One Night in San Francisco

The shock set it on how stupid I’d been. Pete Parnell hadn’t hired me for his Chicago investment firm despite what I had disclosed at my job interview with him about what I’d done in college but because of what I’d admitted I had done in college. It wasn’t just that I went with other men, but it was that I had been promiscuous for a time and even had participated in threesomes and foursomes. He had drawn that information out of me and had made it clear that he wanted to know everything I had done even if I didn’t do it anymore—that he didn’t want to discover later that I had hidden something if he was going to employ me. It said it was worse to have one of his employees pilloried in the press for something in the past that blindsided the firm than it was to know about it beforehand. And I’d misjudged why he had taken an interest in me this past year at his firm. I thought he was as hands-on with all of his employees. But he obviously wasn’t. He was grooming me, slowly bending me to his own desires.

How did I feel about the attention—and the intention? I had strayed in college but given it up. I’d convinced myself I could live without it—that I wanted to live without it. And I’d stuck to my guns, doing what I could to only think of any men around me as business associates, not as possible sex partners. That hadn’t worked so well with Pete Parnell. He was a real hunk and he’d paid such close attention to me.

Now I thought I knew why.

I’d just disconnected a call from him as I sat in Chicago’s O’hare International Airport, waiting for my late morning flight—our flight—to San Francisco to leave. He wasn’t coming with me, but he wanted me to go ahead and take the meeting late that afternoon on the firm’s investment in a San Francisco waterfront condominium and to use the other arrangements he’d made for the trip.

He’d set the trip up for the weekend, although there was just the one meeting with the construction firm this afternoon, Friday. He’d said that we might as well add a day and a half and see some of San Francisco. I’d let him know I’d never been there. I hadn’t even thought to wonder why it would take two of us to attend a progress review session on the project. He’d said he needed to go and I needed to see how these things were done. I was such a dimwit not to have thought there was more to it.

I took out the travel packet—I’d only had time to check the hotel reservation and pull out the airline tickets. I saw now that he had set up restaurant reservations as well and a gym, with massage for both of us, in the evening at a place called Eros in The Castro area. Pete was a fitness nut. And he kept himself in really good condition. He was as toned as I was even though he was fifteen years older than I was.

“Pete, where are you?” I’d asked when my cell phone had gone off and he wasn’t there yet. He’d said he’d meet me at the gate a half hour before boarding, but we were less than ten minutes away from a boarding that already was fifteen minutes late, and he wasn’t here.

“Sorry, I can’t come. Last minute problem,” I heard him say somewhere from down the line. That somewhere wasn’t here, where the plane was about to board. “You’ll have to take the meeting without me. Go ahead and use all of the reservations I had set up for the weekend. We’ll talk when you get back. We’ll have to talk then, Logan.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I know you don’t. It’s just all moving so fast. This wasn’t the way I wanted to do this,” Pete answered.

“This wasn’t the way you wanted to what?”

“I wanted to go slower with you. Put this all together more adroitly.”

“Go slower with me in what?”

“It came to a head earlier than I thought. This weekend was to make sure with you—to win you over for a relationship.”

“Win me over for a relationship, Pete? With you? I don’t understand.”

“Really? You don’t understand, Logan? You haven’t seen—felt—that we were moving closer together?”

“I didn’t mean for us to get into a relationship, Pete.”

“That’s not an answer to my question. Are you saying it never entered your mind—that you never thought of the possibility?”

I couldn’t answer that. I found I couldn’t say no to that, if I was to be truthful.

“Tell me, Logan,” Pete continued. “Say it. Say you were thinking of being in a sexual relationship with me.”

“OK, I admit it,” I said after a pause that Pete obviously wasn’t going to fill.

“Say you’ve thought about having sex with me—under me. You admitted that you had bottomed for men.”

“I’ve thought about having sex with you,” I said. I wondered if Pete had any idea how hard it was for me to admit that.

“I’ve left Helen, Logan. I wasn’t supposed to happen this fast. But I left her and I want to start a relationship with you—when you come back. I know you’re capable of it, and that you are a submissive. We’ve discussed that much. Go this weekend, have fun, give in to it, and come back to me Sunday night. I’ll meet you at the airport. We can go to your place to begin with. Helen will make a fortress of the house against me.”

“You aren’t coming this weekend because you’ve left Helen for me?” I asked dumbly. “That’s why you’re leaving me high and dry here?”

“I’m not leaving you high and dry, Logan. You have a weekend of expensive fun set up after a short meeting where they’ll treat you like a prince and all you have to do is smile and nod your head.”

“About the arrangements you’ve made in Frisco, Pete. Like this evening at the gym, this Eros place, for a workout and massage. How close is that to the hotel? I doubt I’ll get out of the meeting before nightfall. I’m not sure I’m—”

“Do that, Logan—the workout and massage. It’s all paid for, nonrefundable. Life in San Francisco doesn’t even start before dark—or end before the next light. Take San Francisco as it comes. You need to loosen up. I’d like to come back to Chicago ready to take me on—or rather for me to take you on. I want you to be more open to it; not so uptight. Think about it—what you want, what you really want. And the hotel cars will take you wherever you want to go. That’s already on my tab. I really wanted to do this trip, but I really can’t.”

“If this weekend is so important to you, I can’t see why you’re not going,” I said. I sounded petulant about this even to myself.

“It’s just impossible, Logan. Listen, my kid saw this blowup between his mother and me. Pete Jr. has a ballgame tomorrow morning, and I need to be there for him. I don’t care about Helen, but I can’t just leave my boy like this. It just hit him at a bad time. We didn’t have time to prepare him for this. You can understand that, can’t you?”

Crap, I thought. I hadn’t even thought about him having a kid. I felt like I was sinking into a morass. It didn’t help that it was stirring old arousals I’d tried to put to rest.

“Yeah, I guess. Yes, sure, I can understand about your son,” I said after a pause. And I certainly could. I hadn’t been prepared for Pete to be this far along in his plans for me—for him and me. We hadn’t even done it. None of it. Sure, I’d thought about it. But I’d been fighting the urge. Apparently, I’d been fighting the urge harder than Pete had.

“And this isn’t the way I wanted to get something set up with you,” Pete was saying. “I know you’re skittish and have been avoiding doing what I know you want to do. But, dammit, we’ll be so good together. You want this, don’t you?”

“I don’t know what I want, Pete. When I left Atlanta, it was to change completely. There’s been nothing. I’ve had no intention of doing anything, of going back into that life.”

“But you could do it with me, couldn’t you?” Pete asked.

Saved by the bell—or at least put off by the bell—the flight agent was calling for boarding. I had a business class seat and Pete, in whose name the tickets had been bought, had the highest level of privilege on every airline known to man. I’d be boarded in the first group.

“They’re calling my flight, Pete. I’ve got to go. I don’t know what to tell you. I didn’t have any inkling this was where this was headed. I shouldn’t have told you of my active gay past in the job interview last year. I intended to give up that life. I’m going now.”

He got a last shot, though. “Whatever happens this weekend was in the plans and is fine, Logan. Remember that. It’s what I want. I want you to return ready for it.”

Did my job depend on it, I wondered. But I couldn’t ask him that. That would wound him—and me too.

I disconnected the phone and looked up into the eyes of a dark and sultry hunk sitting across from me in the departure lounge. I had gone to a remote area of the lounge to take this call, but at some point, the movie star-handsome hunk had come over and sat right across from me and I had been so flustered by the phone call that I hadn’t noticed him. I wondered what he’d heard. But he was giving me such a knowing, sloppy smile that I’m afraid he heard too much.

I quickly rose and headed for the departure gate, getting there just in time to, red faced, be waved through to the airplane as part of the privileged boarding passengers.

The embarrassment continued after I’d gotten settled in business class. The seat next to me was empty during most of the boarding, which made sense, as that probably would have been Pete’s seat and he hadn’t made the flight. Before the doors closed, though, a young man plopped down in the aisle seat. It was the dark, sultry hunk who had given me the smile after I’d had my phone conversation with Pete in the departure lounge.

“I hope you don’t mind if I sit here,” he said, turning his melting smile toward me. “They kept paging someone who wasn’t showing up, I’d overheard your phone conversation in the lounge—sorry, you got a little heated and spoke up—and I put two and two together that your boyfriend wasn’t showing up. I found out he had been assigned to business class and I managed to get upgraded into the seat. Again, I hope you don’t mind.”

“I don’t mind, of course,” I answered. “But he’s not my boyfriend. He’s my boss. He was supposed to go on this business trip to San Francisco, but he couldn’t make it.”

“I gathered as much. I also gathered that he wants to be your boyfriend and that you’re not a stranger to such relationships. Sorry, if you don’t want to talk about it, but you did talk about it loud enough to be overheard. I understand. I’m gay too and sometimes have boyfriend problems like that.”

“I’m embarrassed you overheard the telephone conversation,” I said. “I don’t openly talk about these things. And I don’t usually talk that openly on my cellphone. I was upset. I’ve toned my life down considerably since college and I hadn’t realized my boss had as much interest in me that I have found out he does. Everything’s just moving too fast.”

“So, you aren’t lovers? At least yet?”

“No. It’s been since college for me. I’ve been working for two years. I thought that was the end of it.”

“And in college?”

“Oh, I was wild and promiscuous then. You know how the young believe they’ll live forever and will forever be young. Also, I wasn’t thinking about anyone but myself in college—and my own pleasure.”

“But you do admit that it gave you pleasure.” He was giving me a sloppy grin that was ever so charming.

“Yeah, I’ll have to admit that,” I said.

“I can’t imagine there could be an end to it—to enjoying sex with whoever you choose to lie with. Surely, it’s been hard for you not getting it regularly. ‘Hard for you.’” He laughed. “Sorry, I didn’t mean it that way.”

By now we were taxiing out to the runway and the two of us were speaking in low tones. I was embarrassed about this, but he was so free in talking about it, and he was a real movie-star-handsome guy. I couldn’t say that he wasn’t very attractive—or wasn’t sexually arousing. The phone call from Pete had dredged up a lot of thought patterns I’d managed to tuck away.

“Yeah, it’s been rough, I’ll have to admit.”

“I’ll bet. A really good-looking guy like you. He’s older than you are, right?”

“Yes. Fifteen years. But he’s aged really well. He takes care of himself.”

“You do too, I can see.”

“Not like he does.”

“So, he wants you to come back from San Francisco and just hop into bed with him the first time and then the two of you move in together?”

“Yeah, something like that, I suppose.”

“Are you going to do it?”

“I don’t know. Probably not. I haven’t done it in, like, so long. I just don’t want to think about going back.”

“Even though it gave you a lot of pleasure back in college,” he said.

“Yeah, even though,” I admitted.

The flight attendant had started her safety feature spiel, so we went silent and stayed that way until the plane was up in the air and the first round of refreshments had been dispensed in first and business classes.

“My name is Ryan. Ryan Hayes,” my seatmate said, resuming our low-voiced conversation. “You probably think I’ve been too forward, but I live in Frisco. We’re pretty open and direct there. It’s my world. The world of the night.”

“World of the night?” I asked.

“Yes, especially for the gay community, which is extensive. San Francisco is beautiful by day, but the night—the night is when San Francisco comes to life. San Francisco is a sexual being at night.”

“I’ve been living in Chicago,” I said with a laugh. “There’s nightlife there, but it doesn’t sound anything like the hedonism you hint at.”

“Hedonism. Now there’s an evocative word. A word of personal pleasure.”

“And this world of the night. Is this your world?” I asked. I don’t know why I asked it. It seemed to be a pivot of some sort in the conversation—the opening up of something. I later thought this was the moment I became open and vulnerable to him—that I opened my legs to him and invited him between my thighs. Somehow my subconscious was at work without connecting to my conscious thoughts. That phrase—personal pleasure—kept working through my brain.

“I work in adult films,” he said, which seemed a random statement, but of course it wasn’t random. It was directly to the point toward which we were headed. “I am all about the night—and personal pleasure. And you?” he added.

“Nothing as glamorous and sexy as that,” I said. “I work in an investment firm. We have a condo high rise going up on the water near Golden Gate Park. I’m just here for a progress meeting with the builders on that late this afternoon. But my boss had booked us for an extra day. Now, I guess, I understand that he was planning something more than just a business meeting with me in tow. It turns out he’d planned a day and a half of activities together, and as far as I know, with just one hotel room for us to share. Oh, I’m sorry. You told me your name and I haven’t told you mine. I’m Logan Griffin. I live in Chicago.”

“You called adult films glamorous and sexy,” Ryan said. “To be clear, I act in gay male porno flicks. The studio I work for is a classy one, though. Our films have plots and the setups are artistic, the photography extremely so. Their hallmark is taking the scene slow and showing how much pleasure the actors are taking from each other. They’re picky about who acts in them. So, you think I might be sexy enough to work in these films, Logan?”

“Yes, of course,” I answered.

“I find you sexy too. Maybe since your boyfriend isn’t making it this weekend—”

“Maybe not,” I said, giving him a sad smile. “I haven’t been going straight for two years just to go off the wagon because my boss is having a life crisis. I couldn’t get into anything that fast, and I don’t think I should get into anything like that at all anymore.”

“By going straight, you—?”

“No. I don’t go with women. I haven’t changed preferences. I’ve gone strictly solo. But I don’t know why I’m telling you this. This thing with my boss has me off center.”

“So, I’ve come on too strong. I’m not your type.”

“Oh, Lord, you’d certainly be my type, and, no, it’s been refreshing to talk with you. But I’m just not in that place anymore, and this conversation you overheard, it hit me from left field. It will take me all weekend to process it. I can’t imagine what I’ll be able to say to my boss when I return to Chicago.”

“Well, OK, I’ll cool my jets and we can talk about other things—football or other sports, if you like. But I have a card, and if you change your mind today . . . I have no plans for the weekend I can’t break.”

“Sure. Of course,” I said, taking the business card he was holding out to me. “If I were a player now, you know . . . I’d certainly would be interested . . . with you.”

“Good to know,” Ryan said as we settled down to chit chat about sports and movies and life in San Francisco compared with Chicago—and Atlanta, where I’d been before that, attending Georgia Tech. I was surprised that Ryan went to college too, at San Diego State. And that he’d been a football player there. But, of course, he’d had the build for that, although unlike many other college players, he hadn’t allowed himself to go to fat. He was bigger and bulkier than I was, though. I’d been on the lacrosse and swim teams at Georgia Tech, so I was slimmer than he was. I’d kept myself hard bodied, but I’d never muscled up like Ryan had.

It was with a bit of regret—I hoped on both sides—that we went our separate ways from the baggage claim area. True to his word, Pete had booked a hotel car—I was staying at the Hotel on Francisco Union Square—to get me checked in; to the brief meeting on the condo project, which went well; and then back to the hotel, where I had dinner in the hotel’s Urban Tavern. As I assumed would be the case, it already was dark when I got out of the meeting.

Night had fallen on San Francisco.

I stopped at the restaurant’s men’s room before going up to my room to change to reserve a car to take me down Market Street to Eros, where Pete had made reservations for a workout and massage. During dinner, I had obsessed over my relationship with Pete, my boss. I did have a relationship with him; it just wasn’t as hot and bothered on my side as it obviously was on his. But was that because I hadn’t given it the attention it deserved? Did I really want never again to have man-on-man sex? I had stopped not only because a relationship went sour in college but also because I thought a change would be expected of me in the career world if I wanted to get ahead. But here my boss wanted to have a sexual relationship with me. He was clearly signaling that the way ahead in his firm was to sleep with him. And Pete was a real hunk. I can’t say he didn’t turn me on.

My thoughts were conflicted and disturbing and remained so as I went into the men’s room and saddled up to a urinal. There was a good-looking guy at the urinal next to me. I was so deep in thought, that I didn’t realize that I was standing there longer than normal, with my cock hanging out, urination a bit hard because my cock was half hard from thinking about Pete—and also, truth be known, thinking about the porn star, Ryan, I’d had such an open conversation with on the plane.

The guy next to me was standing there for a long time too. It took me longer than it should have to realize that he was turned three-quarters to me and had his cock, at least half hard, as mine was, in his hand. He obviously thought I was signaling something I wasn’t. But before I could move away, he’d reached a hand out and was touching my shaft. In shock I pulled away, turned, zipped myself up, and walked quickly out of the men’s room, going directly to the elevators and to my room.

What was it that Ryan had said? Both that San Francisco was an openly gay city and that the party started when night fell. It was night in San Francisco—or dark, at least. I could believe now, when one was propositioned even in a hotel men’s room, that San Francisco was the city of the night.

My sexual arousal was kicking in; I was becoming one with the night. In my room, after I stripped down, instead of changing into what I was going to the gym in, with my gym clothes in the collapsed pack I carried in my suitcase, I stretched out on the bed and let my mind run all over these new, long-suppressed sexy feelings I was having from the buildup of encounters today: the phone conversation with Pete, the discussion on the plane with and the signaled offer from Ryan, and just now the misunderstanding of a direct sexual act in the hotel men’s room. The stranger’s fingers lightly touching my exposed shaft.

All of those had come into my current life so smoothly. The ease with which men were taking an interest in me made me realize I was still desirable to men—and that I seemed to be exhibiting some signals of willingness myself.

While I was thinking, I took my cock in hand, and I masturbated, for the first time in a long time with images from my real life to beat off to. I was wavering in my resolve to permanently change my chosen lifestyle. The long-dormant urges were coming back, and I was weakening to their power.

* * * *

I had to laugh at what Pete had pulled on me. When the hotel car dropped me off at Eros on Market Street, in the Castro area, I found that it did have a workout room, but it was miniscule compared to the rest of the operation. Eros was a no-holds-barred, clothing-optional gay male sex club. It was going full blown when I arrived in the dark. I should have known from the name, but I’d already been dumb about so much that Pete was feeling and showing that there’s no reason, I guess, that I should have been clued in to the Eros name. Eros was Greek god of sexual attraction.

I signed up for the massage Pete had paid for at the front desk, before I’d gotten the full picture concerning what Eros was and what it had to offer. It was there that I got my biggest surprise of the evening.

“You have paid for two massages, Mr. Parnell,” the reception desk attendant said. “For you and a Mr. Griffin.”

“I’m Griffin,” I said, “and Mr. Parnell won’t be coming.”

“The fees here aren’t refundable, I’m sorry to say.” I thought the regretful frown on the attendant’s face was a bit rehearsed. But maybe it was genuine; there wouldn’t be a prospect of two sources of gratuities.

“I could take the massage for Mr. Parnell,” a voice from off to the side said. I turned and did a doubletake.

“Ryan?” I said. “How did you get here? Have you been following me?” It was the hunk from the airplane, and he was hunkier than ever, wearing nothing but a low-slung towel—low slung enough that I knew the black, curly hair on his head could be found much further south as well—and a sexy smile. His body was beautiful. He was dark, either tanned or Mediterranean sun skinned, and his curly black hair swirled on his chest as well as on his head—and down below. He’d developed a bit of five o’clock shadow since the plane ride, which looked really good on him. He unknotted the towel and let it drop and then he looked even better. He was hung, thick and long, and his pubes were trimmed, but, as already hinted at, black and curly. Most significantly, he revealed his total nakedness without an ounce of embarrassment. Another guy in a towel padded through the reception area and gave him a whistle, but Ryan didn’t take his eyes off me. He maintained an amused smile on his face.

“I took your Pete’s airplane seat. Perhaps I can take his massage too. It’s not refundable, the attendant says.”

“Yes. Yes, of course,” I stammered. “But what? Has Pete put you up to this? Did he bring you in to wear me down on going into a relationship with him?”

“Not at all. The idea of seducing you is all my own. And I hope I’m succeeding.” He gave me a smile and ran a hand down his hard-bodied side and across his hip to continue down the length of his cock. “You weren’t being quiet—or discreet—in your phone call with your boss in the O’hare departure lounge. You mentioned that you were coming here to Eros. I knew what Eros was and what could be gotten here. I’m ever in hopes that you can be gotten here.”

“I’m trying my best to be good,” I said.

“I think you’ll find that I’m very good,” Ryan said, with a smile.

“I don’t think I have the courage to find out,” I said. “But it would be a shame to put an expensive massage to waste, so, by all means take Pete’s slot.”

“We’ll both be in the room. It’s a massage for two,” Ryan said, giving me a provocative look.

“I’ll survive it somehow,” I said.

“I hope so,” he answered.

I turned to the attendant and made the reservation for an hour hence. “I want to work out first, assuming there’s a real gym in here someplace. Are you going to work out too, Ryan?”

“I’m hoping I will get a rigorous workout later,” he said, with a low laugh. “I’m saving myself.” And then he turned and wafted off. I watched the shimmy of his perfectly rounded butt cheeks as he walked, my resolve chipping away.

We lay side by side, maybe four feet between the tables for what was paid for as a full body massage. I was still fighting the urge. When my body-beautiful masseur leaned down and asked me with a whisper in my ear if I wanted more servicing than he was giving, his hand jacking my cock as I lay on my back on the table, I gritted my teeth and said that no more than the hand job was required. I was watching the other table, though, where another body-beautiful masseur was riding Ryan’s shaft in a vigorous cowboy. As he did so, Ryan turned his head to me, flashed a smile, and said, “I’d be happy to hold off if you want exchange places with Claude here,” he said.

“I wouldn’t want to deprive Claude of his reward,” I said, and turned my head in the other direction. This wasn’t getting any easier. I came in a flood of cum. It was the first time in two years I’d let another man get me off. I could pretend that a hand job was enough, but Ryan had me so worked up that it wasn’t.

Claude was still riding Ryan’s cock when I was finished and, gripping my towel around my middle, went, first, to the showers and then to the sauna. The sauna was where my resolve started seriously to unravel. My resolve, indeed my whole world, had started to unravel early that day in the Chicago airport, of course. But, up to the sauna at Eros, I hadn’t let myself go with full-on man-on-man sex. The hand job on the massage table didn’t count. That easily went with a full-body massage and I had turned down so much more—like what I’d endured watching Ryan getting beside me and had been saintly enough to turn down an offer of the same.

I offered little resistance at all in the sauna at Eros, where an orgy was going on when I arrived. It was a big room, and there were only four or five pairings when I got there, so the full effect of what was happening and that everyone was supposed to participate didn’t wash across me until I was in the arms of a big, black, muscle-bound bull, handsome as sin, big as Goliath, and he was cradling me in his arms and kissing me on the mouth and cheeks and throat. He laid me stretched out on the bench above the one he was sitting on, and continued kissing, and licking, and nipping down my body as he moved up onto my bench, stretched out over me. He kissed and licked and nipped down my belly and into my groin, his kisses on my inner thighs causing them to spread to give access for his penetrating finger. I was in high heat, a heat that had progressively developed over the day, starting from when the hunk, Ryan, plopped down in the airplane seat beside me that morning.

This was like it had been back in college, where my fraternity, which attracted gay me, engaged in orgies like this. I had put that all behind me, but this was so familiar and this was so much what I needed right now.

Ryan had come into the sauna and sat on the other side of the room, watching us, watching the big, black bull hovering over my body. I jerked, and groaned, and arched my back as his mouth opened up over my engorged cock and his lips slid down the shaft. I turned my head to the side to see that Ryan was stroking his cock and watching me. I couldn’t withstand much more of his teasing. I turned my head again to find that the black bull’s monster of a cock was dangling above my face. With a sigh of resignation, I took it in, almost unhinging my jaw in the process, and let it slide into my throat. It had been two years since I’d done anything like this, but it’s not something a man forgets how to do.

We sixty-nined, with others around us doing that and more—and Ryan sitting across the sauna, watching us and slowly masturbating himself. I came first, which the black bull took as a signal to reposition our bodies and to fuck me. I hadn’t completely unraveled, though. With a surge of intent and determination, I broke away from him, and, grabbing my towel in hand, although it covered nothing except the last shred of my resolve, I rolled off the bench tier and scrambled down to the floor and out of the sauna, passing Ryan, who smiled at me and gave a little laugh.

We dressed, Ryan and I, side by side in the locker room, saying nothing to each other while we did so. I felt the heat—it only was rising; I hadn’t dissipated it with the mutual blow job with the black bull, the farthest I’d gone with a man in two years. As I was fastening the cuff buttons on my dress shirt, he said, “There’s a popular bar near here. The LookOut. The night in the city belongs to the brave. I thought that maybe we could—”

“Fine,” I said through gritted teeth. “Show me the way.” I wasn’t going to fight it anymore.

* * * *

I woke up, groggy, remembering nothing clearly beyond the first two drinks in the bar, to the rhythmic flashing of a neon light coming through the hotel window in what I later learned was a gay-friendly dive, the Twin Peaks, two blocks from Eros, on Market Street. It was listed as a deluxe room, which only meant it had its own en suite bathroom, which wasn’t the norm in this hotel. It had a queen-sized bed, though, and I was on it. It was still dark outside the window, so it wasn’t morning yet. I tried to remember something—anything—from the evening with Ryan at The LookOut and only was able to think of it not being just Ryan. There had been a swirl of men of all ages and builds and color and I felt I had danced with them all—and then maybe something about dancing all by myself on a table. There was the vague notion I’d done more with some of them.

When I woke, it was to a snort from the man lying next to me. We were both naked. The sheets were tussled. It was obvious that we had tussled as well. I was on my back, legs parted, butt raised on a couple of pillows, the feeling of moistness on my inner thighs. Although it had been a couple of years, I remembered the feeling of having been fucked—and by a big one. Probably more than once—and maybe by more than one. My channel felt like it was gaping open. Snippets of my hedonist college days floated through my brain, and damned if I didn’t have a feeling of satiation as I hadn’t felt since those college days.

Surprisingly I felt like purring. I had a guilty feeling of having been satisfied repeatedly. I wouldn’t be needing to have anyone tell me I’d been fucked.

My surprise was that it wasn’t Ryan lying next to me. The guy was some mix of Caucasian and Asian origin, which had resulted in tall and hunky, muscular and hung, but with slightly Asian features and a yellowish-tan cast to his hard-bodied skin. The eyes of us both were open, our heads turned to each other, and we lay there for a couple of minutes, gazing into each other’s eyes, as his hand glided over my body. He didn’t ask me for permission to touch me, and I felt a low moan coming up from inside me when he fondled me intimately. He seemed to know me—biblically—but I didn’t know who the hell he was. He was a hunk, though. I intuitively knew he had fucked me, and I felt a twinge of regret that I had no memory of the experience.

I knew that the expression on my face reflected the “Who the hell are you?” question tempered with “But it doesn’t really matter; you give great fuck.” I could only guess that his eyes expressed the “Are you going to let me fuck you again?” question.

The answer to that must have been “Yes,” and it was clear that we’d already fucked at least once in the night, because when his hand glided down to my legs, inserted itself between my thighs, and coaxed my legs to open, I whispered, “Yes, yes, yes,” spread them for him, and gave a little moan as he stroked my inner thighs.

When he moved his body over mine, hovering above me, looking down into my eyes, capturing them with his determined gaze, I wrapped my legs around his, placing my heels on his calves, and I wrapped my arms around his broad chest, pressing my fingertips into his shoulder blades. I rolled my pelvis up to receive him as a good angle and he slid inside me, slowly, deeply, strongly, and immediately set a steady rhythm that I quickly matched in the rocking of my pelvis. As big as he was, he glided in easily. We’d obviously been here before in the night, probably more than once. We were already familiar lovers. He fucked me and fucked me and fucked me.

My surrender to the inevitable after two years of denying it and fighting it off was complete.

I tensed and shuddered and came and then I felt him—whoever he was—jerk and come, once, twice, three times. He wasn’t sheathed. Both of us were panting hard from the exertion. I let my head loll over to the side, the bathroom door coming into my vision. Ryan was standing in doorway, leaning into the frame, magnificently naked, smiling at me.

“Good morning, Logan,” he said. “You want to see what Delta dragged in for you?”

Before I could answer, before I could ask him what the hell he meant, another figure emerged from behind him in the bathroom.

Pete Parnell. Also naked. In erection. Smiling.

The exotic Caucasian-Asian was still on top of me, inside me. Neither Pete nor Ryan seemed to notice or care.

“I think he’s ready for you again, Mr. Parnell,” Ryan said. “I think you were right—that it was just a matter of getting back on the bicycle again.”

Again?

“So, are you ready to take another spin, Logan?” Pete said. “With me?” It must have been a rhetorical question, as I didn’t answer. I didn’t say no, though.

And as the Asian lover pulled out of me, patted me on the bare rump, and rolled away to the other side of the bed, Pete walked to the bed and turned me on my belly, me giving no resistance at all, finally fully surrendering, as he climbed up on the bed. He wrapped an arm around my belly, bringing me up on all fours, crouched over me, mounted me, penetrated me . . . and fucked whatever resistance and indecision were left out of me.

Pete and Ryan obviously knew each other, which meant this, in fact, and contrary to what Ryan had told me, had all been a setup. I didn’t really give a fuck that it had been, though.

I was ready to go back to Chicago with Pete.