Strained Relations

Author's Note: Just a head's up. Although this story doesn't contain raceplay raceplay, it does mention it in passing without going into detail about it (no language, so to speak) as well as a brief mention of a white master using a collared black slave for servitude in these modern times. If you care to read further, the story explains as to why in oppose to going for pure sensationalism. 

---

Sir Dexter Blake, my father, was a revered mystery to me. Most of my life he resided only a few doors down but it was as if he lived in a world all his own. I tried to get to know him growing up seeing he was the only parent I had after my mother abandoned me at age three. But every effort I put forth to get close to him was often thwarted by a manor staff member ready to scold me to stay in my assigned corner of the wing. I was to leave him be as he was always busy crafting his latest masterpiece and need not be disturbed–even if I was on the heels of resuming my studies overseas. Sir was a great literary author of the classic variety that was well-regarded among his contemporaries but very little acclaim among the masses. It was curiosity as a teenager that finally drove me to attend one of his many lectures. I was very endeared to find he held a captive audience among men of brawn and beards and of inferior brand. Something I would not have expected but pleased it was something I stumbled upon nonetheless. I was sorely disappointed to find him dry and stiff, however, almost talking in some rich jargon his audience members gladly clung onto. His book signings allowed him to be more at ease, like a ruffian, as much as a gentleman of his ilk allowed.

At the end of my studies, I figured I could retire at the manor for the summer to get to know the man whose brew I came from before beginning my life’s journey out into the world. For all of my expensive education, I guess I should’ve been smart enough to inquire if he had such room in his busy schedule for me. Like always, I sat on pins and needles hoping he was going to join me in the main hall for a meal only for the massive door to creak open for his newest houseboy to send his apologies and to bring him back his dinner.

After another failed attempt to meet him in his world, I found myself venting my frustration to two attractive grandfatherly men I allowed to use me while they chuckled among themselves and who also suggested I read a few of my father’s books to gain a better sense of the man I wanted to know, to find some common ground. The first few books were a bore, like his lectures, quite scholarly in saying a lot when not much was needed to be said. As I ventured into his other works, I noticed his prior books landed on the theme of sex. The subsequent titles that followed also did the same except they were far more poetic in prose and eventually hinted at bisexuality before constantly exploring the theme of two men favoring each other in secret among other rules. This shocked me immensely. Though I never seen or heard of my father mention his take on women–not even my own mother–I also never thought of him ever entertaining homosexuality. Attending boarding school like we did lent itself to adventures of the sort, but nothing permanent I presumed other than a release or to be used as one.

I finished all twenty books in three weeks time, at the risk of little sleep or littler function other than to be used and discarded by four anonymous men at a hotel in insatiable heat.

One evening, I was eager to confront my father at this revelation. I was more angered at myself of the snide jokes my earliest peers made to me in this knowing regard, that just happened to sail over my head and evade my sensibilities. So I followed one of his new houseboy’s to his wing of the manner and I was astounded to find him reading in his chair with his bare feet propped up against the back of a naked black buck with a collar wrapped around his neck. When I returned at a safe time–or so I thought–I found him fucking a new lad on his sturdy tambour.

I never confronted Sir on this, but I began to make formal appointments with his secretary to engage him in conversations about the themes of his books that eventually grew informal to confess his sexual orientation as I finally came to terms with my own.

Years of this back and forth, along with my own successful hand at a writing career, led to a well-known publisher to ask me to draft my father’s biography. I readily accepted knowing there wasn’t much left to shock me with after discovering that our manor was well-equipped with a full-fledged dungeon, especially after he invited two of his daddy friends to use me as a sexual sacrifice in there. All the same, I fortified my mind against the other unknowns of his personal life, as I braced for the other revelations I was sure to come since he always greeted me with a new story that always managed to changed a little more of my perspective of him as a man.

The danger, I was well aware, was of his merciless charm. Because maturity had managed to augment rather than diminish my father’s goods looks, granting him with a slightly rugged appearance on top of his already formidable masculinity, Sir knew well he could elude many of my pointed questions behind his comeliness, engaging me in wild stories of his former trysts that caused me to hop online and try to mimic the same with someone of a similar interest. Back then, I was green to believe it was because I held a curiosity about mirroring his maturity in my own right in the future. Soon, I accepted, as weird as it sounded rummaging through my head, I was devastatingly attracted to Sir, my father, body and mind. His body was enticing, but his novels after a second careful read were so impressively manly yet expressively wrenching, almost turbulent in ways I couldn’t resist. Like men of old wanting to be with men without societal judgment, sometimes taking what they wanted or going through this dance of secrecy to reach this resolve–and often the tragedy that followed.

I sat metamorphosing from his seed into his biographer and relished this grand gift. This is what I always wanted right? To get to know the man behind the mystique? I got to indulge this by spending hours upon hours interviewing people who knew him, then hours with him, days of questions as I looked to receive direct answers from him while expecting to engage in endless discourse and an overabundance of sidetrack conversations. I thought of the many places this could lead as I settled into the custom chair he had made for me in his study that first day, watching him pace the room like a lion contemplating his run at some antelope.

“I will not bore you with the earliest details.” Sir informed me before I clicked on the tape recorder. “The early years aren’t so much mundane as they are overindulgent, inappropriate for general consumption. While my youthful indiscretions shaped me into the author that stands before you, for the purpose of your work–though heavily important–are really nothing more than tawdry tidbits that could be readily scrutinized in the wrong context because of the pedigree involve and the rank and file quick to stand judgment. If you need any more clarification of this matter, think of the masculine presences that filled your youth. Isn’t it wise to still protect the not-so-innocent from being publicized, especially if there wasn’t anything you didn’t do so willingly?”

I nodded, with shares of my own rashness flashing through my mind.

“You know the gist, anyhow. The trivia most people are either familiar with anyhow or the fanatics who are desperate to align resemblance between my fictional worlds and snippets of my real life through many of these disclosures.”

I offered nothing more, letting him dictate the rules, as his pacing across the room filled the room eager to consume his only begotten heir in this momentous occasion. His salt and walnut strands were thick and magnificent; his body solid yet trim hugged by his quilted velvet emerald green smoking robe. When he turned his back to me I traced his broad shoulders and a back that funneled down to narrow hips, firm ass. And I knew he knew I was taking note.

“Let’s begin with Thaddeus.” Sir announced, turning to face me like he’d thrown down a challenge.

“Thaddeus?” I repeated. We’d had many conversations about the men in his life, many first and brief notable loveraffairs, but I didn’t recall the name.

“Ah, you know as much as I thought you would about your dear old father–absolutely nothing.”

“Apparently not,” I cowered in response as his biographer in oppose to fault him for this as his son.

“That’s because I’ve never ever spoke of him. I’ve let everyone welter in the supposition and I’ve taken great delight in just how far the wrong path is possible for the hordes to travel in search of the well of truth.”

“Who’s Thaddeus?”

Sir poured himself a drink before he answered. When I declined, he chuckled. “I see, keep a clear head. I prefer not. It’s much easier for me to blame loose lips on this brown liquor.”

He stood at the fireplace, thought for a few seconds and lit a culebra, then began. “I guess I shall start at the beginning. It might help if I explain Kelly before tunneling into Poor Thaddeus. Kelly was the short, stout black landscaper around campus that used to keep the grounds immaculate and full. Whenever he was around, there was not a shrub unkempt, a blade out of place, or a bare ass unsown.”

I swallowed my spit after I got his subtle meaning.

“See, in his idle time, the hung landscaper fucked as many of us rich white queers he could get his hands on and being that there was always a new crop of young curious cocksuckers coming onto the grounds, he was never without a new one to take care of his needs. Kelly fathered and played stepfather to several sons, each exceptional in their own right, but the one that happened to stand out to me was named Thaddeus, a tall, wiry, very dark-skinned lad that was ink in color and perhaps a month or two younger than me. Thaddeus was the first piece of ass I ever plowed.” Sir paused, looking for a reaction out of me, and receiving none, he continued. “All I ever attended were all-boys schools, as you know, and as you know from your own experience there were lots of fooling around. But it wasn’t until I arrived at the university that my true awakening begun–at least those I can freely talk about. Kelly was far from my first, or even my first black man, but he led me on many scrumptious adventures that went far beyond indulging his carnal lust, though it rarely ended any other way. Thaddeus used to hang around his father under the guise of learning his trade, seeing that the younger just had a young daughter at the time, when in truth, neither father nor son could send Thaddeus to such a prestigious institution and hoped he aspired to be an autodidact from the nuggets he picked up along the way.

“Over in the afternoon, Kelly would often abandon his greenhouse shed for work or play, leaving Thaddeus behind to clean up. Of course, I never paid any real mind to the latter. I was so cock-struck by my latest tryst with senior and busy plotting on a repeat to notice the rest of the world. As the quarter moved on, I noticed that once Kelly abandoned his post several of my schoolmates ventured inside the greenhouse. Chasing after Kelly and his new boy, it wasn’t until a few weeks later I caught some of these young men leave the greenhouse in various forms of elation. At first, I thought they went in there to fool around with each other. Damned if the landscaper’s black son was in there. Surely he would have to clean the mess up without protest or complaint. Then one afternoon, as I happened to be strolling by the shed hoping to luck up on Kelly for another tryst, my ears were violated by this vile verbal assault fused with lustful passions. I didn’t know what to make of it. Naturally curious and naturally conflicted, feeling disgusted for being so turned on at this verbal battering, I had to see what was going on and discovered a new world of possibility.”

“What was that?”

Sir smirked, knowing he had piqued my curiosity though I managed to hide my interest in my steady tone. “Where Kelly was ardent to conquer his next piece of ass with his big black cock, Thaddeus had an affinity for his bubble rump to be dominated by a keen white cock with the added intricacy of race play. The more this young man was degraded during this act, the more he reveled in it, begging for another white cock to saw at him. When I stepped into the greenhouse unnoticed there were three university students doing just that, throwing anything and everything one might expect out of hardcore racists when given the chance. Unlike the real deal however, their words failed to hold the weight. They were right for their purpose, but it lacked the true emotional stir for it to be taken really seriously, though it was rather taboo just the same. My pants were down stroking off to this image when I happened to see the guys disappear out of the shed. Thaddeus saw me out of the corner of his eyes, curled his finger for me to come near. Nervously, I did, knowing what he expected out of me and for the first time I was thrusting my cock into the most satisfying grip to ever envelop me. I couldn’t indulge the degradation, in fear I might get too comfortable with it and use it at the most inopportune time, seeing that I grew up knowing the sheer hatred that your grandfather had for others. That isn’t to say I didn’t have my fun, making up for my verbal deficiency in this regard for strong-arming him into submission. This was quite a feat since he was quite formidable. Far more than me, of course, but I found my strength to keep him steady until I arrived and paid for it dearly for a week more with the sorest muscles I’ve ever produced. Though I was forever hooked on Thaddeus after I found my rhythm with him, I wasn’t rapt until I saw the contrast of my deluge of heavy cream drizzled across his exotic dark buns. I was so revved by it I had him twice more there in the greenhouse, and after my tenderness subsided came back every day for a month still.”

“So what happened between the two of you? Young love ran its course?”

“Naturally, of course,” Sir sighed. “I wanted him to be exclusively mine and he wanted to explore much like his father except on a different end. He indulged me for awhile, even after I consented to his demand and our embrace grew stronger because of it, but as I said, he wanted to explore with abandon.”

“I’m familiar with that.”

“Please, do tell?”

“This is supposed to be about you.”

“Ah, yes, but I have a right to know about my biographer.”

“You had the freedom to learn your son properly over time and squandered it to play master to slaves and subs. We’re going to be spending a lot of time together and there will be plenty of opportunities for you to finally get to know more about my world.”

“Yes, I suppose I will.”

I heard a slight twinge of defeat in his tone, but we both knew it wasn’t going to last long. And so began an experience that was to result in a well-received book and a good dose of Sir Dexter Blake’s turbulence. Of course, as I shielded myself from it as best I could, my resolve collapsed after a couple of weeks. I traded all of my professionalism and bypassed blood for the fucking of a lifetime and will probably inquire for years to come if it was worth it.

A week into this project, I was jerking off feverishly, perhaps three to four times a day. His recollections were so heavily laced with sexual escapes that I invariably was a walking hard-on and he knew it. When I excused myself to the bathroom, he offered a knowing smile or a comment like “take your time.” He knew what I was doing. And then, on that fateful day, he followed me in.

I didn’t turn when I heard the door open. When I stopped pumping my dick, he came up behind me, and growled in my ear, “Don’t stop on my account.” Sir lowered my pants and began to squeeze my vulnerable butt cheeks, getting his thumb down inside my sweaty crack. Instead of picking up the pace, I slowed down, wanting it to last. I was in heat. I was going to get fucked, damned the relation. If I was going to end up selling my soul for this, it was going to be an event, my famous father’s cornholer up my humbled ass, to hell with professional ethics or even blood relations. He fingered me for awhile, looked over my shoulders at my dripping junior, and then withdrew to grab the lube. He bent me over the vanity and ran a gob over and into my hole, prodding back there with his finger always attempting to evoke a different moan out of me. “More than ready,” he murmured, then pulled out his finger and stuck in his battering ram.

I had no idea how big my father was. His reputation was for conquest, not endowment, but I was quickly learning he was equal on both fronts. It felt like a fire hose was being run up my rectum. I squirmed with a mix of pleasure and pain while he presented his encouragement. “Nothing like a big dick, is there? Cockhead up in your bowels?” He began to thrust–a slow, easy stroke that made use of every inch of his big thing–pulling out all the way sometimes, then easing back in. With every thrust I let out a gasp or moan and a couple of times a swear word or two. “This is what I did to Thaddeus that first year,” he told me as he began to settle into a smooth, rocking rhythm. I let go of my dick at his entry, and still hard, it flailed blindly while I received him. “I never get enough,” Sir gasped. “You young things with your tight little asses, you never get enough dick up there, do you, hmmm? Do you?”

“No,” I managed because he seemed to require a reply.

“Tell me how much you want it. Tell me. I want to hear it.”

I let out a shriek. He picked up speed, pounding me, and it hurt, but I also felt my balls tighten, my cock poised to fire unaided. “No,” was the only thing I mustered before my urethra flooded and I lazily shot ribbons upon ribbons of my thick semen onto the cabinet and floor. “Fuck! Fuck me!” Sir kept pumping his cock into me, and then asked “You want a personal revelation, son?” as I busy squeezed my cock clear. I tried to get my head out of its ecstasy, hoping it was something I could add into the biography, but all I was able to do was groan an inaudible reply. “Your mother left because I couldn’t get enough of this from other men. She could drown herself in the fortune to forget about the amount of ass I paraded around in this manor, but it ruined her dearly that her proud black father was such a proud cock whore for white men. If you hadn’t put the pieces of the puzzle together, my dear boy, the first real fuck of my life was her father, your insatiable grandfather, Thaddeus Pettigrew.”

Before I could process this shock, Sir blasted off himself. He kept pounding me, growling like an animal as he churned his fresh cream against the lining of my guts as we both loved every second of it. When he finally stopped, he wrapped his arms around me and held on, sweaty forehead pressed against my shoulder. He ground his hips, the spent cock still formidable, as we experienced our gradual descent. Only when his cock softened did he slide out and even then he reached under my shirt and tweaked my nipples, then worked his way down to my limp dick. “Let’s not work any more today,” Sir said. “There are so many other things to do in the mist of this christening.” He turned me around and kissed me and I knew right then I was lost. As I sucked his tongue, my dick stirred and I climbed in front of him. “I think we need to get to a bed.”

Atop the black ombre shaggy duvet, he stripped away our clothes and only then was I able to really pay attention to the man. I was truly impressed. On his knees, he reared back while I lay inert below and looked from his formidable, furry thighs to the big cock hanging between them, plump plums underneath. A fine pelt ran up his stomach and spread across his well-defined chest.

As he looked me over, his dick began to rise and it was about halfway along, he slid down, pushed my legs back, and got his face in my ass, his tongue on my rim. He licked and played and periodically stopped to narrate. “What a sweet little hole you have.” Sir stuck his finger, worked it around. “Nice and quite tight, but I swear by the time we get this book written, it’ll be stretched quite a bit.

He then guided his stiff prick into me again. “This time,” he mouthed burying himself to the root. “We will be much unhurried. I’m going to fuck you until you come at least twice, until you’re so spent you can’t walk. You’ll sleep then and when you wake, we’ll work awhile. Then fuck awhile. Oh, yes, this is going to be a wonderful arrangement. I should’ve pushed for this exposé a long while ago.”

He pumped steadily, sweat glistening beneath his fur, and everything else disappeared, time included. His staying power was remarkable, cock like a piece of hot iron, thighs taut, balls slapping. It didn’t take long for my prostate to warm up again and for me to grab my cock and shoot another load that my father cheered every spurt, then pulled out, gathered up the come, and smeared it along his shaft. “Fuck you with your own juice,” he grinned, and I could see he relished in the idea, knowing that my juices were nothing more than his extended. He fucked me a while longer, then turned me over and rode me from behind.

I’ve been fucked by a lot of anonymous men in a lot of anonymous places, but I don’t ever think I’ve ever felt more like a piece of meat, nor enjoyed it so much like I did then. Reeling from the sex-high, I imagined us in some forest, a big furry creature fucking the small animal that happened upon his path. We were Dick and Ass, nothing more. He had me until deep in the night when we finally slept. My last thought before drifting off was that we hadn’t returned to work.

“We might as well not kid ourselves. This will be our bed.” Sir said the next morning as he prepared to mount me. He’d awaken me by rimming me and now he had me on all fours, kneading my saturated hole with his finger.

“That’s probably not a good idea,” I said, thinking of the staff as he prodded my bruised prostate, which made my breath catch. “Of course its not,” he agreed. “But it will be so much more expedient in the long run. Keep me satisfied and I’ll tell you everything!”

He entered me without waiting for a reply. He pumped that big cock in me and suddenly I thought about the publisher who was paying for my time. It was wrong what I was doing on so many levels, but I was powerless to stop myself since I ventured down such a rabbit hole. I vowed then and there to capture that very feeling in the book, the overwhelmingness of the man. “We’ll have a long session after breakfast,” he said, maintaining a steady thrust. “On the book, I mean.”

“You’ll need your rest.”

He chuckled. “You’ll be the one that need it most. Your hole won’t be the same after I’m done. Even so, I want to enjoy its tight grip before its walls are lost to this amount of fucking and that to come!”

From that point on, the challenge was balancing the sex with the work. Not exactly a chore but it still required a concentrated effort. Retaining at lease some professional standing while being taken to ecstatic heights wasn’t easy but proved worthwhile in the long run.

The trouble, I soon unearthed was that his recollections remained relentlessly sexual. Every time I tried to guide him back to what he termed the “boring” facts of his life, he would veer off into yet another sexual encounter. These were difficult to resist because his trysts were never a bore, since no two were alike. Fucking, yes, but when related by a prose master, each became its own singular play with him as the star. The tapes were becoming a collection of verbal porn I knew was not what the publisher wanted from a man that held in such high esteem amongst his writing peers, mine as well.

The reward however, in addition to an enviable sex life, was that I encapsulated the man’s energy. How could I not? It engulfed me, permeated my very being. Never mind his cock in my ass; he himself was inside me and holding fast other than naturally inherited traits. Halfway through the project I began to dread its end, to consider the unsettling fact that there had to be an end. Not easy to view from the sexual wallow and the eroding reality I wasn’t nearly the man I thought I was, regarding character and race. I always knew I wasn’t entirely white like my father. Though quite faint, racially ambiguous really, there was a slight exoticism to my look. I naturally assumed since he fancied the Mediterranean so much that my mother bore from there.

Getting my narrative down was managed in those periods when my father worked on his latest novel. He’d put in three or four hours, usually an hour after lunch. It was during those respites I’d record the man himself. Then after we’d fucked for three months, and coming up on two hundred tapes, I realized my overview was slipping, that I was falling in love with this man. I could hear it in my voice, in the choice of things I wrote about him.

“What’s wrong?” Sir asked one evening. He’d fucked me for over and hour and I hadn’t come, I hadn’t even gotten hard. He fondled my limp dick and, when I said nothing, he joked, “I thought your insides would lose life rather than this. Concerned, my dear boy?”

I got out of bed, stormed to the bathroom, and closed the door.

“You stupid shit!” I screamed at the mirror, knowing I would be eaten alive and not in the way I’d like. There was no outcome to what was going on; set aside the book our most meaningful relationship up to this point has been this, revolving just around him. I could kid myself to believe I could stoke the fires for an eternity, but the truth was I was nothing more than a piece of ass to him, more than his son. I was on borrowed time. I returned to the bed but didn’t get in. Sitting on the edge, I tried to avoid Sir, but from my peripheral he worked his cock with a slow caressing stroke that took long to get it inside me and fuck, literally, everything else.

“Tell me.” He finally countered.

“You don’t want to hear it.”

“So now you speak for me?”

I sighed. “I know you and it makes me wish I didn’t.”

“Ah, a conundrum.”

He was so sure of himself, almost cold. All that heat he generated, yet he still remained the predator of his own flesh and blood. “Have you ever really been in love?”

He laughed. “Oh, god, is that it? You’ve taken the leap and, mid-flight, are having second thoughts?”

“Can you blame me? You’ve never got to know me. You don’t know me now. You just fuck me, and I let you because it’s the only way I can ever get close to you.”

“Well, my flaw is my flaw as yours is yours. I prefer to spend my emotions on the page where it can be felt and dissected. If you love me, so be it. I love you, too, but not in the way people pin their hopes and dreams on. Nevertheless, it doesn’t have to play out like a tragedy.”

A shiver ran through me. I’d never felt so alone, even when he resided down the hall a world away. I wanted him to sit up, put his arms around me, tell me how much he cared either as lover or father, but I knew he wouldn’t. He let go of his cock, rolled onto his side, and still said nothing. “You failed to answer me.”

“Sorry. What was the question?”

“Have you ever been in love?”

“If I hadn’t does it render me a lesser man?”

“This was such a mistake.” I folded my face in my hands.

“Which? The biography or the fucking?”

“I feared this might happen. I said if it did, I wouldn’t go to bed with you. Not because of our relation strangely. Not because I thought I was somehow special, either. But because of the amount of ass I’ve seen you parade around this manor to know that an asshole is nothing more than a tissue for your cock.”

“That’s an unfair assessment. I would say more like a silk handkerchief than a tissue. I used them between washes before ultimately discarding them. Since you are my heir, and successors of both your insatiable grandfathers, you should understand far better than most.” His tone was mock indulgence and also the last straw. I shot off the bed, looking for my clothes. “They’re in the living room, if I recall.”

Still naked, he followed me, watched me dress while a manservant scurried in a different direction. “Surely you’re not going to let feelings put asunder all we’ve accomplished.”

I tied my shoes and tried not to look at him. He was larger than life, once again intruding my peripheral vision as he stroked his cock. “Don’t be foolish, boy,” he coaxed, his voice softening, taking on a compromising, almost endearing tone. I paused, my resolve pierced. The possibility of a connection, however remote, took hold. I slumped, hands over my face again.

He came to me then. “If I’ve learned one thing over the years is to have fun and not get dragged down by definitions. If we let the traditions speak, we would never gotten here, and I’m quite glad we’ve gotten here. It’s been hella fun!”

I looked at him. He raised a hand to my cheek. My heart filled. I was overcome with joy, and when he guided his prick to my lips, I took it willingly.

After that there was a certain indulgence on his part, enjoyable so long as I didn’t let myself acknowledge that was all it was. He became almost gentle between bouts of insatiable sex. He appeased my emotions just enough to circumvent my caution. As a result, I fell deeper-still in love with him. He became my world. I forgot anything had existed before him and contemplated nothing after. Months passed, we fell into habits, a pair of sorts. Not quite father and son but far from biographer and subject.

Some days we didn’t even work on the book. When it was warm we’d swim nude, fuck poolside, then lie glistening with sweat until we slid back into the water and start the dance all over again.

We never went out. He did, but would leave me behind and I tried not to let my jealousy show. He’d arrived home from an event–a reading or a party–and fall on me, fucking me rabidly as if the time spent away had sent him into a panic. Later he’d tell me about his evening. I’d note details to use in his book, but I was begging to see that the biggest part of him, the part with me, could never reach the page, regardless of how hard I tried to craft it digestibly for general consumption and still protect the not-so-innocent details from being publicized. I tried not to dwell on this, kept to my work, my life with him. Then one day while he worked in his study, I sat at my desk and stared at the book’s final page. I wanted to cry.

“Why so quiet?” Sir asked over dinner. We normally ate well, but I couldn’t manage a thing at that moment besides wine, and plenty of it. I didn’t answer him, just refilled my glass.

“Better have some of the fish with that,” he counseled. “Otherwise you’re not going to be much company.”

I fled. “What is it?” he called out but didn’t immediately follow. He let me drink myself into a near stupor, and then wandered onto the patio where I lay on a chaise longue, the view starting to swirl. He sighed heavily, sat nearby. “One more should do it,” he calmly offered. “You’ll either pass out or regurgitate.”

“Company,” I slurred.

“Pardon?”

“I’m not going to be much company.”

“Well, I’m no saint, my dear boy. Before I became disciplined in the hunt I’ve taken advantage of lads in far worse states and still walked away quite satisfied with the conquest. Oh–oh dear, god. Is that it? You’ve seized upon a simple remark and refused it with meaning, never mind how offhanded it may have been?”

“That’s what I’ve become to you.” Tears began to stream. I hated them, but I couldn’t stop. “Now the book’s done where does that leave me?”

“Ah, the plot thickens, so to speak. First off, congratulations on the accomplishment. No one has ever managed to get me onto the page before. I commend you at the risk of leaving my soul bear for its reader. As for where this leaves you, that’s up to you. You’re welcome to stay in my bed if you like or move back onto the premises or play things by ear.”

This was and was not what I wanted to hear–an invitation rather than a declaration. I said nothing.

“Come on, let’s get you to bed.”

I thought then he might say it. He undressed me, turned down the covers, put me beneath them, and then began to rub my chest as a mother would her ailing child. I watched him through my drunken haze, trying to figure what I needed. His fingers found a nipple, rubbed gently until it became a hard little nub. He seemed so quiet, almost content as his hand slid down my stomach and into my pubes, inched towards my soft cock. He palmed me, looking into my eyes all the while, and I knew there was something there but no matter how much I wanted him to frame the emotional tie into words, it was forever remain a physical one. He confirmed this when he pulled aside the covers, lowered his head, and took me into his mouth with his finger thumping on my favorite spot.

I still can’t believe he made me come. I was beyond ready to pass out, but my cock remained sober and filled under his ministrations. When I came I lost consciousness.

The next morning, I awoke to a monumental hangover with his dick hungry to enter my ass. “Lie still,” he commanded when I protested. He was mercifully gentle but still fucked me thoroughly and when he neared his climax his thrusts set my stomach on a path of no return. Seconds after he came, I ran to the bathroom and threw up.

It was an awful day; I was hung over on two levels, the emotional ultimately outdistanced the physical. As my head cleared, I recalled the night before, the invitation. I could stay on. It was up to me.

I kept my distance from Sir and he was gracious enough not to press. I sat with my completed draft, thumbing the pages. He was in those pages. As my fingers ran the edges, I thought, how appropriate. Ink and paper, lifeless until someone begins to read it.

I called the publisher and told him the first draft was complete. He was elated. “When can I see it?”

“It needs some polish.” I told him, suddenly glad I had a real reason to stay on. Staying on: would it ever be palatable?

I no longer conducted interviews with Sir. The tape recorder was put away, the hours of him relaying his exploits concluded. I tinkered with the manuscript and tried to ignore the hollow in me. When I drank I said things I shouldn’t have and Sir accepted both protestations of love and angry rebukes for his failure to reciprocate, both past and present. Another month passed. The publisher pressed for me to deliver the manuscript. I resisted.

Sir caught me one day in his study, pages stacked before me, an empty box to one side, and a vodka bottle to the other. He chuckled. “Second thoughts?”

“I can’t do it.”

“What, send it off? Is there a problem?”

He hadn’t asked to read it which unsettled me on two levels: one, that he had faith that I’d do him justice, and two, he was so arrogant he didn’t care what was said about him, even by me, his own son.

“I don’t know.” I finally confessed, reaching for the bottle. He took it from me. “You’ll make yourself sick. Come with me.”

He led me out into the warm fall afternoon, undressed me, then himself, and eased us into the pool. And there he wrapped his arms around me from behind and lay on the steps with me against him. His cock stiffened but he didn’t do anything beyond wedge it between my butt. Relief spread through me. If he’d fucked me, I would have crumbled.

“There’s one more chapter,” he said after awhile and my breath caught because I thought he was going to concede at last, concoct the two of us into a perfect ending.

“When I was rounding into my thirties,” he began. “Leaving the boy stage for the man, Bobby Norman entered into my life. As with most gay love affairs, he also left six months later. He was a student of mine during my brief stint as a professor at the university, after my first book failed to gain any real promise outside of academia. He was an artist, a sculptor that painted more beautifully than he sculpted, and every time I saw one of his latest paintings, I fell deep into him. You asked me if I’d ever been in love. The answer is yes. Mostly, it was infatuations up until then and thereafter, but him most definitely. He was so handsome he was beautiful, and though his look was breathtaking it only mirrored the character inside the man. And boy did he have some ass–and some dick! To understand, by then I’d given up on getting fucked after a lifetime of being plowed by the legions. I made the rare exception with him because I was so in love. We fucked constantly, anywhere and everywhere.” He paused, and then spoke the next words as if they tasted badly. “We…made love. Always there in his studio, in his world that I slowly absorbed my way into.”

“This should be in the book.” I snapped.

“No. The goddamn world doesn’t need every drop of my blood. Besides, it’s not who I am–or really ever was.”

“What happened?”

“Some months later a new artist came through, Sal Jaguar. Far from the stiff lip I was back then, he was man to Bobby’s boy. I knew the first time I saw them together, that Bobby was lost to me, even if he–or they–didn’t know it. There is nothing to compare a moment like that, exchanging pleasantries with the man who is about to fuck your lover and take him away from you for good. We weren’t living together so there wasn’t much subterfuge when things went sour. Having trusted him, I learned a great lesson.”

My first thought was that’s it? A break up? Like he should be exempt from the pain of life? Anger seized me. I wanted to scream but held everything in check, became solicitous even, because I still wanted him to love me. “That must’ve been rough,” I soothed.

“No. Thaddeus and others had prepared me for heartbreak long ago. No, the lesson I learned was that love is not for me and life has proven that much. I don’t waste time on matters of the heart. I channel it elsewhere and I’m genuinely happy in that regard.” He stirred beneath me, pushed up a bit. End of story, time to fuck.

I pulled away, swam to the middle of the pool where I lingered for a bit, then paddled to the side. Sir watched me. I thought about his cock under the water, what he would do with it. He liked me to sit on it while he lay on the steps. He waited, arms out to the side, floating there.

I thought of all the times I’d fallen in love and been hurt. About the times I’d done the hurting to someone else. Like love was some sandy bog you and to keep wading into and struggling out of because maybe, just once, it would’ve prove all muck and mire. Love had never lasted for me either but at least I hadn’t written it off. Just the opposite. Each new experience was laced with possibility, even if it ultimately proved a disappointment on some level. Sir Dexter Blake, my father, for all his literary genius, couldn’t see this simple foundation. On paper he was a master, his imagination soared, but in reality, here in this pool, he was no more than a hard dick awaiting service. I swam to him, climbed on facing him, and let him fuck me.

It set me free, knowing it was the last time, and I thought about him up inside me, doing what he allowed himself knowing that I was perhaps the only thing in the world he had any real connection to, and even that went as deep on the ink on my birth certificate. We were even at last, in some way. I couldn’t define it. I would send off the manuscript, leave out his “last chapter” because he was right, it wasn’t him. But I still didn’t see it as he did. While he considered the affair with Bobby Norman a turning point, a justification for the wall he built around his heart, I saw a man who had simply lost himself long before he stepped foot in that greenhouse with my grandfather Thaddeus Pettigrew. When he could no longer get the attention of my great grandfather, he sought it out elsewhere, with his son, much like the history he written for himself, who let the pain and the fear of it rob him of life. In walling off his pain, to look for something more than to be used, he hadn’t so much protected his heart as left it to thicken and dry like any ill-used muscle. No, the public need not see this of the man I knew as my father. The man on the tapes was who he would remain, the man who led with his prick and lived by it. I reminded myself that I known the dangers of going in, and now how right my first instincts had been. When my father came I watched the familiar grimace and I no longer searched for more. He could keep being his world. I had no interest in being apart of it.