“Hell, yeah.”
“And I can’t wait until we can do it together for real, in person.”
“Me, either.”
* * * *
I received a long, chatty email from Rupert. He was enjoying his stay in London—except for the weather. He’d forgotten how cool and wet it could be, even in summer. His years of living in Italy had spoiled him. He’d also been very comfortable staying in my house. As for his exhibition and his lectures, they had been successes, but now he was looking forward to returning home, which he intended to do in about a week.
I shared this information with Rick.
“What will you do when Rupert comes back from London?” he asked.
I shrugged. “Move on, I suppose. I’d like to see some more of Italy.”
“So there’s no pressing need for you to go back home to England, right away?”
“None whatsoever.”
“You could always stay here in San Floriano. I mean, use it as your base camp, while you travel around. We can always find a bed for you here in The Blue Cat—especially since you don’t seem to mind sharing a bed with another person,” he added, slyly.
“I do like it here,” I admitted.
“And you and I seem to get along pretty well, don’t we? We don’t make any demands on each other. We’re fuck buddies, friends with privileges, whatever you want to call it.”
“As long as you’re sure I wouldn’t be getting in the way.”
“Getting in the way? Of what?”
“Of you meeting somebody else. After all, eventually you’re going to want to find a replacement for Jed.” As soon as I said that, I regretted it. “I’m sorry. Replacement was a poor choice of words. I make it sound as though I’m talking about some sort of an appliance, with interchangeable parts.”
Rick wasn’t offended. “Oh, I know exactly what you mean. But if I were to meet somebody and fall in love with him, I wouldn’t necessarily expect it to be the same way it was with me and Jed. It might be a totally different kind of a relationship. Maybe it’s too much to ask for, to have one more than one truly special guy in your life in one lifetime. That doesn’t mean you have to resign yourself to celibacy or just whore around. There’re a lot of possibilities to experience in between those two extremes.”
“And am I one of those possibilities?”
“Yes and you’re one of the ones with a lot more potential than most. Come on,” he went on, in a coaxing tone of voice. “When Rupert gets back, move back into The Blue Cat. You can bunk with me, in my apartment. As my guest. My non-paying guest.”
“I couldn’t do that. Not pay my way, I mean.”
“Sure you could. We can work out something. I know…we’ll barter. One of your paintings in exchange for your room and board. I’d even be willing to throw in sexual favors, as an additional enticement.”
“Hmm. You may just have yourself a deal.”
So, a couple of days before Rupert’s scheduled return, I moved back into The Blue Cat. I think Vittorio was sorry to see me go.
He insisted on cooking me a farewell dinner on the last night I slept in the house, and I must say he outdid himself. I felt obligated to do something for him in return. I’d already bought him a present, to express my appreciation of the good care he’d taken of me. Rupert had told me that Vittorio fancied a particular brand of high-end men’s toiletries that a shop in Naples sold exclusively. I checked out the shop’s website and ordered several items from them. When they arrived, I gift-wrapped them and stashed them away, among my painting things, which I had warned Vittorio he was not to touch.
When I gave him his present, he was ecstatic. He was so effusive in his thanks that I began to feel embarrassed. Like a small boy on Christmas Day, Vittorio wanted to try out his gift, immediately. He stripped down in front of me, then dashed off to take a shower.
He returned with a towel wrapped around his waist—an unusual gesture of modesty for him. His skin was flushed red from the hot water and his freshly shampooed hair was still wet.
“Smell me, signore,” he invited me. “Don’t I smell good, from the soap and the shampoo you gave me?”
I took a good whiff of him. “You’re very aromatic indeed,” I assured him.
It wasn’t long before we ended up in bed together, naked and going at it with our habitual gusto.
“Lie back and let me suck you,” I insisted.
I feasted on his cock. The feel and the taste of it in my mouth inflamed me. It wasn’t long before I hungered to taste Vittorio’s ass as well.
“Put your fucking legs up higher, buddy,” I told him hoarsely. “Hang them over my shoulders and raise your ass off the bed. I’m going to shove my face between your buns. I’m going to suck your ass!”
I sucked it. He’d given himself a thorough scrub back there during his shower. The taste was sweat-salty and utterly masculine. I buried my face between Vittorio’s squirming buttocks and rooted around inside his sphincter ring like a pig going after truffles. I licked my way back up his perineum muscle to his cock, pausing to tickle his balls with the tip of my tongue. I took the tip of his cock back between my lips, easing the foreskin down the shaft to expose the glans.
I took his entire penis inside my mouth. My tongue coiled around his pulsating cockshaft like a wet, slippery whip as I applied my best form—steady suction to the head with my throat muscles and caressed the base with my warm wet lips.
He screamed and howled, it felt so good for him. He’d rarely had a blow job that came anywhere close to what he was getting from me tonight—of that much I was sure.
Just when I could sense his ejaculation beginning to build up, deep down in his prick and balls, to deliver the coup de grâce, I tore my mouth away from his cock and plunging my face down again, went back to work sucking his ass. With my fingertips, I kept his anal aperture stretched wide open, while my tongue violated it with rapid, darting swabbing motions.
He let out the loudest, wildest shriek of frustrated lust I’d ever heard. I stuck my tongue as deeply into his unprepared asshole as I could get it, then began to rim him lustily again, despite his hoarse protests. I thrust my tongue in and out of that silken hole, tasting the slightly tart flavour of the interior of his ass each time my tongue dug into the feast of flesh.
I lapped and licked until his anus felt like warm, quivering jelly around my fucking tongue. When he tried to reach down, grab his neglected, all-but-exploding prick and stroke it to relieve himself, I seized both his wrists and held on to them to stop him. Helpless, he just had to lie back and take it.
I ground my face into the valley between his sweating, squiring buttocks. I could feel his big, hot balls banging against my forehead, rising and falling along with the steady jerking throb of his overexcited cock as it waved about frantically in the empty air and my tormenting tongue slammed deep into his asshole again and again.
I licked that delicious responsive anus until I was afraid he’d shoot his cum without even having to have his dick touched. That wasn’t in my plans, so without any warning, I dropped his legs back to the bed and took his cock down into my throat again.
It was so hot, hard and pulsing with fuck lust that I didn’t even have to suck it. His frantic hip movements drove that huge thing of his in and out of my mouth with the speed of a piston.
He was fucking my goddamned mouth and throat as he grabbed two fistfuls of my hair to hold my head down between his thrashing legs. He wasn’t going to let me tease him any more by interrupting the blow job. Either the poor guy had to come or die, he was so fucking horny by then and I loved it!
I thought he would choke me to death with his floodtide of sperm! But I held on, desperately and swallowed it all. As I did so, I wanked myself to orgasm, too. My load burst free from my tortured cock and shot through the air in a dense white arc. Another and another followed that first spurt. At last, though, Vittorio and I collapsed spent.
I have to admit that
I began to toy with the idea of finding a live-in servant like Vittorio for my town house in London. He had taught me that having a man around the house had its advantages.
Chapter Twelve
In Which I Do My Best to Earn My Keep
Rick went out of his way to make me feel at home. He showed me the closet space and the drawers he’d cleared, to make room for me to put my things. He gave me a spare key to the apartment and told me I was to feel free to come and go as I pleased.
Still, on my first night there I felt like an interloper. I didn’t want to get in the way of Rick’s routine. After all, he’d been living alone for some time now and I suspected that, like me, he was set in his ways.
We were having coffee when I let my end of the conversation falter. Rick seemed to pick up at once on my introspective frame of mind.
“You seem to be in kind of a quiet mood,” Rick said. “Is anything wrong?”
“I feel like a whore,” I confessed.
“Do you? I can’t imagine why. I don’t recall any money passing hands. Are you expecting to find a fifty-euro note on the nightstand?”
“Be serious. Last night, I was with Vittorio. We went at it like a couple of animals. And tonight I’m here with you.”
“Also prepared to go at it like a couple of animals, I hope. If not, I’m going to be bitterly disappointed. So what’s the problem?”
“You must think I’m terribly promiscuous.”
He let out one of his trademark snorting laughs. “Are you kidding? What do you think I am? A fucking Vestal Virgin?”
“We’re both pretty bad.”
“Listen, let’s make a deal. I won’t judge you if you don’t judge me. And stop apologizing for having a functioning prick. I know guys who have to take their prescription meds in order to get it up. Be grateful you seem to have the opposite problem. Namely, keeping it down!” He moved toward me and took me in his arms. He gave me a kiss. “You want me to be serious? I can be serious. I don’t think you’re a whore. I think you’re sweet. And you’re really in love with that soldier boy of yours, aren’t you?”
“I think so.”
“I know so. I recognize the symptoms. I wish I felt that way about another man, or that somebody felt that way about me. I wouldn’t even ask that it be a reciprocal thing. One-way desire is a lot better than nothing. Anyway, if you’re really in love with Geoff and he feels the same way about you, then what either of you does with other guys doesn’t matter, in the long run. It’s just sex. What you give to other men doesn’t take anything away from what you have with him.”
“But my feelings for you, Rick…they aren’t just sexual. Maybe that’s why I’m so confused.”
“That’s nice to hear. Come here. Let me show you something.” Rick took a small framed picture down from the wall and handed it to me. “Take a look at this.”
I examined the picture. As a work of art, it had no great merit. It was a nineteenth-century coloured print, somewhat naïve and crude in style. It showed a landscape with a bridge over a river. Standing on the bridge were a number of Roman soldiers, in armour. They had a prisoner, a man who was nude except for a loincloth. He had his wrists tied in front of him—and a millstone tied around his neck. In the sky overhead, angels swarmed about in the clouds.
“Do you know what this is?” Rick asked.
“I haven’t a clue. Well, I assume it’s a picture of some Catholic saint. Remember, I’m Church of England. I’m not up on all of this competitive imagery.”
“It’s a picture of the Blessed Saint Florian himself, after whom this town is named. A very serious, intellectual young priest gave it to me, when Jed and I first moved to Italy. I’m afraid Jed and I led the priest astray, or it might be more accurate to say that the two of us helped him to come to terms with some of his suppressed desires. But that’s another story. I’ll tell you all about it some time.”
“Please do. It sounds interesting.”
“Let’s leave my sordid past out of the discussion, for now. Anyway…I solemnly swear, on this holy image of the Blessed Saint Florian, that I will never come between you and your boyfriend, Geoff.”
“Now you’re just making fun of me.”
“I’m being quite serious. So, now that that’s settled, you can trick with me with a clear conscience. And I hope, with complete abandon.”
“I intend to.”
“Now you’re talking!”
* * * *
I insisted that if I was going to stay in Rick’s apartment with him, I was going to earn my keep. One night the two of us were doing the washing up together at the kitchen sink. Rick washed and I dried.
“There’s a domestic streak in you,” I said.
“Is that a good thing, in your opinion or bad?”
“Oh, definitely good. If you ever decide to get out of the hotel business,” I teased him, “you could always come to London and be my houseboy.”
“Thanks. I’ll give your kind offer some serious consideration, the next time I’m going over the books and wondering why I ever got into this racket in the first place. But I think I can aspire to a little higher than houseboy. Kept man, at the very least.”
“I’d be willing to keep you. But, seriously—thanks again for putting me up here. I’m lucky. After all, you’re a very attractive man. You must have guys lined up, fighting over a chance to make love to you.”
“Thanks for the compliment, but hardly. I don’t have to hand out numbers to a line of men waiting outside my bedroom door. But if you were to show up outside my bedroom door—I’d give you a free pass. Allowing you unlimited access. Any hour of the day or night.”
“And I’d take advantage of it.”
“Oh, you would, would you? But I’m old enough to be your Daddy.”
“Don’t exaggerate. You’re old enough to be my older brother, maybe.”
“I wasn’t using Daddy in a literal, biological sense. I was using it in a sexual sense.”
“Well, in a sexual sense, then I’d love for you to be my Daddy. I’d love to be your boy—or anything else you wanted me to be—and do anything you wanted me to do, for you.”
After finishing the dishes, Rick dried his hands on a towel.
“Sexy,” he breathed, staring at me. “You are so damn sexy.”
“So are you. Now that we’ve agreed on that—what are we going to do about it?”
“How about this, for starters?”
As he spoke, he pushed himself away from the sink and took a slow step forward until he was standing right in front of me. I couldn’t seem to take my eyes away from his crotch. The closer he came, the more clearly the outline of his penis stood out. I could even see the ridge around the head of it.
He unbuckled his belt. “Since you insist on helping out around the house, I’ve got another chore for you, right here.”
“I might as well take care of it right now, then.” For all the compliance in my words, for some reason, I felt a need to hold back, to force him to make the first move. Perhaps I was only too aware of how ready I was to submit to him and my pride insisted that I put on a show of reluctance.
“Yeah, let’s get it over with.” He tugged his shirt up from his jeans. He opened the buttons, slowly, one by one. “I’ve had a long day,” he said. “I’m feeling kind of tired and hot and sweaty. And that always makes me feel horny. It makes me feel dirty, too, in more ways than one, if you know what I mean. How’d you like to get down and dirty with me, buddy, before we go to bed?”
“I think I’d like that just fine.”
“Are you sure you don’t want me to take a shower first?”
“No, that would spoil everything. I like the way you smell.”
“I like yours, too. There’s just a hint of turpentine fumes, undercutting the sweat.”
“Occupational hazard.”
“Kiss me.”
As I did so, I allowed the flats of my hands to caress his shoulders and c
hest, through his shirt. He took my right hand and guided it down to his crotch, to his open fly.
“Don’t be shy,” he coaxed me. “Don’t tease me. We both want it. Why shouldn’t we just go ahead and do it?”
By now, I knew that Rick, like Geoff, had an instinct for keeping sex exciting by making it unpredictable. With them, it could be tender one moment, rough the next. Tonight, with Rick, was going to be one of rougher encounters.
A chasm was opening, deep within my body, a need for sex so desperate, so overpowering, I knew I couldn’t fight it. I had to touch him, to suck him, to do anything he demanded from me.
He opened his shirt, pulled it over his arms and tossed it onto a chair. I reached out and touched his stomach. Thick black hair, soft to my touch covered it and the skin of his belly was taut over firm muscles. His flesh felt warm. The excitement within me mounted. My penis strained painfully, frantically hard against my pants. He opened the top snap of his jeans, inched the garment down. I could see just the base of his cock, nestled in a thick tangle of black pubic hair. He reached into the spreading V, closed his fingers around his cock, eased it upward—then pulled it out.
A hot thrill lashed through my body.
It was every bit as beautiful as the rest of him—long, thick, heavily veined, with a mushroom head protruding from a sheath of foreskin. It was utterly and excitingly male and he was offering it to me!
Slowly I moved my hand down from his belly, down over the white hollow of his leg. I slipped my hand slowly under his cock, cradled it in my palm, watched it jerk and grow harder, rising upward. It was indescribably beautiful, like a living piece of erotic sculpture. The ancient Roman god Priapus would have been proud to have possessed such a phallus—and his devotees honoured to worship it, as I was ready to worship it now.
I knelt before him, still clasping his penis in my hand.
I leaned forward, closing my eyes and felt the warm tight head of his cock touch my lips. I shuddered, but let me assure you, it was not from revulsion. I was trembling with hunger. I needed to take him inside me, take his cock into my mouth, to engulf it. His cock—the most beautiful, personal part of his body. I opened my mouth and took it in. he moaned softly. His hands touched my shoulders and the contact felt indescribably good.
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