Carter grimaced. “I’ll try to hold out until we’re on dry land.”
“That bad, eh?”
“Trust me. You have no idea.”
“Oh, I’ve partied with guys at university, and we got a bit carried away. I’m sure I have a very good idea!”
A persistent light fog had descended, accompanied by a very fine mist of rain. Some of the ferry’s passengers abandoned the open deck altogether. Those who put up with the slight inconvenience, though, including Carter and Liam, were rewarded by the first indistinct sight of land, a dark horizontal sliver which suddenly could be glimpsed through the haze of fog. A few moments later, these hardier passengers were rewarded with another sight.
“Look! Otters—and seals!” someone exclaimed.
There was a rush to the boat’s railings, accompanied by a flurry of picture taking, by cell phones and conventional cameras.
“Why, there must be dozens of them,” Carter said, as he and Liam admired the sea mammals, which, oblivious to the chill and damp in the air, lounged on the gravel and rocks of a narrow beach, or splashed about in the nearby water.
“Oh, this is nothing to what’s in store for you,” Liam assured Carter. “Once you get away from civilization and start traveling about the more remote islands, it’s like one big nature preserve. You’ll feel like you’ve gone back in time, to a more primitive world.”
At last, over an hour behind schedule, the ferry docked. By way of partial compensation, the town of Armadale was picturesque, like an ideal image for a postcard or a travel poster.
The town’s sheltered anchorage was small and very crowded with small fishing boats at the moment, and the ferry squeezed itself in with little room to spare. A line of derelict petroleum tankers and a beached trawler littered part of the rock-strewn beach. On the opposite shore, however, the ruins of a tiny castle rose abruptly out of the sea, resembling the kind of miniature structure which might be placed in an aquarium as a decoration.
From the waterfront, a few narrow brick and cobblestone lanes threaded through the town. None of the buildings was more than three stories high. Most of them seemed to be equipped with smoking chimneys. It did indeed seem as though the clock had been turned back, to Victorian times.
Disembarking, Liam and Carter took care of their pressing business, first.
After they left the ferry, they strolled down the pier, and Liam pointed out the public john.
“There’s the relief station, sure enough. I think I’d better go and unload, too,” he said. “For some reason, being out there on a boat, surrounded by all that open water and inhaling that sea air, always seems to make my bladder feel full.”
Carter was finding this conversation about piss rather arousing. He was delighted that Liam would be accompanying him inside the john. He definitely wanted to see the other guy’s cock, now that they’d more or less committed themselves to having sex with each other.
As the two men carried their bags into the men’s room, Carter was infinitely relieved to see that, in stark contrast to the ferry’s “bog,” this facility was spotlessly clean and salubrious.
Liam laughed as he unzipped his jeans in front of one of the urinals. “Now that I think about it, I don’t know why I’m so damned anxious to unload. I plan to fill up again on some good Scots beer or whiskey, as soon as I can. And then I’ll be visiting the bog again, soon enough.”
Carter didn’t reply. He joined Liam, standing at the adjacent urinal. When he glanced over to his side and he saw what his attractive new acquaintance had pulled out of his pants, he fought to suppress a gasp of sheer awe. Liam’s cock had to be a full eight inches long—and not only was it long, it was big and round. It looked like a flesh-colored wax candle sticking out of his open fly, and when the hot young archaeology student began to piss, his urine came out in a thick, forceful yellow stream which steamed as it struck the porcelain basin.
“Ah, fucking bloody hell, what a relief!” the Englishman exclaimed.
Carter pulled his own dick out, and, to his relief, he began urinating too. The sound of both jets of their piss hitting the adjacent urinals turned Carter on, and he felt his cock begin to swell, which made it more difficult to unload.
Liam was casually flipping his dick up and down to empty it completely. Carter glanced up at his face as he did so, and Liam smiled back at Carter.
“Feels damn good to blast off, doesn’t it?” Liam asked.
“It feels great. A good leak is one of the true joys in life, I’ve always found.”
“I agree. Not that it’s the only thing you can do with your dick that feels good,” Liam said. “There’s wanking yourself, of course. And also playing around with another man. Maybe a sexy long-haired bearded Yank, who looks like a gay Jesus.”
“I’m no theologian, but somehow I doubt that Jesus ever experienced the kind of thoughts I’m entertaining just now. And I have to admit, I feel kind of inadequate at the moment,” Carter confessed. “Yours is bigger than mine.”
“Um, I don’t think so.” Liam was nonchalantly looking down to scrutinize the two male organs in question. “I’m fighting an erection, that’s all. I bet yours is every bit as big as mine, once it gets good and hard.”
“It’s well on its way to getting good and hard right now,” Carter acknowledged, punctuating the statement with a grimace and a faint groan, both expressive of his sexual frustration.
“God, you sexy son of a bitch, I can’t wait to get you into a bed.”
“Me, either. I’d like to get it on with you right here and now, but I don’t want risk getting arrested. Do you think there are undercover vice cops, monitoring the johns, in a town this small?”
Liam let out a low, seductive-sounding laugh. “I imagine the few local coppers here are too busy with real crimes to spend much time of their time taking a look in here. But you’re right. Better safe than sorry. Maybe we’d better put this very interesting discussion on hold, until later. But not too much later, please!”
“Trust me, I feel exactly the same way.”
Liam finished urinating, expelled a few final squirts of piss, shook the final drops from the enormous head of his cock and stuffed the whole thing back in his pants. Carter followed suit, although he was still sorely tempted to pull the guy’s tight jeans down to his ankles and suck his cock right there in the men’s room.
“How about you?” Liam asked casually.
“What about me?”
“Is there anything you’d rather do than fuck, Carter?”
Carter blushed slightly. “Not much,” he admitted, trying to match Liam’s off-hand tone of voice, while his heart thumped violently in his chest with erotic arousal and anticipation.
“I’m not a big one for game playing.” Liam said. “Tell me, right up front and flat out, will you? Do you want to spend the night with me? Do you want us to fuck?”
“Yes.”
“That’s all I needed to hear. Now that we’ve decided that—we can relax, and enjoy ourselves.”
“Yeah,” Carter agreed, happily.
“Good man.” Liam slapped him on the back in a very rough, masculine way, which Carter liked, but Liam then left his hand resting against the small of Carter’s back, half-embracing the other man, while they exited the men’s room together. “Come on,” Liam urged. “Let’s have a look at this town, and find our hotel.”
Carter was now sure Liam wanted more—much more!—from him than just somebody to talk to, so he didn’t feel too badly about not having had the nerve to try to start something sexually explicit back there in the men’s room. There was such a thing as delayed gratification, after all. At least he’d had a chance to see the English guy’s incredible horse cock—and he would probably get to see a lot more of Liam, and get much better acquainted with his genital endowment, if he played his cards right, once they were checked into the same hotel!
Carter and Liam strolled along Armadale’s main street.
They saw surprisingly few motor ve
hicles. Bicycles appeared to be the preferred mode of transportation. Half a dozen of them occupied a rack in front of a public house which the two men passed, and Carter saw more bikes in front of the shops.
“What a pretty little town,” he commented. “It’s very picturesque. But not too touristy, I should think, in the sense that it’s been spoiled by too many visitors.”
Liam smiled. “I must warn you, Carter. By these islands’ standards, this place is a crowded metropolis.”
“Are you saying I may have trouble adjusting to the frantic pace of life here?”
“Yes. I’ve never been to the States, but I’m willing to bet that, after living in New York City, you’re in for a certain amount of culture shock.”
After going into a shop to ask directions, they found their hotel. Located on a side street, the Osprey House was one of the three-story structures, whitewashed clapboard with the top floor under a steeply pitched, gabled roof. A signboard suspended from a post and swinging in the breeze depicted the bird after whom the hotel was named.
Monitoring the front desk, at the moment, was a motherly-looking woman, rather elegantly attired in a floral-patterned dress and a pearl necklace.
Carter and Liam identified themselves, and checked in.
“I was thinking, ma’am,” Carter said. “We both have reservations. But we happened to meet on the boat, and we thought it might be more fun if we bunked together.”
“Bunked, sir?” the woman asked.
Carter realized that she was thrown by his American slang. “If we shared a room,” Carter specified. “Would that be possible?”
“As a matter of fact—” The lady with the pearls consulted her computer screen. “We have a couple who asked to be put on the waiting list, in case there’s a cancellation. They’ll be delighted to know that a vacancy has opened up. We can put you and Mr. Purvis in one room, and them in the other.”
“I’ll pay the difference for the double occupancy,” Carter said.
“That won’t be necessary, sir. After all, we won’t lose any money.”
“Then, thank you very much.”
“You’re entirely welcome, gentlemen. We want to do everything we can to help you enjoy your stay. For example—there’s only one bed in that room. A double bed,” the woman specified. “It’s quite large. But we can put a cot in there as well, if you’d like.”
“Oh, don’t bother,” Liam insisted, quickly—perhaps a little too quickly. “We’ll manage quite well, I’m sure.”
Carter thought he detected just a hint of a knowing smile on the woman’s face. Isolated small town or no, perhaps some measure of cosmopolitan sophistication had reached this place.
The room, on the second floor, with windows overlooking the street, was small, but charming, with wallpaper in a particularly bold, even lurid, pattern, and wooden furniture, including the bed, uniformly painted in a bright yellow color. The bed was indeed a double, comfortable-looking, and Carter was already looking forward to sharing it with Liam.
They’d have to use a bathroom down the hall, and share it with other guests. But Carter had been prepared for that, and it would be a preview of the austere living arrangements he would soon be experiencing, on his boat voyage through the Hebrides.
The central heating seemed to be efficient enough. The room was warm—indeed, a bit close and stuffy. Carter supposed they could always crack open one of the windows, if it got too hot during the night.
“What do you think?” he asked Liam. “Is this tolerable?”
“This is fine,” Liam said, and Carter agreed with him. The space wouldn’t have won any awards for interior decoration. The walls were covered in that distracting wallpaper, faded but still garish, with a pattern of pink roses against a background of green and gold stripes. Much of the floor space was taken up by the big double bed. Carter had to grin at the sight of it.
“I always ask for a double bed when I make a reservation like this,” Carter said apologetically, setting his things down. “Because I like to stretch out when I sleep. But also in case I get lucky—you know?”
“Oh, I know exactly what you mean,” Liam replied. “Are you feeling lucky now?”
“Very. Will this really do, though? It is kind of small, for two.”
“It’s fine, I tell you. It’s cozy. And two can sleep in a bed as comfortably as one, provided they’re friendly.”
“I think we’re both the friendly type.”
“Yes, exceptionally outgoing, I daresay,” Liam said, with a laugh.
Carter looked at him. Liam’s heavily muscled body seemed to fill the room with masculine flesh, a heavy bush of dark brown chest hair sticking out of the crew neck of his sweatshirt, the bulge at his crotch and the beautifully shaped mounds of his ass cheeks covered tightly by the worn faded denim of his jeans.
“I think we both got lucky today,” Carter breathed. As he spoke, he walked over to Liam and he boldly put his hand on Liam’s ass. This was what he’d wanted to do ever since he’d first caught sight of the Englishman, and now he reveled in it. For a moment, Liam just stood there, and Carter wondered in alarm if he might push his hand away.
But then Liam moved his butt, almost imperceptibly at first—no more than a nervous twitch—and then he jerked it from side to side, deliberately increasing the pressure, while Carter kept his hand steady so that Liam’s movement worked his ass crack back and forth against the warm surface of the American’s open palm.
“Sweet butt,” Carter whispered.
“Do you like it?”
“Oh, I like it a lot. Can’t wait to make its further acquaintance.”
“Feel free to do so.”
With his other hand, Carter grabbed Liam’s crotch, and he could already feel the guy’s hard cock nestled snugly in the limited space between his husky thighs. As Carter kept one hand on Liam’s behind and the other on his groin, he pressed his own throbbing basket up against the Englishman’s hip, pinning it between his thighs and rubbing insistently back and forth.
“Easy, fucker,” Liam urged. “Pace yourself.”
“Sorry.”
“Oh, don’t apologize. I don’t want to shoot my load already, that’s all. The way you get me all revved up, I’m in real danger of doing just that. We’ve got the whole night ahead of us, don’t we? Just put it on hold for now—that’s all I’m saying. Don’t worry. I’ll make it up to you, later. You can have your way with me then. In case you haven’t noticed—I’m easy.”
“Are you? I intend to hold you to that,” Carter vowed.
“I’m going to make damned sure you do,” Liam retorted. “Later—I swear.”
“So—right now—what do you want to do?” Carter asked, as the two men unpacked a few essentials.
“There can’t be too much in the way of nightlife or sophisticated entertainment in this burg,” Liam suggested. “If you’re not tired after traveling all day, why don’t we go for a walk, and then find a place to have dinner? I caught a glimpse of the dining room downstairs. Breakfast is included in the price of the room, but we’ll have to pay extra for other meals here. I’d rather do a little exploring. And then—maybe early to bed,” he added, with an unmistakable, unblushing innuendo.
“That sounds like a plan. A good one.”
Chapter Three: The Welcoming Committee
It was raining, which didn’t deter the two travelers as they left the hotel. Carter knew he’d have to get used to this kind of weather.
Despite the steady downpour, the harbor looked beautiful at dusk. The ferry was gone. Owners of small boats, attired in wet raingear, were busy securing their vessels for the night.
Carter indicated the public house which they’d passed earlier. Its lighted windows looked inviting. “Want to give that place a try?”
“Sure,” Liam agreed.
Inside the pub, the locals and a few tourists were doing some serious drinking, and enjoying typical traditional pub food—fish and chips, meat pot pies—alongside such imports as
some very American-looking high-stacked hamburgers. A log fire burned in the fireplace, adding a slight scent of smoke to the air in the low-ceilinged barroom.
Liam and Carter drank lager while studying the menu.
“They have haggis here,” Liam reported.
“Ever had it?”
“No. I haven’t had the balls.”
“I suppose I’ll have to try it sooner or later, but I don’t think I have the nerve tonight, either,” Carter admitted.
Liam laughed. “I think I’ll play safe, too.”
He ordered the meat pie, which turned out to be filled with savory beef and vegetables. Topped with onion gravy, it was served with mashed potatoes and peas on the side. Carter had cod filets, fried in a crispy beer batter and accompanied by fries, cole slaw, and tartar sauce.
“This is like what we call a fish fry, back in the States,” he said. “Although you usually don’t get such a huge piece of fish.”
“The people here live on fish,” Liam warned him.
They sampled each other’s food, and pronounced it excellent.
“I don’t know what kind of food I’m going to get on board the boat,” Carter said. “I forgot to ask about that, when I signed up for this gig.”
“Last year at the site we ate pretty well,” Liam told him. “Everything was bought in bulk. Nothing fancy, but plenty of it. As for what you may have in store for you—I suppose a celebrity like Stanislaus Pulaski is used to being coddled a bit.”
“I’m not so sure about that. From what I’ve seen of his show, he and his crew are more used to roughing it. Which I don’t mind, as long as I’m adequately fed and watered. When I’m not, it brings out the beast in me,” Carter joked.
“Um, I’d like to bring out the beast in you,” Liam said. “Are you brutal? Are you rough?”
Carter emitted a low-pitched growl, which made his dinner companion laugh.
“Well, I’ll soon find out what it’s like to be with Pulaski on the road—or rather on the water,” Carter said, philosophically. “So there’s no point in worrying about it ahead of time. All kidding aside, I really am looking forward to this trip. It’s an exciting assignment. And one which won’t look too shabby on my resume.”
Desire in the Isles Page 3
