Summer Deceptions

He deceived me.

Or did I deceive myself?

The late June wedding was being held on the Nags Head beach not more than six blocks down the Outer Banks from my East Driftwood Street cottage just south of Kitty Hawk. I wasn’t at the wedding ceremony. I was home, where I was drinking beer, crushing cans, watching the clock, and seething. I was slouching in a broken Adirondack chair on my back patio, wearing just an electric blue Speedo, because I had originally intended to walk the two and a half blocks to the beach and swimming out as close to Bermuda as I could before I went under. But the day was so clear that I was afraid if I walked out on the beach from here I could see down to where the wedding was progressing on the beach opposite to the Jockey’s Ridge State Park.

Frank was leering at me from next door. But I hadn’t let Frank have me ever before and this wasn’t going to be the day that I started doing that. I struggled out of the chair and padded around to the front of the cottage, finding myself looking at the Mustang and the Harley and wondering which one I should take, without giving any thought to why I thought I planned on going anywhere.

I certainly wasn’t going to go to the wedding, which would be over now anyway. I wasn’t invited. It would have been tacky to invite me, even though it was equally tacky not to do so to those who didn’t know that I hadn’t been invited—and why. I’ll bet anyone else who had ever been in the band had been invited, and I was an original member—well, almost. I bet it would be mentioned in the press that I wasn’t there.

Those not in the “know” probably thought I was on tour somewhere else. They’d be dancing on the beach and glugging champagne. A lot of money would have been spent on this wedding. I had been told the reception would be right there on the beach and a seaplane would land and fly the bride and groom off to a honeymoon in Havana. Key West would have been more appropriate, I thought—with me invited to meet them there.

The Harley, I thought. I would take the Harley.

I turned and went back into the cottage and pulled on a white shirt and black shorts. I added a black bow tie, and then I was ready to fit right in. I put those on right over the Speedo. Having thought “Harley,” I decided on high-top boots. I didn’t fool around on footwear when I was taking the motorcycle.

I motored the ten blocks south and three blocks over to the beach. I heard them before I saw them. I wondered how they managed to get by the noise abatement ordinances, and then I didn’t. We made this town with loud music. They weren’t going to deny anyone in the band on this point. We put this town back on the map.

The attire I’d chosen was a good call. I fit right in as a waiter. One of them even was wearing high-top boots. No one said a thing when I pulled a bucket full of ice with a champagne bottle in it off the top of a mobile beverage cart. I did get the attention of those nearby when I pulled the bottle out of the bucket and swung it against the side of the cart. It made a clunk sound, loud where I was standing but not reaching where the wedding party was doing some sort of chain dance around the beach. I had planned a louder noise and more attention arresting, but the sucker wouldn’t shatter and it dropped to the sand intact. Tucking the bucket under my arm, I walked out through the wedding crowd, tracking down the Conga line.

Happily, the groom was leading the line. The bride was behind him. I walked to where the line would have to go through me to progress. It stopped, in a bit of confusion and varied expressions. Some recognized me; some didn’t. A few snobs only saw a waiter. I’d have to say that the members of the band never turned into snobs, so those I wanted to recognize me did.

This included both the groom and the bride.

The groom took the full force of the ice when I swung the bucket at him. I held onto the bucket, of course. I didn’t want to go to jail; I just wanted to make a point—a splash; an objection to deception.

“Mike?” Marilee blurted. “What the hell?”

It wasn’t her fault.

I turned and walked straight back the way I’d come onto the beach. I climbed on the Harley and headed south on South Virginia Dare Trail, toward Hatteras Island. End of the world. A fitting place from which to start swimming to Bermuda. What beach, though? I wasn’t in the mood for people—certainly not a beach with a lifeguard. Maybe the old Greenwood Lighthouse ruin. No one ever used that beach.

* * * *

I set my compass for the southern end of the outer banks and let the sound of the engine lull me into bringing it all back up for the fourteenth time today.

I hadn’t always loved Bud Taylor. Like many of the local whites in Nags Head, I was leery of him. He was a big, smart-ass bruiser. He was black and had dreadlocks, and initially he was in my face, crowding me and intimidating me. It was only over time that we got to where we got and to where the bottom suddenly dropped out of any part of my life that didn’t have Bud in it.

I was born and raised right here in Nags Head. My parents and I lived in the cottage I now live in on East Driftwood. They moved to Florida three years ago. I bought them a nice house down there and I stayed here, taking over our house. This was first base for the band in the early years, and the house was good enough for me anyway. I could have bought something big and fancy for myself three years ago as well as the house I bought for my parents, but I never was a big and fancy kind of guy. I went to First Flight High School just up the road from my house and across from the field where the Wright brothers tested the first airplane. I was good in music and drama and pretty piss poor in most everything else.

There’s a summer-production outdoor play called The Lost Colony that’s been given for the last eighty years over in Manteo, on Roanoke Island, just across the causeway from my place. This was where one of the earliest English settlements was in America but where, when the colonists’ ships went to England for supplies and came back, they found the place deserted with few clues where the settlers went. There wasn’t any evidence found that they died there, on the spot. The first English settler born in America, Virginia Dare, was born here—or so the area claims—but she too had vanished. I had acted in The Lost Colony as a summer job from the time I was a child. I still do, in adult roles. It’s in my blood, and it helps keep me grounded here.

I’m twenty-six now, but I was eighteen, nearly nineteen, when I came out of high school in 2011 and needed a job. The play paid, but it was only a summer job and only paid for the summer. Now I am on staff part time—they wanted to use my name and credits—but I’m not taking pay now. It isn’t money I need now. When I graduated high school, I knew music and I knew the technical side of putting productions on stage. I got a part time job at a honky-tonk over on the south end of Roanoke island in Wanchese, which is a center for ocean fishing. The place was—and is—called Harry’s, and, yes, I knew it was a gay bar. Big burly fishermen came in there because it was a gay club—because they wanted to be comfortable with what they were and because they might score.

At first that didn’t mean anything to me. I just kept the lights and sound for their stage in working order and helped set up and break down equipment for the bands that went through. I didn’t shy away from working in a gay bar, though, because I guess I’d known for some time I leaned in that direction even if I hadn’t done anything about it. And truth be known, I didn’t mind being ogled by the burly fishermen.

I’d been getting hit on for a couple of years. I guess I was what was called a pretty boy. I was a bit undersized but athletic. I was in good shape. And I was what you’d call a looker, with blond hair and golden highlights and a face that got me noticed a lot. And I was in drama and music, so men I came into contact with made assumptions—and, sometimes, passes. I didn’t respond for some time after going to work there. But I thought about my effect on the men who catcalled me, and I knew that someday I probably would respond.

I almost responded to one teacher at the high school, an English literature and art teacher, Russ Manly, who wasn’t much older than his students were and who was a real stud, I thought. And he seemed to be interested in me—not just as a student but in more intimate ways—but he mysteriously disappeared from the school half way through the second semester of my senior year.

I almost responded to Mr. Manly, and I know he was sending signals, and eventually I did respond to someone, but it took a while—and it took persistence by Bud Taylor as well. By the time Bud came sniffing around, though, I’d worked at Harry’s long enough to take the sexual innuendo and random feeling up and propositioning in stride.

Not all of the bands playing Harry’s were floaters. The place developed a couple of house bands. One of those was named simply the Bob Hawley Band, which formed from talented locals around the lead singer with that name. It had a strange and intoxicating unique sound, adding a couple of fiddles to the usual country rock instruments for a “what was that?” effect. The band was a mix of white and black guys in their early and mid-twenties in 2011, although the black guys obviously were in charge, the decisionmakers. They were the dominant ones. They were the ones with the most talent too.

I started off working with them on sound and lighting and setting up and breaking down equipment. Sometimes I hummed along when they practiced, though. They noticed that I had a voice. And by the end of that first summer after high school, I was singing backup in their sets. They cut some demos and their unique sound slowly spread out across coastal North Carolina and then the mid-Atlantic states, and by 2014 we had gone national. The money came in then. I no longer was helping with sound and lights or setup or break down. I was in the band and I was lead singer on some of our award-winning singles. We were here, buzzing around Roanoke Island mostly and cutting our records here, but we also were doing a couple of national tours each year.

By 2014 I also was sleeping with and under Bud Taylor. Bud Taylor was fucking me.

Bud Taylor was a tall, wiry black man of twenty-five, six years older than I was, when we first met that summer of 2011. He was hard-bodied, an auto mechanic when he first joined the band. He had dreadlocks and a face that could most politely be called “interesting” and charismatic. He was about as black as black could be. That covered his looks other than what I later was to find out—that he was hung like a bull.

But there was another Bud Taylor inside him, a more artistic and sensitive man who kept that inside until it started coming out with the unfolding of fame. Even though he was an auto mechanic, he had gone to college and he had majored in English and was a poet. It just that in Nags Head at the time, blacks weren’t expected to go to college, and, even if they did, they weren’t expected to go higher than auto mechanic if they wanted to stay in Nags Head.

On top of being educated and a poet he played the meanest fiddle that ever was. He had a deep bass voice too and can be heard in the background of some of the band’s recordings. He dressed elegantly and he moved like a dancer. When the band was on stage, eyes invariably went to him and watched him swaying in perfect rhythm to the music. Somehow they got the message that Bud Taylor was the music.

Bob Hawley was no dummy. The lead singer might be in the center under a spot, but Bud Taylor would have his own spotlight on him off to the side too. The audience standing just below the stage swayed with Bud. Bob Hawley wasn’t a swayer.

The day Bud Taylor and I met—the day in June of 2011 I was called in to set the spots for a local band and help it get set up—Bud Taylor told me that he’d like to take me out to his truck when the band took a break and fuck me. He obviously thought that anyone working at Harry’s was gay and could be had—and I apparently looked like a submissive to him. He obviously was also charismatic enough that he could get the tail he wanted to get. I’d thought of going with him by that point, but I had no idea he’d decided to fuck me.

He was more intrigued and determined, he told me later, when he finally had had me, when I told him I wasn’t interested and hadn’t gone with a man, than he was disappointed or angry I’d turned him down that first time. One of Bud’s talents was to take everything with good humor. But he didn’t stop trying. He didn’t even let up trying, and Christmas of that year, he had worn me down and he popped my male cherry.

All through the summer and fall of 2011, Bud wore me down. He joked with me with suggestive terms and scenarios and touched me and found ways and times and places to be alone with me. He never was threatening about it. He was cultivating me, not trapping me. Invariably we asked me if I was ready to go with him, being “taken care of” by him. On Christmas Eve, I’d been worn down and charmed to the point where I was ready.

It helped that I was half drunk and we had been assigned to share a hotel room. The band was on the top of the world that night. We had played an opening band slot at a Christmas Eve concert in Atlanta. Immediately after the show we were notified that we were being signed with a Nashville record label. We gathered at the hotel bar to celebrate. Bud sat by me and was all touchy feely and ordering drinks for himself that he was passing to me to make sure I had plenty to drink. It was legal for me to drink in the hotel bar, but I hadn’t done much of it yet in my life.

I can’t remember getting from the hotel bar to our room, although Bud was there in the room. Even half looped, I accepted that he was there. It was as much his room as mine. There were two double beds in the room. I had some awareness that he was holding me and kissing me. He had maneuvered me into position before and gotten in a couple of kisses and a grope before I had escaped him. I wasn’t alarmed that he was bare-chested. We were from the beach. We all went to the beach together. We usually practiced bare-chested. I didn’t know how I got all naked, though, and was shocked that he had nothing on below—but that was because I’d seen his cock for the first time and was in shock that it was so black and big and in full erection.

He seduced me with pleasure. The pleasure of listening to his rich bass voice cajoling me. The pleasure of his kisses and of his hands on my body. The arousing pleasure of him turning my back to him, holding me in close, rubbing that massive cock of his on the small of my back and pushing it between my thighs, under my balls, rubbing over my puckering rim. The pleasure of him laying me on my back on the bed and grasping my ankles, pushing my knees up into my chest, rolling my pelvis up, taking my cock and balls in his mouth, and sucking, sucking, and sucking until I jerked and came with a little cry. And the pleasure of his mouth and tongue on my asshole, working me deep, working me open.

And then the pain. He knew I was a virgin. He knew he was a hung bull. He was half drunk too, and he’d worked at me so long that he was almost crazed with lust and arousal. He took time getting inside me only because I was so tight and unused. Granted, I’m sure he tried to talk me through it, telling me to relax and to breathe, giving me instruction on how to open to him, how to receive the huge, insistent shaft, but I was in panic and pain. My thinking was wild, the cock was massive, and the sensation of being invaded, filled, and stretch alien and threatening. I couldn’t focus.

But we were both animals in heat, and he could be patient only for so long.

I do remember him muttering, “Fuck it,” and then just taking me, letting loose and taking me hard and fast and deep, holding me close in his powerful arms and getting on with it and on with it and on with it until he got to getting it over with. He got it his huge dick in as fast as he physically could, regardless of my cries and groans and writhing under him and digging my nails into his shoulders. I was overpowered and nearly unconscious and exhausted when he was inside as deep as he could go.

“It’s done. I’m in. Lay there and take it,” he commanded. “You’re spiked now.”

I recognized he was right. I also was learning that I was a true submissive, subject to expressed control and command. I surrendered; he had mastered me. As he started to pump me, I lay there, open and vulnerable to him, giving neither help nor opposition as he fucked me to his ejaculation.

Our eyes made contact and I’m sure he could see the shock and helplessness in my expression. “Stay with me, baby,” he murmured. “It will get better and better. We’ll be so good with each other.” I turned my face to the side and sobbed. He continued thrusting inside me. At least one of us was going to get his full measure of pleasure.

He didn’t apologize in so many words afterward, but he held me more tenderly in his arms, kissed me, and stroked my body with his long, sensuous, brown fingers—the same fingers that pulled such divine music from his fiddle. That probably would mean nothing to guys who weren’t musicians, but it was a special feeling to me for my body to be played by the same fingers Bud Taylor used to make magic on his fiddle.

“You gonna turn me down next time, baby?” he asked. “We good with this now? If not, I won’t touch you again.”

“We’re good with this now,” I whimpered.

“If you’re good with it, I’ll be doin’ you again tonight. I’ll do you right this time.”

“Yes,” was all I could manage to say.

“Stay with me, baby,” he repeated. Apparently we had a different understanding of what that meant.

We slept on one bed, with him wrapped around me, as I sobbed lightly and moaned, unable to sleep, although he snored for a while. Before dawn, he woke and fucked me again from behind.

“We gonna do it again now, baby,” he said. It wasn’t a question.

“Yes,” I answered.

He took it slower the second time and was more affectionate. It was enough better that I gave him what he wanted. This time I was calm enough to listen to his directions and to follow them. I made him moan this time too. It helped tremendously that we worked together this time. It also helped that I had already been reamed open to his needs. This time when he’d worked his way in most of the way, successfully guiding me through relaxing and willing myself open to him, breathing regularly, holding my buttocks and arching my back into a position that gave him a straight angle up into me, he held, throbbing inside me as I opened to him.

“Concentrate on your spreading open for me,” he whispered. “Think of the wonder of the fusion of the two of us, two men becoming one, and of the coming dance of the fuck, doing what comes natural. Concentrate on bring out the pleasure and on the wonder of me moving inside you.”

His poet had clicked in. The way he said it, as poetry, in that deep bass voice of me, made my groans fade into sighing and moans. “Do it. Do it. Fuck me,” I whispered.

And he did it. He started to move inside me, slow, languid pressing in, withdrawing, pressing in.

“Feel it. Feel us become one. Go with the fuck,” he murmured in my ear and kissed me there. His hands were gliding over my body, one of them reaching for, finding, and stroking my cock.

And then we were fucking in rhythm. It was still painful; this was only my second time and the first one had been torn out of me. But, as he gave patient instruction, I thought of the lovely, big black cock inside me, Bud taking his enjoyment from me, the awe of the big black bull needing to be inside me. He stroked faster, reached deeper, deep inside the soft core of me, the two of us rocking with each other, both concentrating on the working of the cock inside me, and, for the first time, I felt the muscles of my passage walls undulating over the stroking cock, making love to it as it made love to me deep—and then flooded me with the spouting of his warm cum. Once, twice, yet again. He hadn’t worn a condom. All raw, natural, ultimately pleasure flowing in, even for me.

“That was good, very good,” he murmured.

“Yes,” I answered.

“I want to do it again. I got to do it again.”

“Yes,” I responded.

And he did. He was Superman. I had quickly found my role of a total submissive.

I’d done a lot of thinking during the night, between fucks. I had been moving toward having sex with a man. I wouldn’t have chosen a black man or one with such a massive cock, but it was too late to have a first time with anyone. Letting Bud fuck me meant I didn’t have to try to hold him off any longer. That had been getting tiresome. Increasingly I had become mesmerized by the charisma and talents of the man—and comfortable with him being black. I probably would have eventually gone with him even if I had been fully sober. And each time he did it, it got to be more pleasurable . . . the fuck became as pleasurable as his kissing, fondling, and cock and hole preparation, and then we got into the rhythm of it more quickly each time, fucked more intensely each time. We became fused in the fuck, one smoothly fucking machine.

I couldn’t deny that the second time was more pleasurable during the fuck. The panicked pain and shock of the first time had been nearly all me. He had tried to guide me as long as he could hold off. I wouldn’t think about him going ahead and taking me when I wasn’t ready to receive him. The second time I was ready to receive him. The second time showed the promise of what it could be with him. The third and fourth times achieved the natural rhythm of life.

But, God, he was huge. I suppose that later, when I was going with more men, I could be grateful that I’d been reamed already by the biggest.

The band was still giddy the next day, Christmas Day. We partied in the hotel bar around a decorated Christmas tree there and generally floated around on Cloud Nine and discussed what tracks to put on our first labeled album. It was Christmas Day. We had the bar all to ourselves, other than the bartender, who partied with us, no doubt just glad that he wasn’t all alone on the day.

We were a relaxed, close-knit band of brothers—at least in those days before the tensions of our individual pairings began to permeate the atmosphere when we were grouped together. Ten guys living out of a bus when we were on the road couldn’t help but get tense after a while. There were hugs and smiles all around that day, though. I tingled at Bud’s hugs, starting out frosty but melting as the day wore on. I let him touch me and kiss me, to put his arm around me, and to whisper in my ear suggestions that made me shiver. The memories of the previous night, especially the second coupling, were becoming more arousing.

The other band members couldn’t help but realize that Bud had spiked me at last. They certainly had known he had been working on doing it. The innuendo of the two of us doing it stopped that day. It was done, and they knew it had been done.

The image of Bud’s big black cock and what he did with it filtered into my mind and took over. I had been afraid of it at the start the previous night. Now it began to dominate my fantasies. I wanted to touch it, to fondle it, to have it in my mouth as Bud had taken mine into his mouth the previous night. The arousal went to my groin and I hardened. Bud, who was holding me and touching me, knew I had gone hard. He didn’t know it was from the thought of his cock, but he was in heat as well.

“Let’s go someplace,” he whispered in my ear. “I’ll take good care of you.” I didn’t respond by answering verbally, but he could feel me shudder. “Come upstairs. I need to get it off,” he whispered. I was embarrassed at the change in the rest of the band’s attitude toward us both and I wasn’t ready for them to know what they obviously knew. I resisted. I didn’t go with him, and he left for an hour, saying he needed to take a nap. We were having a good enough time as a group that I didn’t think on his absence, and when he came back he was as affectionate and touchy feely as he’d been before. It was only years later that I was told that Bud had gone off with the bartender for that hour and fucked him.

But he had asked me first. In all that time that I refused to accept that this wouldn’t be an “only me” relationship and blamed myself for him going off with the bartender that day, I kept telling myself that he’d asked me first. It was my fault for not saying yes.

I think that Christmas Eve was the last time I didn’t just get up and follow Bud when he told me he wanted to take me away and fuck me, though. He very quickly learned that I was a total submissive to him, at his command. When we were alone, all he had to do was say, “Go down on your knees and suck my cock” or “Lay on your back and spread your legs for me,” and I would do it. The more gruff the command, the quicker I would respond. He would growl, “I want to fuck you now,” and I’d stop what I was doing, drop my trousers, and lie down on the bed on my back or belly, depending on how he said he wanted to do it. And I would shiver with arousal that I had a master to use me.

As soon as the other guys in the band knew Bud and I had finally gotten it on the previous night, they started treating us as a couple. They were mostly paired up too. As far as I knew, they were all at least bi. They seemed sexually quite free and loose about sex. Bud wasn’t the only band member who had propositioned me in the past. I don’t know why I didn’t think about Bud maybe being bi or freer with sex at that point, but I didn’t. I was naïve and warming to the idea of being with him.

Morgan True, a guitarist I’d flirted with in the months that Bud intimidated me and I’d been avoiding, made a pass at me while Bud was gone that day, but Bud returned before anything developed from that. My mind was still obsessed with Bud’s black monster cock, so I wasn’t moving into Morgan’s frequency at that moment. Morgan wasn’t black. At one time that would have been in his favor, and having now been initiated into man sex, I was letting Morgan get closer to me than before. Maybe if I wasn’t latched into thinking about black cock . . .

Years later, when I was letting loose on the rebound from Bud, Morgan and I did get it on briefly. But that didn’t last long, and they all were revenge fucks.

The band did another concert that night and thus we spent the same night in the hotel before driving our converted school bus back to Nags Head the next day.

That night I learned to worship Bud’s long, thick, black cock, with him sitting, naked, on the foot of the bed and teaching me to fondle it and stroke it and suck it. I became fascinated with it and became increasingly obsessed with taking something that big—and black—inside me. And then it was inside me, and, sensing that I was becoming lost to him, Bud took his time in fucking me with it in a missionary that night and then in a doggie, and, finally, in a side split. He taught me to open fully to it and to take more pleasure from having it inside me than when he wasn’t inside me. The poetry he spun for me in my ear in his deep bass voice that night was all focused on the big black cock, taking every advantage of the hold it had taken over me. It wasn’t just Bud and his personality that owned me; it was as much that big black snake between his legs. It almost had a separate, controlling personality all its own.

* * * *

For the next five years I couldn’t get enough of Bud and his cock and I thought I had every reason to believe he was as connected to me. Bud, the man, also slowly became more central to me than the obsession of having that big, black cock working inside me. At the point when the break came, my heart was broken and I realized that I had been in love with him.

And that I had deceived myself.

The whole world flipflopped in early summer 2015 because of two events. The first was on the unofficial start of summer, not the calendar day. Our flighty keyboarder didn’t show up for a concert we were doing at Harry’s in Wanchese. We remained grounded at Harry’s despite now having a national reputation because that’s where we’d gotten our start. The Bob Hawley band had become a major benefactor for the whole Roanoke Island-Nags Head region, where the locals protected our privacy, and we regularly played there to “give back.” Although the band had always been pretty stable in membership, we’d gone through a series of keyboarders. When Steve didn’t show for the afternoon rehearsal, Bob was ready.

Manuel Gonzalez, who went by Manny, was twenty-eight years of muscular hard-labor Hispanic beefcake who had come to Roanoke Island from Texas as a migrant worker to pick strawberries in the field. He was working class and gay and he was a musician, so he had gravitated to Harry’s in his off hours. His favorite band was the working man’s rock band, the Bob Hawley Band, and he’d come to the island without realizing the band was grounded here. He’d sat in with a pickup band at Harry’s and Bob heard him play. When the Bob Hawley Band had a Memorial Day gig at Harry’s and Steve, the regular keyboarder, didn’t show by dress rehearsal, Bob invited Manny to sit in. As of that night, he became the band’s keyboarder.

He also became my sexual harasser just as Bud had been when I first joined the band four years earlier. He was as aggressive as Bud had been with me. The other band members were laying off me with the understanding that I was Bud’s territory. Manny recognized no such barriers. Bud didn’t give him any shit about Manny using dirty words and suggestions with me. He seemed to be amused by it. I only later realized that he let Manny work me because Bud didn’t feel as attached to me as I thought of being attached to him. It was a minor irritant for me; I’d been through that with Bud and that was when I was a virgin. I was experienced now, and Manny was a hunk. I could enjoy the arousal of him without feeling pressure to do anything about it. I had Bud—or so I thought.

Manny certainly had his attractions, beyond his body to dream about, well-honed by his hard work in the fields. Manny was hung and in a different way from Bud. Bud was long and thick. Manny was just extremely thick, having what we called a beer can dick. He made sure I saw it, flashing me at the most unexpected moments, which amused the band members who saw it. They were one laid-back, sexually loose group. He delighted in taking advantage of our placement on stage during a concert to flash me with his dick where only I or one or two other band members could see him even though the place was filled with a crowd. He liked how that put me off my stride while I was singing. I couldn’t say that his cock didn’t arouse me, especially since it not only was the thickest I’d ever seen but also because it was black. He was a dusky-skinned Hispanic, but his balls and dick were black. These was a feature Bud had that turned me on. It had the same effect with me when it was Manny.

The other event a little later that year was that Keith Dunlop, a sexy little blond guy, just graduated from First Flight High School, as I had done four years earlier, joined the band as the sound and light technician and equipment guy—just as I had. I was twenty-three now. Keith was eighteen. I’d been nineteen when I’d started working with the band and Bud had taken an interest in me. I didn’t know that part of Bud’s fetish was taking young guys, for the first time, if possible. He’d been my first. The other band members apparently knew this, but it was only later that any of them told me they knew this and that, further, Bud had been knocking off other late teenagers even as I started marching into my twenties. I was the only one who didn’t see it at the time.

Manny had his way with me late in the summer of 2015. I was writing songs then for the band and they were doing well. All of us were making big bucks, I more than most because the songs I was writing were hitting the charts and the residuals from that were piling up in the corners. By then I’d bought my parents their dream house in Florida and I’d moved into the East Driftwood Street cottage.

I was composing a song and had invited Manny over to play the keyboard while I worked my way through some of the rough edges. He’d thought I’d invited him over to finally give myself to him, and he was both a little buzzed when he arrived and a little irritated when he found out I hadn’t invited him over for sex.

“Why do you play so hard to get?” he asked. “You know I’d do you good. You don’t have any trouble putting out for Bud.”

“Bud and I are an item—together—just us,” I said.

Manny snorted. “Why don’t you tell that to Bud? He’s screwing everything in sight. Not just you. The other guys in the band put out left and right too. Why are you different? Bud isn’t just with you. And he likes them young. You’re getting on.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, suddenly beginning to see what he meant. I’d worked hard at fooling myself—at kicking all of the contrary evidence into the corners.

“He was in one of the back fuck rooms at Harry’s when I just left there. He was screwing Keith. He screws Keith regularly, although Bud told me he likes it best when he’s the first to do them. He got to Keith first. He tells me he was the first one to get to you too. He says you went down hard. I want to screw you. I’ve seen how turned on you by my dick. Take it.”

He had it out, erect, thick as a beer can, pointed at me, and I couldn’t hide either that I recognized the truth of what he was saying about Bud and that I went all wobbly at the sight of his thick, black cock.

He took me then and took me hard. And I let him, in anger at Bud, thinking I could hurt Bud by letting Manny fuck me. He grabbed me by the hair—I wore it long, down to my shoulders, then—and forced me to my knees in front of him. He brought me face to face with his cock. He knew I wanted it, and I did. I worshipped it just as I had long worshipped Bud’s cock as having a separate personality from the man. It was so thick that it nearly unhinged my jaw in taking it in my mouth. He pulled me up, slapped me a couple of times, and propelled me up the stairs to my bedroom. He fucked me bent over the foot of the bed, my arms stretched over my head, my fists bunching up handfuls of the bedspread, crying out in passion, as he stuffed his impossibly thick cock inside me and rode me hard in a doggie. I writhed in delicious agony as he stuffed it in me, panting hard until I had opened enough to sheath it. He slapped me on the buttocks again and again, muttering “Open up. Take it; take it,” as he impatiently pushed in.

I took it all, crying out for the cock and moving my hips with the beefy Hispanic’s thrusts. He reached down; grabbed my ankles with his fists; raised my feet off the floor, wish boning me into a wheelbarrow position; and spread my thighs wide. I had no leverage left; I was completely at his mercy. I cried out in passion as he pounded me fast and hard. He pulled out of me and shot his load on my hole. I only realized then that he had fucked me without protection. I moaned as he pushed his cock in again, sliding more easily through the lubrication of his cum than he had done before.

“Fuck yourself on it,” he growled, letting my feet go back onto the floor so I’d be able to push off on them. I did so, surrendering completely to him. I whimpered as I moved my ass on the shaft, fucking myself.

“There, now we’re doin’ it together,” he muttered. And we were.

“Now you want it from me.” And now I did.

He reached around my hip and fisted my cock, and stroked me. I whimpered more when he released my cock, moved his hand under his balls and grasped mine, lacing his fingers through them and squeezing and distending them.

“Oh, fuck. Oh, shit,” I moaned as he crushed my balls.

“I didn’t say you could stop fucking yourself on my dick,” he growled. And I resumed moving my hips on the shaft, my eyes watering from him working my balls.

“Come for me,” he commanded, and I did. He pulled out of me and pushed me down into a fetal position on the bed, where I lay, panting, as he went off to the bathroom.

After he’d screwed me and had screwed me good, I served him a beer from the refrigerator in the kitchen and took one myself. I stood on one side of the kitchen counter, naked, and he, naked, sat on a stool on the other side and we looked at each other from some time before either of us spoke.

“That was good. Very good,” he said at last.

“Yes,” I agreed. He had been cruel. He had surprised me, though, in showing me that I wanted to be dominated and used a little cruelly. What I was thinking was that it was too bad I didn’t have a video of it to show to Bud. I was sure that Bud, seeing it, would be so jealous that he’d realize that it should just be Bud and me. I was still being stupid. I was still in love with him.

“You are a great lay,” Manny said. “You take it like a champion. I’m thicker than Bud is, ain’t I?”

“Feels that way, yes,” I said. I wished Bud was here to hear me admit that. It would bring him down a notch or two.

“You don’t seem too thrilled. I’ve just screwed the shit out of you and you seem distant.”

“You were great,” I said. “I didn’t know before now that I sometimes wanted what you did to me—to be used hard. I’m just . . . I’m just thinking about something else.”

“Bud? You’re still thinking about Bud?”

“Yes.”

“You want me to leave now, or . . .”

I rode his cock in a facing cowboy on my bed, him lying there on his back, knees bent and feet flat on the bed, grinning at me and holding my waist between his calloused, beefy hands, as facing his head, arms flung behind me, fists pressed to the bedspread beside his feet, and my feet planted on either side of his waist to provide leverage, I rose and fell on his cock, fucking myself.

“You’re gonna be there for me any time I want it,” he said after we’d both come.

“Yes,” I replied.

“I’m gonna stay here tonight.”

“Yes.”

“I’m gonna fuck you again.”

“Yes.”

The next morning after riding him in a reverse cowboy, hands gripping his bent knees and churning on his cock, facing away from him, I fixed Manny breakfast, and he left the cottage whistling, knowing that he owned me as much now as Bud did.

Over the next few months, I slept around the band as openly and blatantly as possible, trying to make Bud jealous and to bring our relationship to a head. He cheerfully ignored my change in behavior while just as openly fucking Keith and me too. I was hot and heavy with Manny for a month and then with Morgan, the guitarist, for another month. Bud didn’t change.

After Thanksgiving, with the band taking off until New Year’s beyond some recording in our Manteo studio, Bob Hawley took me aside and said that this “thing” or “not thing” between me and Bud was beginning to sour the atmosphere, and . . .

“You want me to leave the band?” I asked.

“Bud is the band’s biggest drawing card,” Bob answered.

I left the band, saying I was going to try it solo. The press was good to me, saying that I’d developed into a front singer and was in a band that already had a front singer, who the band was named for. It was understandable that I’d go out on my own. And I was a song writer too. As a last straw, I’d composed the “Big Black Thing’” song. The public liked that song enough to take it platinum without giving the lyrics much thought. The band members thought was about Bud, but I knew was about Bud’s cock, which I’d seen as a personality in its own right for some years past. It didn’t bring Bud back to me solely. Nothing did.

I told Bud I loved him. He said he loved me too. But then he went off and fucked Keith. We obviously didn’t have the same definition of “love.”

People had started mumbling about the band and sexuality. Gay bands had a niche, but not as big a niche as we already had. Some of the band members, including Bob Hawley, had taken wives to tamp down the rumors, not wanting to tarnish the macho band image the band had.

After a series of “sometimes I was there and sometimes not” concerts, the band and I went our own ways, although we sometimes crossed paths at Harry’s. Bud replaced Keith with the next sound and lighting eighteen-year-old, Sean. There was no question that Bud had popped Sean’s cherry too.

I slept around. Sometimes when the band was in town, Manny came over and slapped me around, I opened my legs for him, he fucked me cruelly, and then, after drinking with him, I rode his beer can cock to let him know I would take what he dished out. I sometimes fed him breakfast the next morning. I never said no to him. But nothing more permanent developed there. I was still in love with Bud. At Christmas of 2017, Facebook did a thing on the Bob Hawley fiddler, Bud Taylor, becoming engaged with a black high-fashion model, Marilee, who was so famous in her business that she only had the one name. Rumors were that she was pregnant.

By then even Manny had married a woman and had stopped coming by to show how easily I could be had by a man with a big cock. Then it was basically one-night stands with musicians coming and going at Harry’s.

When I had crashed their wedding on the beach just now, and dumped the bucket of ice on Bud, Marilee did, indeed, have a very un-model bulge in her wedding dress.

* * *

I came off of autopilot when I was passing through the last named blip of a sandy hump of land on highway 12 down the narrow Outer Banks and approaching Hatteras Island, the last call on the road. Once on the island and within a half mile of the current location of the Hatteras Lighthouse, I turned off on Old Lighthouse Road and then onto Tower Circle Road. I pulled up beside the ruins of the old Greenwood Lighthouse. I had no idea why there had been another lighthouse here other than the Hatteras Lighthouse or which came first or why this one had been abandoned, other than it had a slight Tower of Pisa list toward the sea, but I didn’t particularly care either. I came here because no one used the perfectly good beach onto the Atlantic nearly at the lighthouse’s doorstep.

Looking up into the sky and seeing that it didn’t look all that great up there, I put the motorcycle under cover in an open-side wood shed in a copse between the lighthouse and the beach; stripped off to my Speedo, leaving my black shorts, white shirt, and bow tie in the bike’s saddle bag and the laces of the high-top boots knotted together, with the boots dangling off the bike’s handlebar; and walked deliberately to the beach.

I waded out into the water until it was over my knees and I felt the ledge under me start to drop off. I then dove into the water and, with a good stroke I’d learned on the First Flight High School swim team, started my swim toward Bermuda.

* * * *

Lacking a sense of the melodrama and being much too good a swimmer to keep it short and neat, I thought “Fuck it” far short of Bermuda and did a U-turn in the ocean and swam back to the beach. I’d been in the water a long time, however, and I found the beach wasn’t deserted when I got back to it. A beefy black man, just in shorts and boat shoes, was perched on a camp stool in front of an art easel. He was set up on a patch of grass just before a dip down to the top of the beach and was facing the ruins of the Greenwood Lighthouse. He must have been fast with the paints, because the painting was almost finished. And from where I was struggling out of the surf, it looked like a professional job.

My first thought was “Bud,” because the man was black, but I quickly dropped that. He was a body-builder type as opposed to Bud’s wiry, slender body, he had the tattoo of the wing span of a hawk or some other bird spanning his broad back in bluish-black ink, and his head was in a buzz cut, unlike Bud’s dreadlocks.

I walked up behind and to one side of him and looked at the painting of the lighthouse. “That’s very good,” I said. And it was. It wasn’t a Norman Rockwell painted photograph; it was more in the Impressionist style. But there was no question that it was the lighthouse or that it was done well. It even got the tilt of the lighthouse in the observer’s mind without it obviously being apparent or leaving the thought that the artist just didn’t get the perspective right. Looking at the lighthouse how it had been painted, I noted for the first time how phallic it was, rising in a white, thick cylinder to the cap of the beacon. I wondered if it came across like that now because the sexual magnetism of the man sitting in front of the easel. The sky behind it was almost reminiscent of Van Gogh in its surreal intensity. It was only then that I realized that the sky was really that way—that a storm was bearing down on us from the sea.

“I saw the squall forming and had to get out here and capture it before it hit,” the artist said in a rich baritone. “It’s a good thing you came out of the sea. You might have drowned.”

I didn’t note that that had been the general idea. “I was going to swim to Bermuda and then thought ‘Fuck it’ before I got even half way there.”

“So I gathered. That’s what really drew me out here, but then I saw you turn around and decided I might as well paint something as long as I was out here.”

“Are you a good enough swimmer to make it half way to Bermuda and back?” I asked.

“I’m good at a lot of things. It’s starting to rain now, though. It will be pouring and the wind will be strong enough in a few minutes to carry us all the way to Bermuda. Help me get this stuff in.”

“In? Where?” I asked.

“The lighthouse. I have a key. It’s open. It’s where I keep this crap.” He stood and when he did so, I saw that he was nearly seven feet tall and built like Zeus. He was a handsome man, of military bearing. He wasn’t young—there was gray mixed into the stubble that was his buzz cut and in the more profusive curling on his chest—but he was body-builder young in musculature. He grabbed the painting and I picked up the rest. We barely made it into the lighthouse, which indeed was open, and inside before the sky opened up in a roaring deluge.

The first floor of the lighthouse where we entered was just one circular room with a staircase against the far wall following the curve of the wall. Slit windows were set up near the ceiling at all four points of the compass. They let in enough light even during the storm, reflecting off the creamy white of the concrete walls, ceiling, and floor to enable us to see each other. I couldn’t get out of my mind the sense of being inside a giant phallus, and it was making me feel tingly and sexually tense. The man set the easel, with the painting on it, over against the side of the staircase in a fluid, graceful motion and pointed to a curved white-painted bench on the sea side of the room and said, “Sit and make yourself comfortable. We’ll ride out the storm here.”

After putting his folding camp stool and the small wooden table with the case of paints that had been on top of it on the concrete floor next to the easel, I sat on the bench. I was barefoot and wearing just the Speedo I’d been swimming in.

“I like riding in a storm,” he said, with a laugh. “Do you?” He didn’t seem to expect a response to that, so I didn’t give him one.

The massive god-like black man sat on an identical bench against the curved wall on the landward side.

“So, here we are,” He said, giving me a white-toothed smile. He wasn’t black black. He was more a creamy chocolate brown and his features were more multimix Jamaican gorgeous than pure African black. Both Bud and Manny were more of the hint-of-American ghetto thug intimidating black, which had led to me jumping when either of them said jump. This man was more military commander in bearing—one that you would jump for because he knew what was better for you and you ached to please him.

“Yes, here we are, I said. The storm shouldn’t last long.”

“Long enough,” he said, enigmatically. “My name is Hal.”

“I’m Mike,” I said.

“Yes, I know,” he said.

I gave him a sharp look.

“I’ve seen you at Harry’s before. I’ve followed your band.”

So, was he signaling that he was actively gay? Harry’s was a gay club.

“I know you lay down for men and that you sleep around. I hear you’re a pushover for black cock.” So, no more speculation on that.

I didn’t answer that. I let my eyes do a roam-about in the circular room, although there was very little in here to claim I might have interest in.

“I lay men who sleep around.” He was pushing the envelope.

“Do you?” I said, trying to feign disinterest, although my body was indicating it was quite interested.

“And I have a black cock. Does that give you any ideas?” I didn’t respond, so he changed tack. “So, you decided not to drown yourself.”

I gave him a confused look. How could he possibly know? I would have preferred that he kept talking about laying me.

“So,” he repeated, “you decided not to drown yourself—to swim toward Bermuda until you couldn’t get back.” The voice was more commanding. He was challenging me to answer. As I watched, he slipped his shorts down and off his legs. He leaned back into the wall, pushing his buttocks to the forward edge of the bench. He was in magnificent erection—possibly the biggest one I’d ever seen. It and his balls were darker than the rest of his skin tone, nearly black. He fisted it with a beefy hand. I couldn’t look anywhere but at that big black cock. “Do you mind if I jerk myself off to looking at you and wanting you while we wait for the storm to stop?”

“Suit yourself,” I said, trying for nonchalant. That was hard to do. He had one magnificent black cock. “That’s right, I decided not to drown myself,” I answered, going back to the lesser of the two pushy questions.

“It’s done with Bud Taylor. Just let it go. Let me fuck you instead.”

“Excuse me?” I said, tearing my gaze away from his cock and looking into his eyes. “What do you know about that?”

“I know the you and Bud Taylor were a number for years. I know that Bud Taylor is getting married today on the beach up at Nags Head. You band people are celebrities here. His marriage has been in all the papers. I saw you get off your motorcycle and walk into the sea, I knew it wasn’t because you came here to frolic in the surf today. You came here because almost no one uses this beach. This is private property.”

“Yeah, well. I didn’t drown myself,” I answered lamely. OK, so he knows all about it.

“Good, because that would be a waste of prime man flesh. Bud Taylor isn’t the only man who can take care of you. Look at it, Mike. Look at my dick. Is it big enough for you? Rumor is that you like big, black cock.”

I looked at it again. “Yes,” I said almost in a whisper, “It’s big enough.”

“Are you going to let me put it in you?”

“Maybe.”

“That song you wrote, ‘Big Black Thing.’ Some think it was just provocative lyrics to get the attention it got, but others say it is about Bud Taylor—about your breakup with him. Right?”

“Close enough,” I answered.

“A few know it’s about just a part of Bud—about his cock and how obsessed by and captive to it you were. That’s what the song is really about, isn’t it, Mike? Bud’s cock.”

“Yes,” I whispered.

“Is my cock as big and black as Bud Taylor’s is?”

“Close enough,” I murmured again.

“So, you don’t need Bud. You can let him go. You can ride my cock. I said I like to ride in a storm and asked you if you did. Do you?”

“Yes,”

“I’m right here, across the room from you. Stand up and come to me,” he commanded in a gruff voice. “Strip off that swimsuit and come over here and sit on this cock. Ride me in the storm.”

The ultimate submissive, lost to commands. With a whimper, I stood and slipped the Speedo down my legs. I walked across the cold concrete floor, covering the distance between us in what seemed to be an eternity. The wind was howling outside, the rain beating against the windows at the ceiling line. The light was dimming.

“I hear that Bud fucked you rough, Mike. And that Manuel Gonzalez did too. Is that how you like it, Mike?”

“Sometimes,” I admitted.

“Go on your knees to me and give me head.” He was asserting control and dominance over me. It was just the right note to take advantage of my total submissive nature—not just to any man, but to a big, hung black bull. So, it wasn’t just a black man with a hint of the intimidating thug about him.

Whimpering, I went on my knees between his spread thighs and took him in my mouth. He ran his fingers into my golden curls with one hand and manipulated my head, making sure that I took his cock deep and that gagging alone wasn’t good enough to allow me to expel him from my throat.

“That’s it, baby. That’s nice. Suck it good. We’re gonna have fun, you and me.”

He leaned over me and ran the other hand down my spine, to my buttocks, and penetrated me with a finger—and then two. I groaned and he gave a deep, dry laugh.

He was an intimidating thug after all.

He put me on the cock, facing him, my feet on the wall behind him, on either side of him, him grasping my wrists, my torso streaming down to the floor between his spread thighs, as I fucked myself on his cock, me using the leverage of my feet, and him pulling and releasing his grip on my wrists.

“Ride me. Ride me in the storm,” he called out in his rich baritone voice, and I rode him and rode him.

He turned me on the cock, and I was being held in front of him, one of his hands cupping my chin, the other with a grip in my hair, arching my back cruelly, while, at his command, I leveraged my feet off the wall behind him as before.

“That’s it, baby. Take the cock. Ride it.” I took the cock. I rode the cock.

He took me up the stairs to a second, smaller level of the lighthouse, where there was a single bed, with restraints at the four corners. He bound me, belly down, spread-eagled there, and rode my ass to our ejaculations. Afterward he released me and held me close and kissed me all over.

“Every Tuesday afternoon when you are in town. Here,” he whispered.

I was there every Tuesday for the next six weeks.

When he released me from the lighthouse, the sun was out, but branches of trees were strewn all around. The roof of the wood shed I had parked the Harley in had collapsed, but as the wood stack was higher than the top of the motorcycle, no damage had been done to the cycle.

All the time I was riding back to Nags Head, I was checking myself, physically and emotionally, to see what other damage had been done. As yet I couldn’t discern any.

The last thing I did before leaving the lighthouse was to ask Hal why he had come on to me like this and he’d said he realized, from what people at Harry’s had told him, that I’d fallen hard for Bud and that Bud hadn’t returned the devotion to me.

“I’ve been watching you and wanting you for some time. I want to share that kind of devotion with you,” he said.

Somehow that meant the world to me. I hadn’t wanted just sex with Bud. I didn’t want just sex with anyone. I wanted more.

* * * *

Hal liked to try new positions with me. We were on the second floor of the Greenwood lighthouse ruins, and Hal, more than a foot taller than I was, a hundred pounds—all muscle—heavier than I was, had me in a full Nelson. I was draped on the front of him as he stood and huffed around the room, bouncing me up and down on his buried cock, and I hugged his thighs with my legs thrown back. He was demonstrating his mastery and power over me. I was surrendering all to him, lying docilely against his chest, moaning softly, every nerve of my body tuned into the cock working inside me.

He maneuvered us over to the bed and laid me down there on my back, raising my arms one after the other over my head and binding my wrists to the headboard. “Spread your legs, feet on the footboard, and raise your pelvis to me,” he commanded in a growl. I complied and then arched my head back and my torso up and cried out as he grabbed my hips between his beefy hands, thrust his hard cock up inside my passage and began to vigorously fuck me deep inside my soft core.

Afterward, we lay on the bed in an embrace, listening to each other’s breathing as we brought it back under control.

It was the sixth Tuesday we’d met in the afternoon in the lighthouse and fucked like bunnies.

“Hal,” I said. “We always do the same thing—different positions, yes, but it’s just fucking. Maybe we could do more. Meet at other times, go somewhere, do something together.”

“I like it here,” he said. “I like this being our place, our time.”

Doubt crept in. Was there some reason we couldn’t be seen in public together, I wondered. But then we didn’t have to be seen in public together. “You could come to my house. I could fix us something to eat. We could watch a game or something on TV. Just do something together once in a while.”

“You don’t like me fucking you like this, here, in our special place?”

“Yes, of course. But we could do more. I have three bedrooms. We could fuck in each one of them.”

“I like it here. I like this being our time, our place.” And that’s where it ended. Hal rolled me onto my belly. “Go up on your knees. Give me your ass,” he commanded. I did as he wanted and he mounted and fucked me again.

A relationship. A shared relationship. That’s what I wanted, god damn it. That’s what I wanted with Bud too. Hal had said something about there being more. This was a lot. I was well plowed. But I was beginning to wonder if this was enough. I was afraid to get any deeper into it with Hal, though. What if he left me like Bud had done?

He fucked so god damn well.

* * * *

“Very nicely done, isn’t it? You know that few people know about that lighthouse? It’s quite near the Hatteras lighthouse. No one seems to know why there are two of them there. As rendered, the lighthouse looks powerful, almost phallic.”

“Yes, yes it does,” I said, with surprise that someone else had seen that in the painting and was comfortable with noting it. “I saw this oil when it was being painted,” I added. I turned and looked at the man who was standing behind me in the Buxton art gallery and did a doubletake. “Mr. Manly?” I said. “I didn’t know you were still in the area.”

“I wasn’t for a long time. I had to leave, but I came back. I run this gallery now.”

“I’m Mike Evans. I don’t know if you remember me. I was one of your students at Final Flight—”

“Of course I remember you, Mike. How could I forget you? And I’ve followed your career since then. You’ve done very well for yourself in the Bob Hawley Band.”

“I left that a couple of years ago,” I said. “I’m trying it on my own now.”

“Yes, I know. And still performing in The Lost Colony every summer and one of their big donors too. I’ve seen you in that every summer—even back when you were in high school, and I . . . well, I kept track of you.” He looked embarrassed. Actually, he looked very good. He’d kept in shape and he always was good looking. He changed the subject. “You say you watched this painting being done? You know Henry Walsh then?”

“Henry Walsh? No, I don’t think so. Doesn’t Henry Walsh own Harry’s over in Wanchese. Harry’s is—”

“Yes, I know what Harry’s is. I know it’s a gay club. I go there myself,” Manly said. “I see you play there whenever I notice that you’re on the bill. You didn’t flinch when I commented on the lighthouse looking phallic in this painting. I rather hoped—”

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen you in there.”

“I stay near the back, and the audience is mostly in the dark. I go there to see you . . . to watch you from afar.”

“Surely you go there for other reasons.”

“No, just to watch you . . . to keep some sort of connection with you.” He lifted a hand as if he wanted to touch me, but then looked embarrassed and withdrew it.

I didn’t know what to say. It was a little awkward. I’d had feelings for Mr. Manly in high school—my first flutterings of realizing I was interested in men, not women. What was he trying not to say here but being pretty open and raw about it? I know he gave me special attention in high school and there were times I thought . . . but I had no idea he might be interested in me—in that way. There were those rumors about why he’d suddenly disappeared, and Jim Hodges had said it was something to do with me, but I thought he was just riding me. In fact, I had some fantasies about Jim Hodges riding me at the time. And about Mr. Manly too. But I hadn’t done anything. We hadn’t done anything. Bud was my first.

“The guy I saw painting these was named Hal—and he was black.”

“Yeah, that would be Henry, the owner of Harry’s,” Manly said. “You never met the guy who owns Harry’s? I know he doesn’t go around there much. He doesn’t want a lot of folks hereabouts to know he owns a gay club, I think. He owns the land that lighthouse sits on too—the Greenwood lighthouse. And he and his family live close to it.”

“His family?” I asked, my spirits taking a dive. I already was getting leery of Hal. He didn’t want to meet anywhere but the lighthouse and anytime but on Tuesday afternoons. I wanted what we had to develop further, but he was balking. Guess I now knew why. He wasn’t just Hal; he was the Harry of Harry’s, as well as Henry, the artist and family man. He always tightened up when I tried to discuss anything beyond the here and now inside that lighthouse.

“Yes. A wife and three kids,” Manly said. “Listen, Mike. I’m glad we finally met up. I’ll have to confess that I came back because of you. I couldn’t get you out of my mind. But when I came back, you were so famous in these parts and I didn’t know . . . but you’re still playing at Harry’s. Tell me . . . are you . . . ? There was talk of you and Bud Taylor, for instance.”

“Am I gay?” I asked. “Is that what you want to know?”

“Yes, I guess so. Back there when you were in high school, I thought maybe you were leaning in that direction. I thought maybe . . .”

“You thought maybe there could be something between us?”

He was silent for a moment, and then he admitted, “Yes. I’d thought about that and hoped . . . but then they asked me to leave.”

“I thought it about it . . . with you . . . back then, too.”

He came close up to me. “Tell me. Are you seeing anyone now? I know that Bud Taylor got married a few weeks ago. But, of course, in this day and time that doesn’t mean—”

“No, I’m not with Bud Taylor . . . . anymore. That ended some time ago. I’m not with anyone now.” And, suddenly, I realized that was true. Hal wasn’t who I had thought he was, and, most important, he was married and had kids at home. He wasn’t ever going to go beyond Tuesdays in the lighthouse. He didn’t want what I wanted. He had every reason to know what I wanted in our relationship and he had deceived me on where he stood on that—and why. Maybe it was time for a change—a big change. Maybe pursuing big black, randy bulls with black cocks wasn’t the direction I should be going. Maybe I needed to go back in time.

“You know there’s something I constantly wanted to do back there in high school,” he said, his voice soft. It was like he was walking on eggshells in moving in closer to me now. He lifted his hand and hovered it near my head, brushing a stray curl back into place. “Back then I was always wanting to run my fingers through your hair. You always kept it long like this, and it’s such a catching shade of blond.”

“Go ahead, if you want to,” I said. And when he did, I closed my eyes and moaned. “Is that all you wanted to do?” I asked.

“No, I wanted to do this too,” he said, moving his lips to mine. The kiss was sweet. The second kiss was more passionate.

“Is that all you wanted to do?” I asked.

“No, but I never could hope . . .” he said.

“I often hoped . . . back then,” I said. “I have a question for you.”

“What?”

“You aren’t married, are you? No kids at home somewhere?”

“No. I’m all alone. I hoped someday I might not be. It’s why I came back here.”

“Do you have a back room? And a ‘closed’ sign you can put on the door for a while?” I asked, my voice sounding husky even to me.

“Yes. But maybe we should take this slow,” he said. “Maybe we should go to dinner and talk about where we are and where we want to go. And maybe a movie afterward. You, know, a proper date.”

What a novel idea, I thought. And exactly in that opposite direction of how I usually got it on with a man. Maybe this was the sign I needed to approach this differently. But then again . . .

“And after the movie?”

“If everything works out right . . . and if you want to, we could go to your place or mine.”

“If we go to mine, I’ll fix you breakfast in the morning,” I said.

He gave me a sloppy grin and we kissed again.