slicing right into us and talking to our slow-beating hearts—mine, in particular.

He closed with a poem that was delivered directly to me and that I knew had been composed for me and about me when I last lay with him, under him, him inside me, throbbing and causing the muscles of my channel to ripple over his shaft. The poem was his ticket to lay me again. He gave me a piercing, commanding look as he finished the poem and the deal was settled.

His room was in a nearby tenement.

He hovered over me on his bed in the dark, made darker by the black walls, floor and ceiling, relieved only by the single window looking out on a black fire escape and three letters of a frenetically flashing orangish-red neon sign advertising the pizza parlor on the ground floor.

I was naked, my arms raised over my head, my wrists tied together by a black leather cord. Zach was lying on me, between my spread legs. He was bare-chested—thin, tightly muscled, his torso covered in black curly hair that went down into an unruly black bush. His black jeans were unzipped and flared out from his groin. His face hovered over mine, his eyes intense, his mouth forming poetry that was nonsense to me in the circumstance, although I’d never tell him that, and he was deep inside me, moving his shaft in a slow pump. I groaned deeply, lost to him, as the muscles of my passage walls rippled over the steely hard shaft.

He claimed to be in heaven with me, expressing himself in poetry, which, no matter how poetic, managed to emphasize dirty words. My mind going back to the image of the hunky, unattainable New Zealander, Bram Overby, fucking Sandra, I was just happy to have a hard man between my thighs.

I panted, my back arched, my pelvis rolled up to him, all of my concentration on the cock inside me, not even trying to listen to his poetry. I shuddered as his cock pushed up into me, my walls shimmering, grabbing the shaft, and pulling it in deeper. I kept clinching on his cock. He’d groan and I’d moan. He stroked and stroked. Involuntarily my pelvis began to move with him, thrust up as he thrust down, gasping for him . . . and then coming for him in explosions, one after the other. And as the jerks of my ejaculations subsided, his started. This was always the forbidden thrill for me. A man of an earlier era, he barebacked—he checked often, but he refused to be sheathed. He had assured me he had just been checked. I had anticipated this from the time he told me he was clean as we walked to his building. I had no greater thrill than the release of his warm cum inside me. It may be the reason I came back to him again and again—that and how purely, basic, primitive, primeval he was a man of an earlier, simpler era. I was fucked by many a beautiful man. Zach was all cruel, demanding cock, and sometimes that was exactly what I needed and wanted.

I lay there, totally laid out, panting slightly, as he tensed and jerked and tensed and jerked again, finishing me, reminding me of why when he held his hand out to me at the bar, I came here with him, laid down for him, and opened my legs to him. He pulled out to the surface this time, coming in spurts on my rim, my perineum, my balls, and then pushing inside me again, squishing through his warm cum, dragging it deep inside me. The feel of the warm cum breeding me deep had me sighing and moaning.

Later, he lay back in the bed, hard bodied, gnarly muscled, his shoulder blades raised on pillows, smoking a joint, but his eyes boring into me as I straddled his hips, my wrists still tied behind my back, and rode his cock languidly, moving forward and back and side to side, rubbing his hard shaft along my rippling passage walls, gliding through the lubricant of his earlier cum and of his newly releasing precum. He remained rigid, erect, and throbbing inside me, watching me with slitted eyes and puffing on his joint, as I literally rocked and rolled on his cock, using it to rub every inch of the surface of my inner walls, caressed me inside, pulled my cum out of me, and, as he jerked and grabbed my waist, released his cum inside me in strong, virile spurts.

This wasn’t love or even affection. This was pure, raw sex. Zach using me and me using Zach. No shame, no pretense.

Afterward, as I lay on the bed, recovering and panting slightly, he sat on a straight wooden chair facing the bed, strumming his guitar and composing a poem that, when polished, would make me almost cry when I sat and listened to it being performed at the club, knowing it was about me and that it would be his ticket to bringing me back here and fucking me again. All of his love went into his poetry.

It was arguable who was using whom. It was certainly true that I had come to Zach after seeing the New Zealand stud, who I felt attracted to, fucking Sandra.

When I was dressing to leave early in the morning, he was sitting on the sill of the window, guitar in his lap, still in his black jeans, his right leg raised, his foot pressed into the side frame of the window. He was strumming his guitar and reciting poetry, a joint hanging out of the side of his mouth. He was backlit by the orangish-red neon lit, not as glaring in the morning light as it had been in the darkness of the previous night.

He watched me dress when I’d come from washing in the trickle of water his shower produced, and he watched me leave. I can’t remember that he said anything at all—even when we left the bar the previous night, both of us knowing where we were going and what we’d be doing—beyond whispering his poetry. I don’t think I said anything either.

When I returned to the apartment, the door to Sandra’s bedroom was open. The New Zealand hunk was gone. She was on her back, legs spread, rubbing her nipples with one hand and playing with the folds of her cunt with the other. She gave me a little smile.

I stripped in front of her—I knew she liked that—and then walked, erect, to the bed. She slit a condom packet and handed the disk out to me. She dropped the empty packet on the floor by the bed, where it joined two other packets and two spent condoms. I climbed onto the bed and between her legs. I slid inside her and began to pump as she arched her back, threw her head back, laughed, dragged her fingernails across my shoulder blades, and began to moan. I stopped, holding, deep inside, determined to show her that it wasn’t all about her, all under her control.

She began to pant and to move under me, trying to get me to return to pumping her. “Do it, Aiden. Get on with it,” she hissed. But I held her immobile under me, my throbbing cock deep inside her, unmoving. Bram was hung like a bull but he didn’t have that much on me in thickness and length. Sandra had carefully selected me for personal pleasure. And I was young and virile, able to stay hard inside her as long as I pleased.

“Please, Aiden. Fuck me.” It came out in a plaintive whine now. Very deliberately, I pulled back, almost to the surface, and slid in deep again. She groaned and I felt her collapse under me. I pulled back again and the long slide. She moaned, whispering, “Yes, yes, baby.” Then quicker and quicker. We were both panting heavily. I fucked her hard and vigorously, feeling her explode under me and then again before I tensed and jerked and finished her.

This was the circumstance under which I usually fucked my wife—when she’d been with another man and wanted me as well afterward. And I always complied.

“Capricious.” That was a ten-letter word for “inconstant.” I knew a shorter word for it: “slut.” The both of us.

At the breakfast table she told me of the change in our life.

“I have a year’s sabbatical,” she said. “Bram has offered his house and sponsorship, giving me that year to do nothing but compose poetry. I need to produce another book of poems to ensure I can get tenure at Colombia. He showed me a photo of the house. It perches on a cliff overlooking the sea near Wellington. It looks like a bird ready to take flight, raised wings and all. Gorgeous.”

“So, I’ll have to be looking for other arrangements, another apartment,” I said. I hadn’t finished my doctorate yet. Money was coming in the first book, but nothing like I’d need to keep this apartment.

“No, I thought you’d come with me.”

“Will Bram be there, in his house, during this year?”

“Yes, of course,” she said.

“OK, I’ll come with you.” My thoughts went back to what I remembered the most of the New Zealand stud. When he was on top of Sandra, I’d seen his pull almost completely out of her before sliding in again. He had a thick cock that went on forever, a cock that made Sandra’s eyes light up and her mouth to gape open in an unverbalized scream of passion and pleasure. I wanted Bram’s cock to do that for me too.

* * * *

Sandra was right about the impression of a bird in flight that Bram Overby’s house had, although you had to be out here in Cook Strait, off the North Island coast to the south of Wellington, to get the full effect of it. I had swum straight out to sea off the private beach below the cliff that Overby’s house perched on. I was a strong swimmer, having been competitive when I was an undergraduate. I had a swimmer’s body. I wasn’t tall, but my body was sleek: a very narrow twenty-eight inches at the hips, eight inches broader in the chest to accommodate breathing, and strong bicep, belly, and thigh muscles, and a long, thick cock, with low-hanging balls. I shaved myself smooth except for a tightly trimmed reddish-blond triangle at my bush, which aided in swimming as well. I had no trouble swimming a considerable distance out to sea and turning around and looking back at the top of the cliff.

Overby, naked except for an open terrycloth robe draped from his shoulders and drinking from a cup of coffee, had been standing at a balcony and watched me run, naked, down to and into the sea and directly at the orange orb of the rising sun.

The house did, indeed, look like a bird, wings spread, and about to fly off the top of the cliff. The central portion had a foyer on the land side, with kitchen at one side and a library at the other, with the foyer leading into a long dining room on the sea side. To the left from there was one of the wings of the bird house, soaring up two and a half stories in one large living area, glassed in on three sides. A balcony facing the sea ran the full length of the house on this level. Opposite from this wing, to the left of the central core, was a matching wing, in two and a half stories, containing three bedrooms—two at the sea side—each with bath, and Bram’s office on the lower floor, and the master bedroom above in a rising, glassed-in story and a half soaring to the west.

From here it looked like the sandy beach below the cliff was dedicated to Overby’s house. There was a long, twisting wooden staircase coming from the back yard of the house, which was mostly taken up with a large infinity swimming pool, seemingly plunging over the cliff into the sea, and its concrete-block terrace cascading in sections down to the sand. To add to the dramatic effect of that from the perspective from the sea, a waterfall did indeed send water down the cliffside at the end of the pool to a pool between terracing and the cliff wall down to the cliff’s base. The water for that didn’t really come from the swimming pool, though; it recirculated by pump from the pool below.

I could see the roofs of other houses on either side of Overby’s, and I knew there were some houses on the land side of his, across a road. He’d said he lived in an artists’ enclave and that there would be parties for us to go to, but so far we’d met no one else other than his house staff: a cook, a maid, and a houseman, the cook and houseman being wife and husband. These servants lived in a house across the road and were trained to be efficiently of service but rarely seen—and never seeing anything.

Overby’s books had done him very well financially. The house was expensively, if sparsely, furnished. He had a very nice cabin cruiser bobbing around out here near to where I swam, and he had bought both privacy and everyone looking the other way rather than at his foibles.

We were only three days here, Sandra and I, and I’d already become a part of his foibles. I had come down to the beach, nude, just with a large towel, because of the frustration he’d already established in me. I had wanted him back in Chelsea, on the first night, when he’d come to dinner and we’d talked so passionately about writing novels, but then his passion had gone to Sandra, taking her to the bed and fucking her, leaving me, Sandra’s husband, cleaning up the kitchen and sending me out into the night to seek my own sexual solace.

Sandra and I had been given separate bedrooms, the two guest rooms on the sea side of the bird house wing, but Sandra had spent more time in Overby’s bed than in her own. That’s where she was now. That’s why I had come down to the beach and swum out to sea. That he was bedding her, supposedly my wife, was part of the frustration. But more of it was that he hadn’t bedded me—not until the previous evening. And then it wasn’t on a bed, but on the proverbial white bearskin rung in front of the soaring, smoldering fireplace in the far living room glass wall. It was trite and clichéd, but it was no less real, and, although it should have released tension, it only added to my frustration.

As with the first night here, we’d gathered in the living room after dinner, on a U-shaped sectional in the conversation pit facing the fireplace, which was burning despite the warm weather. Sandra was curled up in Overby’s embrace on the section facing the fireplace and I was sitting in one of the wings. The two of them were cuddling as we drank our after-dinner wine. He was stroking her body, progressively opening up the kimono she was wearing to reveal the curviness of her naked body, the fullness of her breasts and nipples, and her silky blonde bush. My eyes narrowed and my hand went to my own basket as I watched his fingers playing with her clit and in her cunt and making little swirls in the curly hair of her pubes. She was sighing and slowly rocking her V against his hand. He saw me watching him fingering her and took in my response. He smiled, knowingly, knowing that he could have me too if he wanted to.

But he was talking shop, speaking of the writing of Somerset Maugham in the South Pacific and he was discussing it with me. He too was in a robe—we all were, having swum in the pool nude before dinner and eaten in robes at the dining table afterward—and Sandra had his opened at the waist, had pulled his cock out, and was making it hard—and thick and long—with her hand. But he was speaking with me, looking at me. He obviously knew he was making out with Sandra, as he was thumbing her nipples and running his fingers into the folds of her cunt—and he was getting hard from her attentions. But he was talking with me on technical issues of Maugham’s writing and was carrying on a perfectly erudite conversation with me.

And he was looking at me with “that look”—seducing me and already dominating me.

I gave up on being guarded and privately living my need. I brushed my robe open and openly stroked my cock. Overby obviously saw me doing so but went right on discussing Maugham with me and fondling Sandra.

It was maddening. We were operating on two different levels here. We supposedly were here to enrich Sandra’s literary poetry efforts and yet every time I was with Overby he was concentrating on what enriched my prose writing. Which of us interested Overby in literary terms enough to bring us here and sponsor us—Sandra or me? On the other hand, it was Sandra he was fucking, even though he looked at me with lust too. I hadn’t even known if he fucked men until now. Now as his eyes fucked me from across the room, I knew he fucked men too. I hadn’t known if he was straight or bi? Did he just appreciate beauty wherever he saw it? Earlier in the evening, when I had emerged from the pool naked, he had remarked on the beauty of my body.

“Such beautiful proportions,” he’d said. “Good definition in the chest and arms, but so willowy and trim below. I don’t know if I’ve seen a young man with such slim hips—and the hollows between your buttocks and your thighs—so sexy. And yet you’re hung. I think you are right to trim your pubes in a close-cropped curly V like that. But the slimness of your hips . . . I don’t know how . . .”

He didn’t complete the sentence because Sandra had chimed in with, “How about the wideness of my hips, love? The earth mother look. I could bear your triplets.”

“Not unless we weren’t careful and were being very foolish,” he had answered, with a laugh, turning his attention from me, which quite evidently was what Sandra wanted. “Although you bring such hot flashes and capriciousness upon me, that I could see us overlooking something important. And, yes, your hips give me no pause in your being able to take a bull like me. You do handle the thickness of me quite well. And I am a bull, am I not?”

He didn’t say it, but he didn’t have to. He was wondering if my passage, because of my unusually narrow waist and hips, could take the cock of a man bull—or at least he was alluding to his consideration of giving it a try.

“Yes, you a bull of a man,” she’d said, pulling him on top of her on a pool bed. He proceeded to enter her and fuck her, leaving me to dry off and find a pool bed to stretch out on several empty beds from where Sandra had her face turned to me, making no effort to cover the flash in her eyes and grimaced smile on her lips each time he thrust up into her. Making a point, I’m sure, before he finished, he had changed to fucking her in the ass channel, and Sandra took that in stride. I harbored the thought that that too was a signal to me of what he was contemplating doing with me.

What word had he used? Capricious? Yes, that was it. Which one of us was he most interested in I had wondered earlier at the pool? And was he really interested in me at all? He had been on the cusp of musing whether a slim-hipped man like me had a channel that could handle a cock like his—he was that close to declaring that he wanted to fuck me and yet he had capriciously veered away. Had he been teasing me? Or was he just not really interested and was cruelly enjoying himself cuckolding me? Surely he knew that Sandra and I didn’t care what each of us did with others sexually. Or was he challenging me on that point? It’s true that some of our discussions on story themes had been wrapped around the concept of self-denial on sexual preferences and toleration. He, of course, was the hedonist in word and deed. But me? Did I even know what I really felt about these matters? Was that what he was trying to pull out of me?

I now knew, the three of us sitting in front of the fire in his living room, that, yes, he wanted to fuck me—that he would fuck me. Both of us knew he would.

The two left me for a while in the living room then. Overby picked Sandra up and carried her out of the living room. But he only took her as far as the dining room, which opened from the living room. He laid her on her belly on the dining table, her legs dangling toward the floor. He brushed her kimono full open off to the side, exposing her body. His robe remained on his back, but fluttering at his side, the two looking like some sort of gross bird of prey, while he hunched over her and fucked her in the ass again on the top of the table. As he fucked her, he grasped her flowing hair in his hand and jerked her head back into his chest, cruelly arched her back. This just made her laugh.

As Overby fucked Sandra, he turned his face from her. He was looking back into the living room, at me. The lust in his eyes was obvious. Was it for the woman he was fucking on the table or was it for the young man sprawled on the sectional in the living room, openly masturbating and watching him fuck the woman?

He wouldn’t commit, which angered and frustrated me. Turning from them, not wanting to hear Sandra’s exclamations on how big he was and how well he was fucking her, I picked up the novel that Overby had taken from the library after dinner and brought into the living room to discuss with me. It was Maugham’s Moon and Sixpence treatment of Paul Gauguin escaping to Tahiti to paint. I stopped stroking myself off and became engrossed in the book, looking for points that Overby and I had discussed, and so lost knowledge of when the copulating on the dining table had ceased and the two had departed the living areas—or, indeed, how long it had been since Overby had returned to the living room, taken the book from my hands, stretched out on top of me on the sofa, taken my lips with his, and begun stroking my body inside my robe with his long, sensitive fingers.

He was stroking my hips with both hands. “Such slim hips,” he murmured. “I wonder—”

“Do it,” I hissed. “I’ve seen your cock. I can take your cock. I want to take your cock. Fucking do it.”

He did it. He carried me over to the bearskin rug, murmuring, “Forgive the cliché,” and stretched out over me in reverse. We sixty-nined each other throbbingly hard and then he moved me to my knees, my chest and cheek to the fur of the rug, my eyes staring into the smoldering, dying fire in the fireplace. Overby mounted high on my hips, finding he did indeed fit inside me, forcing himself inside, controlling my writhing with strong hands holding my hips in position. Out and I sighed, in and I groaned. Then again and again, me stretching, opening up fully to the cock, becoming his.

He fucked me in ever quicker and deeper, fully accommodated as I rocked back to meet the thrusts, to a mutual ejaculation. He fit inside me the perfect way—stretching me and rubbing every surface inside me as he stroked, causing my passage walls to ripple over his shaft and try to grasp it as it forced its way inside, pulling the cum out of me. My spirits soared as he kept mumbling that, “Yes, it fits fine. So sweet, so tight.” He continued to be obsessed with the slimness of my hips, holding and stroking them with his hands as he fucked me.

He left me there without comment and presumably went to bed. Sandra wasn’t in her bed when I went by her room. She presumably was upstairs in his bed. The capriciousness of it all was not lost on me.

Overby was in his office, working, when I got up before sunrise. Sandra already was on a pool bed at the pool, alternating between scribbling verse and filling in crossword puzzles. She had nothing unusual to say to me, either, although she did stare daggers at me as I passed by her on my way to diving into the pool, nude. So, she did know that Overby had fucked me as well as her the previous night. She still had the edge, though, because she slept in his bed.

At sunrise, I went down to the beach, deliberately, knowing that Bram had moved to the balcony to drink his coffee and that he would watch me moving down the beach, naked, into the sea and the rising sun. He wasn’t the only one who could seduce. When I came out of the surf, he was there, sitting on a towel on the sand, naked and watching me rise out of the sea. He fucked me on the towel, me on my back under him, Him cradling my neck with one hand and stroking my cock with the other, as he lay between my bent and spread legs, moving his cock in and out of me in a deep fuck, whispering how beautiful my body was and, once again, his amazement that one with such narrow hips could take what he had to give.

After lunch, where Overby and I took up our discussion of Maugham where we’d left off the previous night and Sandra worked on a crossword puzzle as she ate, Overby took her to bed in his bedroom. The sound of him fucking her good sent me out of the house, naked, down to the beach, and far enough into the sea that I couldn’t hear them.

When I had swum back to the surf line and rose from the sea, naked, I saw that it wasn’t a totally private beach after all. Only from this perspective could I see that wooden stairs came down to the beach from the houses on either side of the soaring bird house. And I wasn’t the only one on the beach either. Standing over my oversized beach towel was an Adonis. He was over six feet tall, several inches taller than I was. He wasn’t much older than I was, probably in his mid-twenties. His body was magnificent, muscular, covered with fine, black curls. He had a close-cropped beard and loose, shoulder-length black hair. His eyes were a contrasting light color—pale blue or hazel—and his smile was sensual. He was tattooed, barbed-wire bands on his biceps, a swirl of a colorful design half buried in black curls on his left pec, and the head of a snake about to strike at his navel, its tail wrapped around an extraordinarily long, if not overly thick, erection. He was, of course, naked.

“I am Jarrod,” he said in a melodic voice. “I saw you enter the sea from my deck, and I couldn’t help but come down. You are a beautiful young man—very sexy. Bram told me you would take cock, that he intended to fuck you. I saw you after sunrise too, with Bram. He was fucking you, so he was right—that you take cock.”

It wasn’t a question, so I didn’t respond. But then he made it an explicit question—more a statement.

“I want you to take my cock. If you will, stay. If you won’t, wave me off and I’ll leave.”

I still didn’t respond, either way—which, of course, really was a response and an acquiescence. He motioned for me to lie down on the towel. I was about to say no and head for the stairs to Overby’s house when I saw Overby himself at the top of the wooden stairs to his house. He was naked and there was a towel over his arm. I reasoned that he was coming down to be on the beach with me.

I was hit with a flare of anger and frustration. His capriciousness was frustrating to me. He didn’t declare himself or ask permission for anything. He just took what he wanted when he wanted it. I don’t know what he wanted from me in relationship to what he took from Sandra. Yes, I was jealous. Yes, I wanted to strike out at Bram and make him choose me.

Jarrod was standing over me, hands on hips, completely open to me in his nakedness. He was smiling. “Do I look good to you?” He asked. “I am horny. Will you take my cock?”

Without voicing an answer, I went down on my knees in front of this Jarrod god, licked around the curl of the snake’s tail, and took his cock inside my mouth. After I had sucked him hard, we lay stretched out side by side on towel, exploring each other’s bodies with our hands, until Jarrod coaxed me onto my back and stroked my inner thighs.

“Open your legs to me. Let me put it in you.”

I spread my legs for him, bending my legs, and planting my feet on the towel. He rolled over on top of me, and pushed his knees under my buttocks.

I lay there, my buttocks elevated on his thighs, my torso reclining on the towel in front of him, my fingers buried in the curls on his chest, and my head arched back, watching Bram pause at the top of the cliff, while Jarrod slowly made the snake’s tail disappear inside me. He stroked my narrow hips lightly with his fingers while he fucked me.

“Nice, very nice,” he murmured. “And tight, but you took it all.”

We rocked against each other and I moaned, as his shaft reached far, far up inside me, and he fucked me slowly—and totally.

When we’d both come, I looked again to the top of the cliff and Bram was gone. Jarrod was still here, though. Without withdrawing from me, he leaned his face down to mine and we kissed. I embraced him and stroked his shoulder blades with my fingers, until I felt the snake tail coming to life again. Then I moved my hands to his buttocks and grasped him close to me.

“There’s more,” he whispered.

“Yes, oh yes!” I cried out to the top of the cliff as I arched my back and he began to stroke inside me again. He turned me onto all fours, mounted my ass, and fucked me in doggie style, allowing him to push in to the root. It was then that I noticed we weren’t alone.

Overby wasn’t at the top of the stairs when I looked because he had come down to the sand and was sitting on his towel, watching Jarrod fuck me. He didn’t sit there for long, though. He rose, positioned himself behind Jarrod, spiked him, and took over the control of thrusts, his thrusts inside Jarrod’s ass determining Jarrod’s thrusts inside me.

Damn him and his presumption of control over everything, I thought. Jarrod took his cock without objection or flinching. It was obvious that Bram had mastered Jarrod before and been given leave to do it at will.

After a while, Jarrod pulled out and disappeared and it was just Overby mounted on me, stroking my hips with his fingers, murmuring, “Such sweet, slim hips,” and slow pumping my passage.

He murmured, “I want to see you taking it,” in my ear and turned me on his cock onto my back. He was hunched over me, but rising on his knees, lifting my pelvis high, my legs dangling toward the sand, unable to set down. He went in deep, his face hovering over mine, capturing my eyes. He was huge inside me and I gasped and panted, willing my undulating channel walls to open for him and moaning deeply when they did. But he held there, deep, as I had done with Sandra, and I whimpered as she did. “Do it; finish me,” I moaned, my eyes tearing up. He held until I was babbling my need, and then he put his dick in motion, causing my passage walls to ripple on the pumping, stretching shaft; quickly brought me off, my eyes flashing and my mouth gaping open in an unverbalized scream of passion and pleasure; and followed that efficiently with his own finish.

He had shown me who was in control, who dominated. But I would let him inside me whenever he wanted to be. We both knew that.

* * * *

The mail had come when I regained the ability to move and went back up to the house. Jarrod had left after Bram had taken over the pumping of me down on the beach and Sandra was up in the master bedroom, taking a long bath. She called out to me as I came back into the house, pulled on a pair of shorts in my bedroom, and then roamed around the house locating everyone. The cook was in the kitchen, working on something. The back door to the laundry room and garage that jutted out on the land side of the house was open and I located the houseman covering the maid from behind over a rumbling washing machine and pulled away from that quickly. The mail was on a table in the foyer.

Included in the post was a letter from my agent, which only now was catching up with me. I’d sold a second book and the hefty—for me—advance check for $25,000 was included. I was ecstatic. With the money I still had from the advance on the first book, I now had some independence. The letter from the agent spoke of negotiations for a deal of three additional books.

I went directly into Overby’s office to tell him of my good news. His response was as self-centered as I could possibly imagine. While telling me how wonderful that was for me, he said we should celebrate. He pulled my face down to his for a kiss, grabbed my hand and moved it inside the robe he was wearing and onto his cock. “Kneel and suck me off,” he murmured.

I barely heard him, though, spinning around and racing upstairs to inform Sandra. Her way of congratulating me was to pull me into the bath, lock lips with me, and grab my cock. We did fuck on occasion, and this was one of those occasions—if only as my reaction to Bram’s assumption I was knuckling under to him whenever he wanted me to, although, of course, I had. Water sloshed around in the tub, as she raised her legs and hooked them on the side of the tub and I pushed my knees under her buttocks and spiked and fucked her.

Overby appeared at the bathroom door and watched me hump Sandra and ejaculate. I then came out of the tub and raced to my room to compose a letter back to the agent. As I wrote, I heard the water sloshing around in the tub overhead again. Capricious Bram and my equally capricious wife were celebrating for me by having a go at each other. I paused for a moment to be frustrated by the uncertainty of the sexual tension in this bird-on-the-wing house—including, I now thought, the domestic staff. Somehow I’d thought the maid was the cook and houseman’s daughter. But then again maybe she was. Everything was fickle and topsy-turvy here.

* * * *

My head was spinning—either from what I’d smoked or what I’d drunk or both. I was standing at the deck rail of Clea and Jarrod’s house, next door to Bram’s, and looking out to the Cook Straits, up into the stars overhead in the clear night air, and north to the glow of Wellington, New Zealand, in the distance, across a bay. The man standing close to me and towering over me was an older, a little-heavier-than-fully desirable French gentleman—although I strongly suspected he was no gentleman—who had told me his name was Georges and that he was a sculptor and that he wanted to fuck and sculpt me—or sculpt and fuck me. I was confused on his intended order. I was standing, facing out at the rail. He was standing beside me, facing me. He had his left arm around my chest, his fingers stroking my side not far under my armpit—my arms were spread, my hands gripping the rail. The fingers of his right hand were stroking my right hip.

For some reason all I was wearing were bikini briefs. I was barefoot. He was in baggy shorts and an open godawful vivid colored Hawaiian shirt. He was hard; I could feel him pressing that to my waist on the left side. Why was I in bikini briefs? There was a party going on around me. Oh, yes, I thought. The striptease on Clea and Jarrod’s dining room table when I was three sheets to the wind. I was celebrating my literary independence in style. One published novel could very well be a fluke. Two published novels and a contract offer for three more wasn’t.

I’d thought I’d be alone in the bird house this evening. Overby was taking Sandra to a poetry reading at Massey University in Wellington. They were offering her a visiting scholar position for her sabbatical year here and he was introducing her to some of the faculty. I had not been invited. Yes, I was a bit ticked about that—until the letter and advance had come through, and then I was glad I wasn’t going. I was jealous enough not to want to spend an evening where Sandra was the focal point when I’d just entered the professional novelist ranks.

They’d been gone three hours and it was getting on to 11:00 in the evening when Bram reappeared—without Sandra.

“I couldn’t do it,” he said. “I couldn’t not be with you to celebrate your novel sale. I know exactly how you must feel.”

I doubted he did know how I felt. It wasn’t just the acknowledgment of my coming to life as a published novelist but also that he had chosen me over Sandra.

“Sandra?” I said, jubilant no matter how he answered.

“I left her in good hands. Stephanie is Massey’s resident poet. How shall we celebrate?”

We could stay home and you could fuck me all night in front of the fire and on the clichéd bearskin rug, I thought. But he was already off on other plans.

“The Nelson’s next door are having a party. It was in full swing, I could hear, when I arrived home. I can think of no way better to celebrate your manuscript sale than with other artists. The whole community out here will be there.”

I could think of a better way of celebrating, but there was no contradicting Bram Overby.

The Nelsons turned out to be Clea and Jarrod, both fine artists. Jarrod was the same Jarrod who fucked me on the beach earlier that day.

“Ah, you made it to the party after all,” Jarrod said in meeting us at the door. “And you brought him, I see. Wonderful.”

“Did you bring wine, darling?” Clea bubbled out. “I’m afraid we’ll run out of wine, and you have such good taste in wine.”

“He brought his young house guest here, Clea,” Jarrod said. “That’s what he brought to the party for us to enjoy.”

“Fine, you go and do your life-of-the-party chores, you sweet little boy,” Clea said, hanging onto my arm and leering at me in a way that indicated that she started drinking well before the party started. “Go. Mingle. Bring joy to the world. We’ll be intimate later.”

That was a sure clue that I was meant to be part of the entertainment tonight.

When we moved into the heart of the party, after giving me a glass of highly spiked punch, pulling a joint away from a passing guest and passing that to me too, Bram swirled off into the crowd. The glass of punch and a joint were followed by others, not to mention a few lurid-colored pills, as I was passed from one interested little group to the next who had already heard of my book sale and were quite pleased to be quite pleased with me—and to offer me more to drink and to puff. Some had already heard that I was visiting Bram Overby, that I sometimes fucked women and more often took cock and that Bram Overby had already had both my wife and me several times. Free, bisexual sex and drugs seemed the hallmark of this little community. That seemed to cut the ice in this artists’ colony and to spice up the conversation.

The host, Jarrod Nelson, pulled me aside and into the butler’s pantry, where he trapped me backed up to a counter, his arms extended around my sides, the heels of his hands pressed into the edges of the counter. One of his knees came up between my thighs, forcing them apart and nestled up under my balls, the knee pressed into the counter door behind me. I was effectively trapped there. The room was a bit dizzy and his handsome face filled my world. His hair was up in a ponytail.

He pressed his forehead to mine. “I enjoyed you this afternoon.” He was stroking the hollows of my hips like they fascinated him as much as they did Bram.

“It was special for me too,” I answered. “That’s quite a snake you’ve got.”

“You mean my tattoo?” he asked.

“That too,” I responded. We both laughed, a low guttural laugh of lustful remembrance. I raised one of my hands and took his hair out of the band that had it in a ponytail, letting it cascade down to his shoulders.

“Undressing me already?” he asked.

“Getting there,” I said. “I like you better with your hair off.”

“And my clothes off?”

“Maybe. Yes, probably.”

“You know I’m going to fuck you again . . . tonight . . . at the party.”

“You’re the host. It’s your party. You can call the party games,” I said. “I want you inside me again.” I couldn’t believe I was being this forward. But it had been a very nice fuck on the beach. And I was a bit more than half way looped.

He came in for a kiss and I opened my lips to him. The kiss deepened and he unbuttoned my shirt, spread it, and palmed my right pec. I sighed and the kiss went even deeper. He lifted me up and sat me on the counter. I heard and felt the zipper of my shorts being lowered.

I broke away from the kiss and his mouth went down to my nipple. His hand was inside my fly, cupping my cock through the material of my bikini briefs. I pushed my package up into his hand. “What a nice shaft,” he murmured. “It should be against the law for someone to have it all, as you do.” He squeezed my balls, and I gave a little yelp, letting all of the air out of my lungs.

“Are you going to fuck me right here, on this counter?”

“Nobody would notice,” he murmured. “It’s that kind of party.” His hand was under the waistband of my briefs, on my cock, which was engorging for him.

“Do you want me to fuck you right here on this counter?”

“Yes,” I responded, with a whimper.

The voice of the hostess cut through the din of the party in the house beyond the quietude of the butler’s pantry save for heavy breathing. “Ice. We need more ice. Jarrod, where did you go? The iceman needeth to cometh.”

“But maybe not just now,” Jarrod said, taking his hand out of my fly and zipping me up. “But later; definitely later. They can’t need ice forever.”

I gave it a minute to cool down after he’d left the pantry, hopped down from the counter, and headed in the direction the party noise was coming from. Beyond the pantry, just inside the kitchen, was standing a tall, muscular black man dressed in a flowing white Arab robe. He was flashing a white-toothed smile. He projected a hand, palm up, in which there was a display of colored pills. I took two and popped them. Immediately my vision clicked into something I could only call elongated 3D.

And in that vision was the face of the black man, as he leaned down and kissed me on the lips. His tongue pressed on my lips and I let it in. When he pulled away, he whispered—or I thought he was whispering—“That will cost you, of course.”

“Cost me what?” I replied.

“All in good time,” he whispered and then was gone. I wandered into the dining room and to the punch bowl. Someone was changing the records on an old six-changer stereo cabinet.

Before I knew it, I was on the dining room table, dancing to “The Stripper” and stripping down to my bikini briefs. Then I was out on the deck being fondled by Georges, the heavy-bodied sculptor, and being fed the line by him what a perfect model I’d be for him.

“You ask what I, a Frenchman, already famous for my sculptures in Europe, is doing out here in the South Pacific,” Georges was saying.

Had I asked that? I didn’t think so.

“Have you read that Maugham book, Moon and Sixpence . . . ?”

“Yes,” I said, amused that everyone seemed to want to talk to me about Maugham these days. Maugham wasn’t my style of writing at all.

“. . . . about Gauguin finding his muse in Tahiti,” he continued without taking a breath. “That’s me, but there are more comforts of life in New Zealand. And I can be me freely, here. Who cares what my wife in Paris says or complains about with others there. I prefer men. I like to fuck young men.”

“Yes,” I said.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a perfect body on a young man before. Such slim hips.” He was stroking my right hip with his right hand, having moved his arm around my waist, holding me in close to his side.

“Yes,” I said.

“My technique is that I must be intimate with every square inch of my model to be able to sculpt him honestly.”

“Meaning you want to fuck me,” I said.

“Of course I want to fuck you,” he said, laughing heartily. “Bram has fucked you; Jarrod has fucked you. Both recommend that everyone fuck you. Everyone here wants to fuck you. Of course I want to fuck you too.”

He was large of body, with a beer paunch. I could tell, though, by what he was pressing to my side that he was thick. He was gross and charismatic all at once. The clichéd artist, with more confidence in his own beauty and prowess than he had a right to claim. There was only a fringe of gray hair on his head, but it was rampant on his beefy chest and paunch belly. It was the eyes, though. They bored right into you, undressed you, and you laid down for him and opened your legs. This would be a confidant, commanding lover.

“Yes,” I said. “I keep saying that yes, you can fuck me, and you keep saying why I should say yes. I said yes minutes ago. You can fuck and sculpt me. No more need to attempt seduction.”

It was that moment, though, that the hostess, Clea, petite, dark haired and dark eyed, a pixie of a woman, with huge dark eyes, showed up at my elbow.

“You mustn’t monopolize our prize guest, Georges,” she was cooing. “Come, Aiden, I wish to show you something.”

What she wished to show me was her bedroom and her bed and her cunt. She pulled me over on top of her, between her legs, her long skirt hiked up to her waist, at the foot of her bed, and maneuvered the bulb of my cock between her puffy labia. My bikini briefs were on the floor beside my feet, and there were lipstick marks on my erection.

I was setting a good rhythm and she was writhing under me and babbling in French when Jarrod and Bram entered the room, arm in arm. Jarrod stripped and saddled up behind me. He thrust up into my ass and fucked me while I was fucking Clea. Bram watched for a bit but then he too stripped, saddled up behind Jarrod, and we had a chain going.

Later, in another bedroom and on another bed, Georges lay on his back like a beached whale, puffing on a lavender-colored filtered cigarette, while I swung my leg over his pelvis and positioned my hole on the head of an extraordinarily thick, but not long, cock. He took a puff on his cigarette, dropped it into an ashtray on the nightstand, and stroked my hips with his fingers.

“Such slim hips,” he said in a hoarse whisper. “I must remember to memorialize those.” And then, “Spike yourself slowly, please. I want to savor the thickness of me opening up that sweet, small hole of yours. I trust that, with such slim hips, you are lusciously tight.”

I assumed I would easily be able to control him. That’s not the way it went, though. I had taken only about three inches of him, when his eyes flashed, boring into mine. I moaned and then I gasped and cried out as his grip on my hips tightened and he lifted me and then slammed me down on his cock. My passage went into shock, trying to open to him, but not accommodating him fast enough. Shots of mixed pain and ecstasy shot through my body, as he lifted me and then slammed me down again. Lifted and slammed. Each time he was getting a little more of himself inside me; each time I was opening a bit more to him; each time there was more length to him for me to take. He was a man who expanded significantly as it was worked. It wasn’t so much a fuck as a ravishment of a rag doll. I flopped around on his cock, my teeth rattling, and my eyes spinning around in my head. It was all for his finish and he took command and no prisoners.

I writhed on him until I collapsed on his mound of flesh, and just moaned and groaned as he took over in thrusting his cock up into me, still going on long after I’d shot my load, still growing, working its way into the core of me.

Of course, even in my drunk and drugged state, I realized that Georges wasn’t fucking me because he had to know every inch of me to sculpt me. I knew that he was fucking me because he wanted to get his rocks off with a young man—a man, as he said, who had slim hips and therefore, presumably, a tight channel that would delight a thick, expanding cock such as he had. And I wasn’t so far gone on drink and drugs that I didn’t realize that I was riding Georges’s cock because he reputedly was a famous French sculptor who wanted me to ride his cock. That I also thought it would make Bram Overby jealous was a reflection that I was high on drugs and drink. Overby didn’t give a shit who fucked me as long as he did too. The revelation to me, though, as I was royally screwed on Georges’s thick cock was that I had no intention of being here in New Zealand long enough for him to sculpt me. Just long enough for him and anyone else Bram pointed to to screw me silly. It was my entrée into this artistic community.

I was in the first bedroom again, but not on the bed—draped over a footstool, belly down, arms dangling over the sides, legs dangling too, knees not quite touching the floor, toes pressed into the carpet. Colors of the rainbow danced before my eyes. I didn’t know who it was. I don’t remember being introduced to him. I don’t remember telling him he could fuck me. It hardly mattered, as I’d taken plenty of cock tonight.

I couldn’t see him, as he was mounted on my ass, behind me, his hands pressing down on my shoulder blades. I certainly knew he was inside me, fucking me with his cock. I could see his bent legs. They were ebony. I tried to remember what man at the party was black, but there were more than one of them. I saw the garment puddled on the floor beside the footstool. A white robe-like garment. The black man in the kitchen, the one who had given me the pills. Getting the payment for the pills that he said he’d collect on later. Still unknown beyond that, though. What I did know was that he had a godawful big cock.

Bram was kneeling beside me, his hand run into the hair at the back of my head. “Take it, take it, good, good,” he was murmuring. He turned my head toward him and stood. His cock was out. He pressed the head of it to my lips and I opened my mouth, took him inside, and gave him suck. The unidentified man on top of me continued to pump—to pump thick and deep. He was stroking my hips with his thumbs.

Later, in another bedroom, on another bed, and even in another house, the bird house, my bedroom, my bed, it was Bram lying on his back on my bed, me straddling his pelvis, and him, gripping my waist and more gently raising and lowering me on his long, thick cock—lifting me up high, almost, but not quite, disconnected, and then bringing me down slowly on the cock to where his curlies merged with mine, smiling as I gasped and whispered, “Yes, yes, yes. Just like that.” And then just like that again—long, thick, throbbing, perfectly satiating.

I just wished I could remember how it ended.

* * * *

I woke on the morning of day four in New Zealand to the maid, Christine, pulling the drapes on the window, opening to a new day. She’d brought a mug of steaming coffee and a tray with a little pile of aspirins on it. My head, of course, was splitting and I was beginning to remember only half of what had transpired the previous evening. I hoped it was the hedonist half.

She stood at the foot of the bed, looking at me, with a little smile on her face. She was a saucy little thing. I was naked, on the sheets, not under them. I was in erection.

“Is there anything else I can do for you, sir?” she asked. “Anything at all?”

“Yes, and quickly,” I said. “That waste can over there.”

She was very quick with it indeed and scurried out of the room as I took care of some of my overdoing it from the previous night.

Bram was in his office, whistling, when I dressed and dragged out of the bedroom. As a writer myself, I knew better than to disturb him while he was composing. I went into the kitchen and discovered, gratefully, that there was still coffee in the pot. I stood at the window, looking out toward the road, and thus managed to view the arrival of Sandra.

An old, classic MG sports car drove into the turning circle. A tall, thin man unfolded from the driver’s seat. As the figure stood, though, I realized it wasn’t a man at all. It was a woman dressed as a man—seemingly a woman trying to be a man. The Stephanie of Massey University who Bram said would take care of Sandra, I decided. Sandra didn’t mind being taken care of by a manly woman, she’d been out all night—because the passenger in the car that the manly woman was helping out of the MG was Sandra.

They walked to the front door hand in hand and kissed there. Sandra went straight to her bedroom, I heard the shower going as I sat at the desk in my bedroom, collecting my thoughts and holding my head in my hands. When I checked later she was in her bed, asleep, and softly snoring.

That afternoon Overby drove Sandra back into Wellington for a meeting on her possible visiting scholar position at Massey University. As soon as they were gone, I packed my bag. I realized that this was as far ahead of Sandra as I was going to get with Bram. He’d bring her back from Wellington, fuck her on the dining room table, I would pout, he’d fuck me on the bearskin rug, and then he’d take her into his bed. The next day he’d do the same. On some days, he’d turn me over to Clea or Jarrod or Georges or someone else to fuck. They’d fill me with drugs and drink and would all be amazed that, even with slim hips, I could take a big cock. They’d fuck me again just to be amazed again. And if I stayed here, I would let them. I would let them fuck me on their terms, capricious with their commitments.

I had the houseman call for a taxi and went to the airport. I took the first available flight out to the States, booking business class because I was still celebrating my rise to professional novelist.

I returned to New York in two flights, the first was to Los Angeles, the venue of the book I’d just sold. I checked into the 777 Motel at Seal Beach, a motel that had figured in my novel. I decided to celebrate the sale of my novel in my own way.

I called the hunky young Navy sailor, Harry Hobart, who I encountered in researching my book and who, under another name, had been a character in the book. I picked him up at the gate of the Seal Beach Naval Weapons Station in my rental car and took him to the 777 Motel, where, as he had done before during my research and also as the character I’d fashioned from him had done, perhaps a little less graphically, to my protagonist in my novel, he fucked the stuffing out of me for two hours. He was young, virile, horny, long-lasting, and straightforward.

I was only interested in the fuck and he was only interested in the fuck. He didn’t care if my hips were slim or not or if I’d read Somerset Maugham or wrote like that novelist, oh-so-cleverly hinting that my life was like a Maugham novel. I already knew it was, thank you very much; I was a novelist, working on my doctorate. I was young and hung and horny; there was time to be meaningful and responsible “someday.”

He only was interested whether the other man had a good body and had a hole he could get his dick in, and he already knew that he could get his big cock in my hole. All he wanted was a toned body lying down for him and opening its legs to him, letting him have what he wanted without drama and fuss. All I wanted was a thick cock inside me, thrust by a man who didn’t want anything more from me but to get his rocks off and to bring the cum out of me as well.

He crouched over me, holding my legs raised and spread, his face buried in the side of my throat, and pumped me hard and deep, as I not only took him but rocked my pelvis against him, moving with him in the dance of the fuck.

It was just before his climax—the hunky young sailor—the second time that I realized that this was the best for me that it would be. He had stopped stroking, but building to the climax and holding off as long as he could, wanting it to be sheer ecstasy, as short as a man’s climax is. The cum was burbling up in him and he wanted it to be a big blow. He held me tightly, his lips pressed into the hollow of my neck, both of us holding our breaths, waiting for it, wanting it to be bigger than the first time. I realized this is the state I wanted to be in, a man holding me close, ready to blow, his cock deep inside me, filling me, throbbing.

Then he blasted the bulb of the condom, two, three times—virile and full of cum. He groaned and grunted, and then we both relaxed with a long sigh. He started to rise from me, to withdraw. But I held him close, gripping his buttocks and holding him inside me.

“No, please. Stay in me,” I murmured. “Again. Do me again. Stay inside me until you no longer can.”

He gave a low laugh, but he did as I had pleaded he do. Exhausted, smiling, and purring, I sent him away in a taxi and slept the sleep of the dead until I had to appear for the flight to New York.

It was dark when I got back to the apartment in Chelsea. The neighbor across the hall had accumulated the mail of the last several days on the foyer table. She would have gathered it together at the end of the week and sent it to us in New Zealand in a prestamped envelope. She didn’t have to do that now.

There was a flyer in the mail about another poetry and guitar performance at a local coffee house by Zach Taggert that evening. I’d been thinking of him on the flight from Los Angeles. I had taken out the letter from my agent and, for the first time, focused on the kind of novel the publishing house said it would like for me to write next. It fit with what had already been forming in my mind for months. The story of a wiry, scruffy hippie poet out of his time, still performing in smoky bars and coffee houses for tip jar contributions. Still making enough to satisfy him and to feed his wish to remain simple and in his chosen era. Satisfied too with what sex came his way. Uncomplicated. Not capricious by any means.

I’m sure that Bram Overby was assuming that my third novel would be about him. But he’d just have to wait for the next one.

When I entered the smoke-filled room after Zach’s set had already begun and stood at the back of the room, his eyes focused on me, and he smiled, pausing for a nanosecond in his reciting of his poetry. His guitar playing was smooth—reminding me of Wes Montgomery. His eyes kept coming back to me. He wasn’t looking at anyone else in the room like he was looking at me. When he started into his next poem, I realized it had been the one he’d started to formulate and polish the last time he and I had had sex.

I knew that it would be me he would be taking back to his room tonight. I sighed, content with that.

Holding motionless, tense, the seconds before exploding inside me, holding to get as much ecstasy out of the moment of orgasm that he could, I held him close, both of us sucking in our breath. He tensed and we both jerked as he, a man of the pre-AIDS era, was barebacking me again tonight, hit me once, twice, three times with blasts of his warm cum. I was an addict of feeling the cum released inside me. I let out a deep, long moan, lasting through his releases. Letting out a deep sigh, he made to withdraw from me, but I clutched at his buttocks, holding him in close.

“No, please. Stay in me,” I murmured. “Again. Do me again. Stay inside me until you can.”

With a low laugh Zach complied, and I sighed with contentment.