Summer of Twenty-Nine

Jack Cranford himself picked me up at Denver International Airport in the Hunt’s Ranch Range Rover for the nearly four-hour drive up into the Rockies to the northwest to the ranch. He had said it was no trouble because he had to meet the flight of another couple that would be lodging at the ranch. When we’d exchanged e-mails, he hadn’t asked me why I was coming or how long I was staying. He had no reason to know of my troubles with Amy in New York and my difficulty in getting my current novel written—that I needed to get away from her and the city. There was no question of whether there were accommodations at the ranch, which I’d heard was doing great lodging business. There would always be room for me in the main ranch house. I was Rick Hunt. I owned one-twenty-sixth of the family-owned ranch that still raised cattle but had moved on to taking timber off the surrounding mountains for construction projects in the boom state of Colorado and had become a dude ranch for the well-heeled who wanted to get away from everything, as I did, and wanted to be taken up in the mountains to hunt elk.

I had known going up in the mountains for a different kind of hunt.

Amy had said that it was just my having turned twenty-nine life crisis—that and that we no longer shared a bedroom, let alone a bed, and we certainly didn’t share interests. She was a doctor in a busy hospital and highly social, with her own set of friends the few hours a week she wasn’t on duty. I was a typical novelist—a recluse, a writer, a teacher of creative writing, which I had to be, at NYU, but one who hated vapid cocktail party chit chat—and pretty much anything and anyone else Amy liked.

I had tried to make a go of the marriage, attempted the camouflage, but it wasn’t working. I needed to get away from New York. I needed to finish this novel and get it published. We needed the money—to get a divorce and each be able to get on with our lives. Mine had been a sham.

I longed for what I’d had when I was eighteen.

The other couple Cranford picked up had been two men—both expensively dressed, one middle aged and the other barely legal and cute. The older man had his wallet out during the skycap tipping phase, so I could guess which one of the two had paid for the clothes and would be paying for this vacation in a remote valley of the Rockies. The other one would be lying on his back and opening his legs on demand, I was quite sure.

Cranford motioned me to sit up front with him and they took the seats in the row behind us. They could have been the only ones in the Range Rover for all they cared. They were mesmerized with each other, although the sense I got was that the middle-aged guy was the more smitten of the two. By the time we got onto I-70 in downtown Denver, headed West, up through Golden, then headed northwest to Kremmling and up into the valley between the Rocky Mountain National Park and the Routt National Forest, the couple had settled into dozing off after their plane ride from wherever, had requested that the Sirius radio sound be turned up in the backseat, and Cranford and I found we could talk freely without them hearing us.

Cranford was the head honcho at the ranch. The last time I’d been there, eleven years previously when I put in an obligatory Hunt family summer working on the ranch between high school and college, Cranford had been married to my Aunt Sylvia, who had previously taken responsibility to manage the ranch with my father’s brother, Sylvia’s first husband, Brandon Hunt. Brandon had died, Sylvia had continued running the ranch, and she married the hunkiest of the cowboys then in the bunkhouse, Jack Cranford. He’d been a good fifteen years her junior, had ridden her into the grave, and wound up managing the ranch himself. He wasn’t a Hunt, so he wasn’t related to me, except in an in-law way, but he knew everything there was to know about the ranch and the Hunts would be lost without him running it.

When I was last at the ranch, Jack was the hunkiest, most massive cowboy on the spread, which, knowing how hard cowboys are worked, is saying something. At six-foot-five of muscle, he was the god of the ranch, a Zeus figure. He was all power, and the family’s take on Aunt Sylvia’s relatively early demise was that he wore her out, but that she died smiling. The Hunts didn’t much care. She was an in-law who was somewhat imperial in her management of the Hunts’ property and probably scraped off more of the profits for herself than she was accounting for. He was one rough character. Eleven years later, he was still all of that.

“That’s what we do now,” Jack said, gesturing toward the backseat with a nod of his head.

“What’s what we do?” I asked.

“Those two, back there. We’re an isolated dude ranch now catering to guys who want to get away and do each other. And it’s a good business. They don’t usually make any trouble or demands, and we don’t have to do any advertising. They find us by word of mouth. Good business. We added two cabins last year, and we still keep booked up. Even the hunting lodge up in the Routt forest. Regulars come there to hunt elk but also to hunt each other.”

“You OK with that trend in the business?” I asked, thinking, if you only knew what’s eating at me.

“It’s fine with me.”

“And the Hunts—the ones on the management board.”

“They don’t care about anything but the bottom line,” Jack said, with a snort, “that and the business not making any waves—not getting a lot of attention.”

“Having such a ranch doesn’t cause trouble in the valley?”

“The valley’s still sparsely populated, and the county sheriff is queer. So’s the local judge. So, we’re OK for now. We’re serving a demographic.” He switched gears then. “You haven’t said in your e-mails how long you plan on stayin’.”

“I don’t know myself. Maybe a few days; maybe most of the summer. I have the summer off—I teach at Barnard College, in New York, next to Columbia University. I’m taking the summer off to finish writing a novel that’s giving me fits.” And I didn’t know how long I’d being staying anywhere anymore. I was antsy. I’d have to light someplace comfortable and quiet to get the novel written. I was trying coming back to the setting, but that threatened stirring up too much of the origins of what I was writing to allow me to write dispassionately. But maybe I shouldn’t be trying to write it dispassionately. Maybe that’s what it needed—more pathos and passion. But passion was already a problem. While writing it I’d already allowed the writing to go to racy for my kind of novel and had had to rip whole pages of description out. Then I’d told my agent what the problem was and he’d said to put it all back in and he’d just find an appropriate publisher. I could always publish it under a pen name. I just didn’t know where I needed to be to get it finished. I’d give Hunt’s Ranch a try, and if that wasn’t working, I’d move on. Maybe California.

“I read The Photograph and Raven’s Possession. They was set here in the valley, wasn’t they?”

“Yes, they were.” I was surprised Jack had read them. I hadn’t taken Jack as the reading kind. He wasn’t well educated, not that that kept him back in his line of business. He just needed strength, decisiveness, meanness, and command to do his work, and he had them in spades.

“They was a little racy. Your new one that suggestive as well?”

If only he knew. “The mainstream is pretty open to that now. It’s mostly a matter of finding the right publisher for it. The novels do well.”

“I bet they do,” he said, with a little laugh. “I just bet they do.”

“And I don’t know where the new novel leads,” I said. “It hasn’t come together yet.” That was a lie. It was beyond suggesting. I didn’t have a clue how racy it would wind up. I just knew I wanted it to be honest and that that would change everything in my life. Maybe it putting me on the brink of massive change—not being able to turn back from there—was what was holding me up in the writing of it. I damn well knew what the story was—what I wanted to write. “Would you read it if what I write is racy?” I asked.

“Would you read it to me?” he asked and then laughed. But he continued before we could get into that. “The new one—the one you’re writing—that set in the valley too?”

“Yes, it is,” I answered. That’s where it all came back to—that valley in the Rockies. That’s where I’ve come back to to see if it can help me finish the writing. The Valley. No, I couldn’t say how long I would be staying at Hunt’s Ranch for—maybe most of the summer. Maybe I’d flee in the morning.

“Rafe’s glad you’re coming back for a visit. It’s been a long time, hasn’t it?”

“Rafe? He left.” How the hell had that gotten dropped into the discussion? What did Jack know about that? Shit. Maybe I’d flee in the morning. He was twenty-six when I last was here. That would make him what now? Thirty-seven? Time for some of the vinegar to have drained out of him?

“He came back. He’s head honcho in the bunkhouse now. He leads the hunting parties. Most of the guests hunt with cameras now. That’s a trend too. Rafe don’t like it much. He’s still a rough and tumble kinda guy.”

Was he ever, I thought, as Jack continued.

“He don’t cotton with the cameras much. He wants to use his gun.”

Hasn’t changed there much, I thought, and went on to fantasize over Rafe and using his gun. But I fought out of that. “You asked if the new novel is set in the valley. Yes, it is. I guess that’s why I’ve come back, to try to get back in touch with it.” Although now, right now, I was thinking of asking him to turn the Range Rover right around and going back to the airport—across the busy city. But we were driving up into the mountains on I-70, west of Denver, now, and, as always, that was having a calming, “coming home,” effect on me. “And, yes, it’s been a long time since I was here. Eleven years. I was just out of high school and worked on the ranch for the summer. Since then it’s been the East Coast and big cities. My branch of the Hunts broke away from here.”

“You like it on the East Coast—lots of people, big cities?”

“Sometimes.” And that was true. I couldn’t imagine how limited my horizons would have been if my branch of the family had remained here, in the mountains of Colorado. Besides, New York was a “lot of people” town. You could get lost there. You could lead a double life and few would ever know it. And there were opportunities for almost any kind of lifestyle you wanted to lead.

“But it’s good to be grounded in what you were, where you came from,” Jack said. “It’s good to come back now and again—more often than eleven years.”

“Yes, sometimes,” I repeated. I looked over at him, at his strong, beefy hands on the wheel and his ruggedly handsome face. He was what? Nearly fifty now. Still a Zeus. But then I looked away at the slopes rising on each side, at the massive concrete buildings of the Coors brewery as we passed it in Golden. I didn’t want to get into that now. Did I?

“You want to be a hermit at the ranch?” he asked. “I don’t know what writers need. You can have the main house to yourself most of the day. I’m living there now, but we don’t let the guests use the house anymore. We’ve built cabins and a lounge and dining room for them.”

“You living there alone?” I asked. “You haven’t found anyone since Aunt Sylvia?”

“I’m doing fine alone,” he said with enough finality that I didn’t pursue it. There were rumors about him floating in the greater Hunt family, but I wasn’t really “in” with the greater Hunt family—and I’m sure there were rumors inside the family about me too.

“I don’t know what I’ll need. Maybe I’d like to go up into the mountains. Maybe not. I’ll have to see when we get there and I get settled in.” Settled in. When would I be settled in to almost being thirty and still not honest with myself—with what I was and what I wanted from life? Thirty. No longer young. Life was passing me by.

“But you’ll let me know what you want? I want to help you get what you want. Rafe said he’d like to take you up into the mountains—we have to supply the hunting lodge later this week. Maybe you’d like to go up with those doing that. It’s a two-day trek by horse. The road up there washed out in a couple of places in the spring and there don’t seem to be any hurry up for the county to repair it.”

“Let me know when they go up. It sounds like maybe I’d like to do that.”

Then we settled into a comfortable silence, Jack concentrating on the road rising into the mountains and becoming narrower, more twisting, and rougher when we got off I-70/40 and started heading north from Kremmling, and I savoring the mountain views—the lack of skyscrapers and people hurrying here and there. The couple in the backseat were becoming more aware of the surroundings too and, having asked for the volume to be turned down on the radio, were asking Jack more questions about the ranch and the life there. He was patiently answering them, while maintaining a rugged cowboy persona. I watched him closely, though. What he had was authentic. And sexy. I had no doubt that the men in the backseat saw that too and were attracted to it.

I wondered about Jack’s sex life. I couldn’t imagine a rugged, virile man like him not getting it. Were there any women working at the ranch now?

When we had reached the ranch and I’d settled into a room in the main house—the same one I’d occupied eleven years previously, one of three kept open for any Hunts who had a notion to visit the ranch, and down the hall from Jack’s bedroom—I switched to my cowboy gear—low-rise worn jeans, a chambray shirt, and boots—and walked the central complex of the ranch, regaining my bearings here and working on getting back into the mood of the setting. I hadn’t brought cowboy boots; I didn’t have room for them on luggage I could bring on the plane. They were lined up in the main house’s mud room for the picking, and I didn’t have trouble finding a well-broken-in set that fit and satisfied me.

I was turning the corner of one of the bunkhouses when I felt a rope lassoing me and putting me on my butt on the ground.

“Rafe,” I exclaimed, looking up at the man who had expertly roped me and brought me down. He was still tall and lanky, hard-bodied, with wiry muscles. Dark and foxy and dangerous looking, a look of perpetual sulkiness, scheming, a vein of meanness and cruelty. A bad boy to the core. One you wouldn’t want to cross. One some called a rattlesnake and others called sexy as hell. While being wary of the first view, I couldn’t help being in the second group of those. I couldn’t eleven years ago. I couldn’t now at seeing him eleven years later, now in his mid-thirties. If anything, the man who had ripped my virginity out of me eleven years earlier in the mountains in the shadow of Hahn’s Peak and broken my heart when I discovered I was just a notch on his holster was more arousing and compelling than ever.

“Let me up from here, Rafe. Take this rope off me.”

“I heard you’d come back for me,” he said with a laugh, as he came down on his haunches beside me. He didn’t pull the rope off my torso that had my arms pinned to my sides, though. “You come back to come for me like you did when you were not much more than a boy?” he asked.

“I didn’t know you’d be here. I heard you’d left the ranch—been run off by something you did or didn’t do. You weren’t on my mind at all. You had nothing to do with me coming back here.”

“But you’ve had me on your mind ever since you heard I was here, I reckon,” he said. Another laugh. I didn’t have an opportunity to answer that, because he leaned into me, cupped my head with one hand, and brought me into a kiss. The other hand went to my basket, enjoying the feel of me hardening up for him. I resisted the kiss at first, but as it went on, I surrendered to it, opening to him, hungrily receiving him.

He came out of the kiss, took his hand away from my basket, and pulled the rope noose over my head. Extending a strong hand to mine, he pulled me up to my feet.

“Yes, you still want me,” he said, and continued before I could deny that. “Welcome back to Hunt’s Ranch,” he said. “I knew you’d come back to me. Later you’ll come for me too, for old time’s sake. You’re still looking good. You’re looking great. Good enough to eat.” He tilted his hat at me and turned and strode off.

Now that I was back up and on my feet and he was gone, I looked around. We’d been watched from the horse corral not far away. At least four of the guests, all men, all paired off. They seemed interested in what they’d seen, but not shocked. I’d already been told that this was that kind of ranch now.

Rafe did come for me and I did come for him—the way he liked it—later, in the night. I probably conveyed the message he could that afternoon when I kept coming upon him in the work areas of the ranch building complex and stopped and watched him—forking hay into troughs, shirtless, his muscles rippling, or at a water pipe dumping a bucket of water over his head to cool down, once again shirtless. I’d always move on when he saw me watching him, but not until he’d laughed and flexed his muscles for me. Once he even crouched down and held his fist in front of his crotch, making jack-off motions. Me watching him obviously amused him and gave him confidence. It frustrated me.

The rest of the preceding evening was spent getting my writing materials out, reviewing what I’d written, and contemplating where I was going from there. Rafe, despite myself, had gotten my juices going and I felt I could pick up the writing and hone in on the direction now. It was only Jack and me at the dinner table in the main house, served by a woman with a voluptuous figure but a good many hard years on her. Her name was Muriel and she was at least partially Hispanic. She was younger than Jack, and I wondered if she was his sexual relief. I felt a pang of jealously. I said nothing about that, though, only telling him that he didn’t have to sup with me. I knew he was busy running a ranch.

“I like talking with you,” he said. “And this is your first night here. We’ll see what comes later. I hope you’ll be with us for a longer rather than a shorter time. It’s always good to have a Hunt visiting.”

I retired to my room after dinner and got 1,000 new words, most of which I thought I’d probably keep, written to the novel before I stripped and went to bed. I always slept in the nude when it was convenient for me to do so. I also often put myself to sleep masturbating to some sex scene in my mind that may or may not appear in some form—most likely watered down—in something I would later write. I surprised myself that night. I assumed my scene would feature Rafe, but it didn’t. It featured Jack. And the Jack of the fantasy scene was hung like a bull and hovered over me, his knees pushed in under my buttocks, my body streaming down in front of me, and Jack gripping my waist with his hands and looking down into my face. He obviously was inside me, fucking me, in the dream, but, as dreams go, I felt nothing of him inside me. I so wanted to feel a stud of a man inside me.

The reality of the night did feature Rafe, though. I was asleep in some dark hour I couldn’t name when he stole into the room. I woke and struggled with him, but he slapped me down and stunned me by banging my head against the brass headboard. In no time, he expertly had me hogtied, on my knees, with my cheek pressed to the mattress, and my wrists tied to my ankles by rough rope and a bandana stuffed in my mouth. He knelt behind me and ate my ass out and milked my cock until, moaning deeply, I came for him. Then, naked except for wearing his boots, he came up on the bed, crouched over me, mounted and penetrated me, and, riding me high like he was in a rodeo, fucked the stuffing out of me. He had brought a riding whip—he was the Rafe I remembered so well of eleven years ago—and, as he rode me, he lightly whipped my flanks—stings that had me yelping behind the bandana he’d pushed into my mouth and admonished me from trying to spit out. I remembered what he’d do if not obeyed, and I kept it in, something to bite down on as he was being cruel in my passage.

It wasn’t like I hadn’t gone out to gay clubs in New York from time to time over the last decade and gotten casual rough and impersonal sex there. I wasn’t the total innocent to being fucked. I had left Hunt’s Ranch eleven years ago having experienced it all. But I hadn’t brought myself to that act of desperation more than four times in the last decade.

He was a good cocksman—I’d had only limited experience in this for some time, but he was good inside me. He’d been good eleven years earlier, when he’d popped my male cherry and ridden me again and again throughout the summer before I went East to college—and then had passed me on for others to use and abuse. I never forgot how good he was. His cock was thin, but long, and he knew what to do with it. He’d deny me the use of it until I begged and then he’d fuck the shit out of me. He was strong and wiry and good at exotic fuck positions. He loved bondage and immobilizing the guy he was fucking—wearing them down, enjoying getting to the point where they surrendered to him and couldn’t get enough of him.

He could take me to that point eleven years ago. He could take me to that point on this night. After he fucked me like a dog, hogtied and completely at his mercy, he unbound me, and turned me on my back, and growled, “You gonna lay down nice and wanting it from me now? Open your legs for me if you want me to fuck you again.” He was looking down into my face with a cruel smirk, waiting for me to beg for more.

I didn’t disappoint. I bent my legs, placing my feet flat on the surface of the bed and raising my pelvis to him. Taking his sustained erection in my hands, I guided the head of his cock to my hole. That was welcome and declaration of surrender enough for him. Laughing, he thrust up inside me. I gasped at the cruel penetration. He grasped my wrists in his fists and forced my arms over my head. I grabbed the brass rails of the headboard as he bottomed in me and held there, cruelly, capturing my eyes with his, and waiting for me to surrender to him, to beg him to give me the cock. I did. Whining, “Fuck me. Don’t make me wait. Do me now,” I rocked against his stretching shaft and, laughing, he began pistoning his hips and brutally fucked and fucked and finished me off.

I realized then that this was what I’d come back to the ranch to get. This was what had become my fetish in life. This was what I had been unable to deny myself of in my life after Rafe in the big city. I just didn’t think it would be Rafe I’d get it from. Eleven years ago the bunk house had been full of randy cowboys who fucked me after Rafe gave me to them. It was one of them I had thought I was coming back for. Cowboys are hard-bodied and rough. That’s what I’d come back for.

* * * *

In the morning, I was alone at the breakfast table. I was a city boy now. Jack had eaten four hours earlier and had already put in half a day’s work on the ranch by the time I was eating. I had a hearty breakfast—enough that would have made Amy gag and leave the table—and I was sore as hell. I did cruise on occasion in New York, looking for what Rafe gave me the previous night, but I had been fighting it. I hadn’t used those particular muscles in months—months of pretending and trying to be what I wasn’t. But I was humming too. I left the table, took my computer out to the front porch, where I could see the mountains, and banged away on my novel.

Both ranch staff and guests passed me. They smiled at me and I smiled back. When Rafe passed me and tipped his hat, though, giving me a sly smile that encompassed both control and a question, I called him back to me. “Rafe,” I said. “Oh, God, Rafe.” I couldn’t keep the pleading tone out of my voice. He laughed, came up on the porch, took my hand, and guided me inside.

Rafe had me for lunch—in my bedroom, on my bed, my wrists tied to the headboard and him on his knees, raising my pelvis to him, my ankles hooked on his shoulders, and Rafe pounding the hell out of me. Out here on the range, the cowboys were rough in everything they did. I had been in the city so long that I needed it rough to feel alive with it. When he was leaving, I was begging him to stay. I was lost to him. I’d suffered from eleven years of sneaking around or trying to do without for large chunks of guilt time. This was a dude ranch dedicated to just what Rafe and I were doing all noontime. There was no need for pretense here. I was twenty-nine, nearly thirty, and I had lost time. I had to make up for lost time or wither away. I needed to feel.

* * * *

“Rafe?” I’d been lying there, on my back, in the pup tent on the rocky ground far up into the mountains of the Routt National Forest, still several miles from the ranch’s hunting lodge. I’d been waiting, both in some fear and anticipation. Rafe had been rough with me both times down at the ranch. He seemed to think I’d continued with this since I’d been with him eleven years ago. I hadn’t, not regularly. And when I had done it, it had filled me with guilt, all the more painful as it left me unsatisfied as well. I’d fled him in fear and worry then, worry about choosing that life, fighting it after having escaped him into another life. And I’d fallen back into it so easily—not just the sex with a man, but melting to sex with a demanding, cruel man. I’d done everything Rafe had demanded of me then. And I did everything he demanded of me now. And he demanded total submission to his every desire—sexual slavery.

I waited for him to come to me and do it again.

I lay there, naked, on top of the sleeping bag, legs spread and bent, feet flat on the ground, fingering my cock and hole, ready for him to thrust up into me and do whatever he wanted with me. I’d agreed to ride up to the hunting lodge with Rafe—and Jack—on three horses, taking two other horses as well, all weighed down with supplies. We’d come this far before camping for the night.

I was wide awake, waiting, when I heard the flap of the tent being pulled aside and felt the presence of two, heavily breathing, men in the oppressive confines of the canvas. Only one of them was me.

“No, it’s me, Jack. Will you deny me? I watched you the other night with Rafe. I want you so bad.”

I was surprised, but ready with the answer. “No, never. I thought you’d never want . . . that you’d never ask—”

“I’ve wanted you since you were here last. I wanted you then, like the other guys in the bunkhouse were having you. Every time I thought of one of the ranch hands on top of you, inside you, I wanted to be there as well. But Sylvia kept me on a tight rein.” His voice sounded belabored, saturated with lust. I couldn’t see him well in the dark, but I saw enough to take in the massive, muscular chest, the Roman-shield-like abs, the huge erection. Yes, the man was hung.

I didn’t say yes, but I didn’t say no, either. And I didn’t close my legs as he was crouched there, on his knees, between them. When I bent my legs, feet flat on the ground, and hugged his hips with my knees, he knew I would let him inside.

“Fuck, your body is beautiful.” He was running his hands over my naked torso and legs—and hard cock—and I wasn’t stopping him. “You are sexiest man alive. Shit. I can’t wait. Sorry, I have to . . .” And he was leaning over me, putting one arm around me, pulling my pelvis up to him.

“Oh shit. Fuck!” I exclaimed, realizing he was going to take me with that huge cock with little or no preparation. He did. There was spit, but not nearly enough. Holding me close, my pelvis raised to him, my torso streaming out on the sleeping bag, my arms stretched out, clutching at the earth—and anything I could. My eyes were staring wildly up into the frame of the tent, my mouth was open in one long mournful cry, as he used his other hand to put the head of his cock in position and slowly, but surely enter me.

“Open to me, dammit. Open. Relax. Let me in!”

I looked into his eyes then. They weren’t wild with want. They were simmering with lust, and there was a hint of something else there—the warrior. He wasn’t forcing me dry with a monster cock because he couldn’t hold off. He was doing it because the height of his arousal was in taking a smaller young man with a cock his size without preparation. Rafe’s thing was to immobilize me—tie me up and take me hard, and to share me—Jack’s was to tax me hard, unprepared, with a huge cock. What did I think in both cases? I realized their fetishes were mine as well. I screamed, “Fuck, you’re split me!” and started panting hard when his mushroom cap breached my sphincter. I collapsed under him, looking into his eyes. He was enjoying this immensely. So, despite suffering—despite the taxing of his cock and the captivity and hard taking of Rafe, I enjoyed the taking as well.

“Open up! Take it! Take it!”

And I did. I suffered for Jack. I arched my back and pressed my pelvis up into his groin and groaned deeply. I took his too-big dick. I suffered for him because I knew it gave him power and control—and thus did the same for me. Because while I suffered, he owned me and conquered me and spiraled up into arousal heaven, but I had the power to give him what he wanted or to deny him. But what he wanted, I wanted as well. He took me up there into heaven with him.

“You can take it. Take it; take it,” he growled.

I did what I could. And then I was spreading for him. I needed to. His was the thickest cock I’d ever taken.

“Is it too much? Do I need to . . . ?”

“No,” I cried out. “Do it. Hurry. Fuck me! Pump me! Give me your cum.”

The light in his eyes dimmed a bit. He had wanted me to beg him to stop. But he wouldn’t have stopped.

“Shit. Too big. Too big. Maybe . . .” I groaned, watching the light come back in his eyes.

But then he was in, in to the hilt. thick and deep. The muscles of my passage walls were undulating over the shaft. I lifted my knees to hug his hips and moved my hands to his shoulder blades, digging in. “Yes, yes, yes. Work me,” I whispered, with a deep moan. The rhythm of the fuck started . . . and continued, me rocking against him, throwing my head back, crowing to the night . . . and the fuck continued and continued. We fit now. We were working together. We were fucking. I was just big enough for him. He was getting the close fit he wanted. The muscles of my passage were making love to the throbbing shaft. In, out; in; out. It ended in a flood of cum inside me, him breathing heavily, wheezing his victory. I’d already come up his hard belly.

He hadn’t worn a rubber. I didn’t give a shit that he hadn’t.

I thought it was over then, but it wasn’t. He pulled out and off me. “Turn over. Give me your ass.”

With a groan, I did so, going up on my knees, him pressing my cheek to the ground with a fist in the back of my neck. His other hand was milking my cock. His face was in my crack, eating me out. He regained an erection and mounted me, riding my ass high, sliding inside me—me reamed to his need now—and fucking me again. Midway through the fuck, the fist at the back of my neck withdrew, came around my throat, and cupped my chin, pulling my torso up into his chest. He buried his face in my throat, murmured, “I’ve wanted to do this for so long,” and he fucked and fucked and fucked.

An hour later, Jack was on his back and I was saddled on his hips, riding his cock, my torso leaning back and my hands palming his knees, when the tent flap was pulled back again, and Rafe was there. He saddled himself behind me, pressing my chest into Jack’s. He tied my wrists together behind my back, and, putting his cock in position, slid it inside me above Jack’s buried staff. Jack and I held, as Rafe fucked me. I’d like to lie and say I’d never done this before, but I had. When I was here before Rafe had me do everything, including this. Every cowboy in the bunkhouse who wanted to come to the party—and few cowboys could pass up getting rocks off no matter how it was done—did me separately and together, with Rafe watching and goading us on, before I had escaped into trying for another life.

This couldn’t have been spontaneous or the first time these two had done a guy together. There was no surprise—at least from Jack and Rafe—and their movements were too coordinated for this not being something they regularly did. First it was Rafe’s cock thrusting, with Jack holding, and then they’d trade motions and later trade again. This was coordinated. They didn’t just take me in that position. They readjusted, turning me on Jack so that I was stretched out on top of him, my head resting between his pecs and his legs woven through mine to raise and spread them, while Rafe knelt between my legs pressed my shoulders into Jack’s chest, slid his cock in above Jack’s buried dick, and fucked me in a missionary.

The next day I found out just how planned it all was.

* * * *

When we reached the hunting lodge, four guys were there—two of them in their late twenties or early thirties and two in their forties. All were muscle men and were good-lucking enough not to throw out of bed. They all were shirtless, wearing shorts, boots, and ten-gallon hats. They weren’t out hunting elk, which I remarked on as we unloaded the supplies, but were setting up for a grill. It was twilight before we arrived.

One of the younger guys grinned and said, “We’re doing a different kind of hunting today,” to my casually thrown-out comment of “I think you’ll find the elk higher up on the mountain.”

What they were hunting was me. After the grill dinner, using supplies we’d brought up on the horses, we sat around a fire outside of the lodge, quaffing beer and smoking pot. I’m sure they were getting mellow for the main event and were softening me up for it as well—getting me a little high, but not too high that I zoned out or didn’t feel every stroke of what they had to give me.

At a suggestion from Jack that it was time, we moved into the lodge, Jake and one of the hunters carrying me between them. Jake and the hunter stripped me as the rest of them stripped down.

Jack leaned over and whispered in my ear, “You good with this, Rick? Rafe said that before, when you were here before . . . in the bunkroom . . . and you let Rafe and me double you.”

“Do it,” answered. This was the release I’d come back to Colorado to get.

They put me on the dining table on my back, stretched my arms out, and used rope to tie my wrists off, using the table legs on each side of the table at my head for anchors. They spread and raised my legs, tying the ankles to hooks in the ceiling beams over the table.

Even though groggy, I told them they didn’t have to bind me for what I knew was coming—and wasn’t resisting, Rafe having told me it was what he wanted me to take.

“They want to do you this way,” Rafe said, with an evil grin. “This is part of the fun.”

And then they did me that way and had raucous fun gang banging me. I took each of the six of them separately and two doubles. Some barebacked, some didn’t, as they wished. They stuffed pillows under the small of my back to roll my pelvis up to show my hole. They each climbed up on the table, big cocks and medium-sized cocks. No small cocks. All hard erections. Each grabbed my hips and brought me to them. Some slowly slid in; most reared back and thrust in, watching my eyes flash, my mouth open in a scream. They were a gang. They were a team. They were all half drunk and hopped up on pot.

They kept my passage full of cock for two hours and after resting and drinking more beer, they all did me again.

The cheer of “Olé!” went up with each initial penetration and then again with each ejaculation. I arched my back and yelped for each one of them. Entertaining them, Suffering for them. Spiraling up to arousal heaven with each one on the initial thrust and then again on the coming. They wanted me. Each one of them had to have me. Determined to enjoy this, I went with them each time.

More than once, a drunken voice called out, “Shit. Look how big that hole is now. Fuckin’ shit.”

Thrusting, thrusting, thrusting. “Olé! Olé!” It went on most of the night; I came three times. Though I panted heavily and yelped and screamed from time to time, I made no objection—even to being trussed up, defenseless. I never said “no” or “stop.” They assuaged their lust by declaring I was a professional whore. I wasn’t. I didn’t want it to stop. I was free—fully liberated of all inhibitions and pretense. It was what I wanted. I wanted to have that effect on men.

I was royally gang bang fucked. Olé! Olé!

I’d been dreaming of this—and trying not too—for eleven years. Rafe had done this with me in the bunkhouse the summer after my high school as well, and I’d never forgotten it. Six men on me; six men inside me. Banging away. Fucking a Hunt. They all fantasized gang banging a Hunt. The session with these hunters didn’t have the edge that it had in the bunkhouse, where a ranch hand fucking a Hunt had special meaning, but that was their issue—the ranch hands as opposed to these hungers; the effect on me was the same with both. It was a high-lust fetish I’d only rarely had scratched.

Young and tender, I cried through it, but I didn’t say “stop,” and I didn’t tell anyone they’d done it—not even when they did it again. When they did it again, I recognized the power I had over them and I wanted it. Rafe had wanted me to do it. I did whatever Rafe wanted me to. Rafe, my lover; Rafe who had taken me to the mountains the summer after high school, bent me over a saddle, bound my wrists and ankles, and fucked my virginity out of me. And then had fucked me again . . . and again—until I was lost to him and begged for it.

I was fighting with myself over whether to include the scene in my current book, knowing it would be hard to find a publisher if I did. But it was real. It was something that really happened to me—more than once as of the night at the hunting lodge. It was honest and the full story. I was a slut for it. It made me feel alive. I knew now that I’d put it in the book—and whatever else came in sex with men—and publishing be damned.

I couldn’t walk the next day, or ride a horse. They had to load me over a horse’s saddle on my belly and lead me down the mountain. That was best anyway—being on my belly rather than on my ass on a horse that was jolting back and forth down a mountainside. I wasn’t talking. I was burbling. But I was smiling.

* * * *

“Are you OK?” Jack asked two days later, at dinner, the first time I’d seen him since we’d come down off the mountain. I’d isolated myself in my room, pounding away at the computer. I’d made more progress on the novel here in the valley over the last few days than I’d made the previous year in my New York apartment.

“Yes, I’m OK,” I answered. “That was planned, though, wasn’t it?”

“I knew from the time I picked you up at the airport that it’s what you needed. And that I needed to be part of it.”

“As intense as that?”

“Rafe told me you’d done all of that before. Are you angry that it was done again?”

“No,” I answered, honestly.

“It’s a service we give to the guys up at the hunting lodge when we resupply them and if they pay for it. We have a couple of ranch hands who will lay down for a party like that. You’ll get paid for having done it, of course.”

“I’m not concerned about the money,” I said. “I won’t argue with you that it was what I needed, what I was struggling over—for several years.”

“So, you’d do it again? The night before—me and Rafe. That was checking to see if you’d do it.”

“It wasn’t because you and Rafe wanted to do it—to do me that way? Together? And you, like you did me? You took me hard—and dry—the first time. You acted like you couldn’t hold off. You’ve got a lethal cock for doing that.”

“Of course I wanted to fuck you. I told you that. I wanted to fuck you when you were younger. And you didn’t lose your appeal. I wanted to own your ass then; I want to own it now. You were the sexiest thing at the ranch at eighteen and you are the sexiest thing at the ranch at twenty-nine. Your jaw will drop when you learn the tip the hunters gave me for being allowed to use you. They thought you were a model I’d brought in from Vegas. They were sure you were a seasoned whore.”

“Yes, I’d go on the supply mission again—if I’m here when you do one next.”

“If you’re here? You haven’t decided to stay a while?”

“I might stay all summer. I haven’t decided, but I think I’ll want to.”

“If so, maybe we can save Muriel some time.”

“Oh, how?”

“She won’t have to change and wash sheets off your bed if you move into my room and sleep with me.”

“Will I get much sleep?” I was grinning.

“I get up a 5:00 a.m. You can sleep the rest of the morning away, if you want.”

“If Rafe doesn’t find me.”

“If Rafe doesn’t find you, or if we don’t call Rafe in to join us. I have no problem with Rafe finding you—or the two of us finding you together.”

“Neither do I,” I said, with a smile. “It sounds like a plan to me.”

The night they both found me and singled me and doubled me and singled me and doubled me again, and I decided I’d be staying at Hunt’s Ranch for the summer. I got practically no sleep until later in the morning when work started on the ranch—for the rest of the summer—but that was just fine with me. It appeared to be fine to Jack and Rafe too—and to some of the guests.