However, in fact our school days were long behind us. We were grown men, experienced in the ways of lust and we knew how to give pleasure to each other.
Silently, we shifted our positions on the mattress, exploring each other with lips, tongues and hands. Silently, my aching cock pleaded for stimulation, for relief. As though he could read my mind—or could see the semaphore signals being made by my erection, even in the dark—Rick finally took my dick in his hand and guided it to his mouth. His lips engulfed my glans, closed firmly around my shaft—and breathing heavily through his nose, he began to suck me. At the same time, he teased my sphincter with a fingertip. Even the first gentle pressure of his finger against my bunghole made it constrict in response making my cock swell and pulse within his firm, wet oral clasp. When he eased his finger through my hole and began to finger-fuck me, my penis once again seemed to possess a mind of its own. It fucked Rick’s mouth, the impetus behind each thrust supplied by an involuntary jerk of my pelvis. Moaning, I twisted my body around until I had positioned my own face at Rick’s groin and I could suck him, too, in wanton retaliation.
We blew each other for long minutes on end, losing track of time, savouring our feast. I was the one who ultimately had to admit defeat.
“Let’s take a breather,” I gasped, letting go of Rick’s saliva-slick cock. “I’m going to come if we keep this up and I don’t want to shoot yet.”
He tantalized me by sucking me some more before he, too, released his prey. “I don’t want to come too soon, either. God, you’ve got a beautiful cock!”
“I like yours, too—just in case you didn’t realize that, while I was going down on you.”
“I thought you were having a good time. I know I was.” He sat up and continued to caress me, but now in a way that was intimate and comradely, but not as urgently sexual as before. I knew he was giving us both a chance to cool down, before we exploded prematurely. “Relax. There’s no rush.”
“Tell that to my hard-on.”
“Impatient son of a bitch, is he?”
“Let’s just say he’s extremely goal-oriented.”
“Maybe I can show him how getting there can be half the fun.”
“I imagine you can be very persuasive. But don’t touch him for a moment. Right now, he’s feeling not only hypersensitive, but also quick on the trigger. A potentially lethal combination.”
“I won’t go near him again until you give me the all-clear,” Rick promised. “We can make polite conversation, in the meantime. Now, what shall we talk about? Oh, I know. How about your sex life? I guess I should be ashamed to admit it, but I was as jealous as hell of that little blond bitch you tricked with last night.”
“No need to be. He’s gone on his merry way, but I’m still here. And tonight I’m all yours.”
“He was a boy. I’m a man.”
“That’s for sure. Why don’t you prove to me just how much of a man you are? Why don’t you fuck the hell out of me?”
“I think I will.”
“Go for it, fucker. Do your worst. Give me all you’ve got to give.”
“Is that your subtle way of sounding the all-clear?”
“Don’t you worry about my cock. I’ll take care of him. It’s my asshole that’s craving attention, at the moment. And I’m sure that, as a good host, you would never neglect the needs of one of your overnight guests.”
“I could never forgive myself, if I did.”
I took immediate advantage of his hospitality by assuming one of my favourite positions, on my hands and knees. I could hear Rick fumbling in the drawer of the nightstand for a rubber and some lube. He knelt behind me and quite unceremoniously pushed his cock inside my ass.
“Sweet Jesus,” I blasphemed. “That cock of yours feels bleeding huge in there! Take it a little easy at first, will you?”
“I thought you wanted all I had to give,” he reminded me.
“I didn’t know you had so much to be generous with.”
I have to give Rick credit. He possessed enough self-restraint to control his thrusts at first. He eased his endowment in and out of me, slowly, gently. It was almost as though he was giving the interior of my anus a massage with his prick. Warmed and stimulated by the light friction, my ass adjusted itself to his bulk and soon began to want more. Nor was my behind shy about communicating its desire. I began to buck my hips and rotate my butt from side to side around the impaling fulcrum of Rick’s fuck tool. At the same time, I clenched and relaxed my sphincter around him, milking his cock.
Rick correctly interpreted the signals I was giving him. He humped harder, driving himself more roughly in and out of me.
“Fuck me,” I pleaded. “Oh God, Rick—please fuck me!”
“That’s right, baby,” he growled. “Let’s hear you beg for it!”
Chapter Nine
The Man Who Came With the Place
I had been in San Floriano less than a week when I met a compatriot of mine, named Rupert.
Rupert was a strongly built man of middle age, sun bronzed and wearing when I first met him a fisherman’s blue-and-white striped jersey. I was in the art supply store, purchasing a few tubes of paint, when he overheard me carrying on a conversation in English with the clerk at the cash register.
“You’re an Englishman!” he exclaimed.
“Guilty as charged,” I replied.
“But I know you. I know your face. I’ve seen your photograph somewhere. No, don’t tell me. You’re some sort of an aristocrat who paints…aren’t you?”
I burst out laughing. “That’s a perfect description of me.”
“I didn’t mean to give you any offense.”
“Oh, none taken.”
“You see, I paint a little myself.”
This turned out to be a considerable understatement. When Rupert and I finally got around to exchanging our full names, I recognized his at once. He was a fine portraitist and landscape painter. We already knew each other—by reputation.
Over lunch at The Blue Cat, we became better acquainted. Rupert had lived in Italy for several years. He now owned a house in San Floriano.
“It’s an old wreck of a place, but it suits me,” he said. “At least I have enough room to store all my unsold pictures,” he joked.
We discussed mutual acquaintances in the London art world. I found out that Rupert and I had a teacher in common, although Rupert, who was nearly two decades my senior, had studied painting with the man long before I had.
We reminisced about our teacher. During class, he invariably kept handy a bottle of gin and a glass, from which he imbibed at regular intervals. This steady intake of alcohol never seemed to have any adverse effect on his teaching—quite the contrary. What he didn’t know about painting wasn’t worth painting
“What that man could do with tone!” Rupert said. “It was practically a religion to him.”
I agreed. Drawing, colour and every other desirable attribute could be added later, our instructor had assured us, if only we first got our tones right. He nearly drove us to despair whenever he gave us a demonstration of what he meant. He could accomplish, with a few swipes of his brush and using only the relative values of black and white, what we struggled to put down in colour.
“He told me I was good at colour, but not a great draftsman,” Rupert recalled. “So my drawing was what I was going to have to work on.”
“My God. I remember him telling me exactly the same thing.”
“Luckily for us, his advice didn’t fall on deaf ears. We both had the good sense to do as he said.”
Rick, who came over to our table to ask if everything was all right, interrupted us.
“It couldn’t be better,” Rupert informed him. “Not only has Francesca surpassed herself in the kitchen—I’ve found a charming companion, as you can see. You’ve been holding out on me, Rick. Why didn’t you tell me this young man was staying here?”
“I wanted to surprise you,” R
ick said.
When Rick excused himself and walked away, we both turned our heads to follow his retreating figure.
“Look at the ass on that boy,” Rupert said, with a sigh. “Poetry in motion. Have you been invited up to his apartment yet?”
The bluntness of the question took me by surprise. “Ah…no.” I don’t know why I chose to lie. I had some misplaced notion of protecting Rick’s reputation, perhaps.
“Why not? You’re not straight, are you?”
“No. I couldn’t be less straight.”
“Well, that’s a relief. It’d be a terrible waste if you were. I can see that you’ve got quite a cheeky little bottom there, yourself. The kind that was meant to be fucked and fucked hard and often.”
I asked Rupert what he knew about Rick and Jed. They were a good-looking couple, he told me and they seemed to be very much in love. Toward the end, if they had a strained relationship they had too much class to show it in public.
Like so many other artists, Rupert had given them one of his paintings, which hung among the many others on the wall near where we were sitting. He challenged me to pick out the painting from the many hanging on the wall.
I studied the display and made my guess. I was correct and Rupert was pleased.
“Why, you’re not just a hot body and a pretty face,” he exclaimed. “You really do know your stuff.”
“That’s me,” I joked. “A true Renaissance man. A sex pig in the bedroom, but a connoisseur in the studio.”
“Hmm. It’s the sex pig aspect that I’m beginning to find intriguing. Listen, my lad. I know I’m older than you and no Adonis. But might you be in the mood for a quick wank?”
“I’m in the mood for a little more than that. I like to take my time.”
“So do I.”
“Let’s have another round of drinks, then. After I’ll take you up to my room and we can continue our discussion of art, in private.”
“I’m sure it will be a stimulating one.”
In fact, we had a couple of rounds of drinks and I was feeling distinctly mellow by the time we finally paid our bill and I led Rupert upstairs.
In my room, we stripped.
Rupert was what American gay men call a bear. He had a furry, stocky body, packed with a few extra pounds and a hint of a paunch. None of this bothered me. He also had a remarkably thick cock, which didn’t bother me at all—quite the contrary. He was a delightful lover, the kind of man who is more interested in stimulating and satisfying his partner than in getting his own rocks off.
He was especially interested in playing with my ass and after working his thumb in and out of it while I jacked off, he finally invited me to sit on his face. I did so and rarely have I been so well rimmed and to such a devastating effect, my cum shot across the bed as that agile tongue continued to explore the depths of my anus. Rupert refused to give up until he had coaxed a second ejaculation from me. After that, it seemed no more than fair play for me to roll over onto my belly and let him fuck me.
* * * *
There was never any question of a romance developing between Rupert and myself. We were friends who enjoyed each other physically. I was glad I had met someone with whom I could talk about the things that mattered to me the most.
Il Gato Blu was an exceptionally artist-friendly hotel. However, they politely requested their guests not to do any painting in their rooms, which of course were not suitable for that purpose—quite apart from the danger of staining the hotel’s furnishings. Conversely, there was a small, brightly lit space on the ground floor that artists who chose to work indoors could avail themselves of—provided they didn’t mind having other guests wander in to observe their efforts. It came in useful on rainy days. Also, at the top of the building, under the roof, was an attic space, which the artists named the drying room. Painters who worked en plein air in oils, as I often did, could store their canvases there, out of the way. Before long, I had quite a little gallery of my pieces on informal display up there.
“What a shame we won’t have more time together,” Rupert lamented. “You see, I’m going out of town next week.”
Rupert had business in London, including an exhibition of his work, lecturing and teaching some classes. He asked me if I knew anybody in the city that had a flat, a studio or both, which he could rent for a month or two.
“My place is sitting there empty. You can have it if you like,” I told him. “And the rent’s being paid by my solicitor each month while I’m away.”
“I’ll have to pay you something.”
“I won’t hear of it.”
“Maybe we can work out some sort of a quid pro quo arrangement. Would you like to move into my house here while I’m gone?”
I made the usual token protests, but Rupert had no trouble persuading me to accept his offer. I had originally planned to stay in San Floriano for only another week. Now, I definitely wanted to extend my stay, but my room in The Blue Cat was already reserved for another tourist, so I would have to find new accommodations in any event.
Rupert invited me to come see his house before I committed myself.
“I wouldn’t want you to buy a pig in a poke,” he said.
“As opposed to renting a sex pig, for a poke,” I joked.
To some people, Rupert’s house would have seemed modest and lacking in conveniences. However, I was enchanted from my first sight of it. The house was perched on a hillside and accessed by three flights of steep, narrow steps. Once one negotiated these, one could pause to catch one’s breath on a narrow vine-canopied terrace. The house had six main rooms, three on each floor, with the lower ones opening onto the terrace. The lime-washed walls were massive, but upstairs the ancient floor beams creaked ominously beneath the lightest tread. The windows, like the terrace, boasted an unimpeded view of the sea and the sky. These vistas compensated for the fact that none of these windows provided a tight seal against the outside air, let alone wind or rain. They had arranged the furniture well away from the windows so that rainwater could not damage anything.
Rupert’s taste in interior decoration emphasized comfort over style. There was the kind of roomy, overstuffed armchairs into which a man could sink down and relax and each of them had an ottoman. Here and there, though, things that Rupert had collected in the course of his travels attracted the eye and gave the place individuality. He had been to India and the Far East, for example, and as a result such objects as a Buddha, a Japanese incense burner, a Tibetan butter lamp and a bronze statue of Shiva rubbed shoulders with Sicilian ceramics and wood carvings from the Dolomites.
During the course of our tour of the premises, Rupert showed me some of his drawings and paintings. Among them were ones, which because of their subject matter, were not exactly the sort of thing that one offered for sale in a mainstream gallery, although private collectors avidly sought them. The images were outrageously pornographic—naked bodies, hard cocks, men masturbating, men fucking each other, men sucking other men’s cocks.
He showed me a series of paintings he had recently completed. They had been inspired by a visit to a leather bar and sex club in Naples. The revelation that such a thing as a leather bar, let alone a sex club, existed in Naples surprised me.
“Isn’t it still the most conservative city in Italy?” I asked.
“Probably,” Rupert agreed. “Which is why, when those Neapolitan boys go wild, they really go wild.”
As for the paintings, they were eye-catching, to say the least.
They were all of the same two men, both muscular and good-looking. They were both naked, but one of them had his hands tied behind his back. The first picture showed him kneeling in front of the other model. You could see the rope around his wrists looped tightly and secured in a complicated-looking knot. The kneeling man was watching as the standing one played with himself. The second painting showed him abjectly licking the other one’s testicles, his chin up between widespread legs and a large, slick penis l
ying on his forehead. In the third and fourth paintings, the standing bloke had moved around behind the other one. He now had him bent over backward, his body arched so that his own erect penis stood straight out. The standing man was holding his partner’s head tilted back at a painful-looking angle, trying to force his hard organ into the man’s mouth. The fifth picture was a close-up image, showing lips pressing hard against pubic hair, the entire penis completely engulfed by that mouth.
The climactic image, which was the most explicit, showed the kneeling man’s face, his mouth open wide, tongue sticking out—and above it, a slick-shiny hand tight around the thick head of that grossly proportioned penis, milking a thick bright gob of semen down onto that outreaching tongue. There were other gobs and shining trails all over the kneeling man’s face—on his forehead, down his cheeks, in his hair.
I couldn’t stop admiring the exquisitely executed thing.
“They’re beautiful,” I said. “But they’re on the, ah, explicit side, aren’t they? To whom do you sell this sort of thing?”
“Oh, to a dealer in Germany. Munich, to be exact. He puts them on display right there in his shop, where anyone can wander in off the street. Of course, his shop is next door to a gay bar and across the street from a porno book and video store, so it’s not as though the locals are likely to be surprised or scandalized. And the Germans do love their porn.”
For a working artist’s residence, the house was unusually tidy. I complimented Rupert on this and admitted that I tended to be a rather negligent housekeeper, myself. I expressed my fear that, if I moved in, standards would soon lapse.
The Blue Cat Page 15
