by Neil Plakcy
Cool wind buffeted Matt’s body as he stood to go to the window. He grabbed a blanket to wrap around him like a cape.
Niko didn’t look happy or sad. Just distant, like he was waiting for something.
“Hey, Niko?”
Niko startled like he was shocked from a daydream. “Thirsty? I’ve got champagne. Water? Coffee?”
“Nah.” Now that he was here, Matt wondered what he’d thought he’d say to Niko. He felt so dowdy next to him. Sure, Matt was a model too, but Niko was a star. “I guess I wondered why you picked me up. Do you just like newbies?”
Though Matt expected the smirk, Niko shrugged. “Would you believe me if I said you were the hottest guy in the room?”
Matt snorted. “No.”
That made Niko smile and he gave him a sidelong glance. “True. I was in that room.”
“Were you trying to piss Gabe off?”
“Feel free to shoot me if that jackhole motivates anything I do.” Niko took a long drag from the joint and exhaled into the night. “You appealed to me. No magic algorithm. Sorry if that’s disappointing.”
“Really? Sounded like there was something going on between you two.” Not that Matt was going to be picky about how he got with Niko. That wasn’t a fucking he’d soon forget. He just wanted to know if it might happen again.
“He wishes.” Niko grabbed Matt’s blanket and yanked him forward. Their bodies pressed together. Niko’s skin was clammy from exposure to the outside. He pulled the blanket around them both. “Stop talking about him. He doesn’t matter.”
Matt took the joint and took a long drag. If Niko said he didn’t matter, then he probably didn’t. “What does matter, then?”
At that, Niko smiled, his slightly crazy, mostly caustic smile. “Me.”
YOUNG MAN’S GAME
Michael Bracken
I relied on my good looks to get me everything I ever wanted when I was in my twenties, traveling to photo shoots on six of the seven continents and enjoying commitment-free sex with other models and the men attracted to us, but my modeling career abandoned me when makeup artists started taking longer to prep me than photographers took to capture my image.
When the top fashion houses no longer requested me by name, my agent promoted a receptionist to junior agent and made me his first client. The afternoon Delray called to inform me, in his chipmunk-chipper voice, that he was now representing me and that he had booked a one-day shoot for a hemorrhoid cream, I told him he could shove the gig up the same orifice where he might apply that cream, and I quit the business.
Unlike many of my contemporaries—boys who became men in a make-believe world where natural beauty and easy money lead to overindulgence in multiple vices—I had never required rehab to control my urges, nor had I become intimate friends with plastic surgeons in a vain attempt to recapture the youthful appearance that was so obviously escaping me.
I sold my condo in New York City, emptied my bank accounts, and returned home to my family’s west Texas cattle ranch, a place that favored hard work over good looks, and during the next two decades I put on forty pounds of muscle and saw the lines on my face that makeup artists had tried to spackle over develop into deep crags. The sun and the wind turned my exposed skin to leather, and a farmer’s tan—face, neck, and the lower three-quarters of my arms—replaced the carefully cultivated all-over tan I once had.
The one thing I hadn’t counted on when I returned home was the dearth of potential sexual partners so far from any town large enough to have a stoplight. With only three places to meet people at the town nearest the family ranch—a diner, a feed store, and a Methodist church—I resigned myself to taking my sex life in my own hands. And for too many years I did exactly that.
Fifty was safely in my rearview when my past caught up to me.
I spent the morning at the feed store, talking to Carl about an increase in our monthly order of mineral supplements, and stopped at the town’s only diner for lunch before heading back to the ranch. I was sitting at the counter, halfway through a chicken-fried steak, pinto beans, and double order of creamed potatoes, when a stranger left the booth in which he’d been sitting and straddled the stool beside me.
“May I take your picture?”
The first time I’d heard that line I’d been sitting at the other end of the counter fresh out of high school and two months away from starting classes at Texas A&M over in College Station, following in the bootsteps of my older brothers. I’d thought the sweating fat man asking the question was hitting on me, but he turned out to be a talent scout who’d taken a wrong turn on his way from Ft. Worth to Amarillo and had driven too far south. A month later I had an agent, my first modeling gigs, and an anemic photographer’s assistant giving me blowjobs.
I examined the handsome man sitting beside me and felt my cock rearrange itself in my jeans. Almost ten years my junior, he was slender like someone who watched his weight but was unaccustomed to hard, physical labor. He dressed like a catalog cowboy, though, not like a cattleman, in a blue and black embroidered western snap-front shirt, too-new Levi’s jeans, and high-heeled ostrich Justin boots that showed no sign of wear. A black felt Stetson remained on the table he’d just vacated. His dark hair was slicked back and he didn’t have hat hair, as if he carried the Stetson rather than wore it. Wherever he was from, he clearly wasn’t from west Texas.
I asked, “Why?”
He pulled a business card from his shirt pocket and placed it on the counter next to my plate. “I’m a photographer,” he explained as I glanced at the card and learned that Steve Carson hailed from Austin, the liberal center of the conservative state where we lived. “I’m shooting pictures for a coffee table book called Contemporary Cowboys and—”
“No, thanks,” I told him. I turned away and forked another bite of chicken-fried steak. I dredged it through the creamed potatoes and white gravy and stuck it in my mouth.
The photographer touched my arm, sending an unexpected jolt of sexual electricity through my body that caused my balls to tighten. I turned toward him.
“You’re exactly the type of man I’ve been looking for,” he explained. “You look the part and everything.”
I wore a blue denim shirt with the cuffs rolled halfway up my forearms, faded Wrangler jeans molded to my lower anatomy, and cow-flop-colored ropers—low-heeled cowboy boots—with unevenly worn soles caused by a slightly bow-legged gait that came from years astride a quarter horse. Unlike the photographer beside me, my apparel wasn’t some wannabe Marlboro Man garb ordered off the Internet but the daily attire of a working cattleman. “This isn’t a costume,” I said. “Not like that getup of yours.”
“What’s wrong with how I’m dressed?”
Pushed back on my head was a sweat-stained white Stetson made of Shantung straw. I touched it with one forefinger and pushed it back another half-inch. “No self-respecting cattleman wears black felt in the summer.”
Then I told him what else was wrong with his outfit.
“Nobody else has said anything,” he said defensively.
“Trust me, son,” I told him, “they were laughing behind your back.”
He considered that for a moment and then asked, “Why aren’t you?”
I shrugged. I knew what it was like to be ridiculed by men like my father and my brothers and I knew how hard I’d had to work after returning home before our neighbors accepted me back into the community.
“So what’s your name, cowboy?”
“J. C. Beck.” It wasn’t the name I’d modeled under.
“So let me take your picture Mr. Beck,” he said. “Show people what a real cowboy looks like.”
“Cattleman,” I corrected, dismissing him as I returned my attention to my now-cold meal.
The photographer returned to the booth behind me, grabbed his hat, and left the diner while I tried hard to forget the way I’d felt when he’d touched me. After I finished and sopped up the last of the white gravy with the butt end of a biscuit, I realize
d he hadn’t left but was outside, camera in hand, leaning against a Japanese-made pickup truck dwarfed by my white Ford F-350 parked next to it.
I slipped Steve Carson’s card into my shirt pocket, left a fistful of crumpled singles on the counter for Edna, and pushed out of the diner. As soon as the door opened, the photographer lifted his camera and took my picture.
“You don’t give up, do you?”
“I know what I want,” he said, “and I want you.”
Squinting against the bright sun, I stared at the photographer. I wanted him, too, but not the same way he wanted me.
So we talked.
Carson spent the night at a motel fifty miles up the road and drove to the ranch before sunup the next morning. I introduced him to my father and my brothers and told them what he wanted.
My father looked him over and I was glad Carson had been smart enough not to try to cowboy-up that morning, instead wearing jeans, blue T-shirt, running shoes, and a gimme cap.
“We ain’t posin’ for nothin’,” my father told him, “and you’d best not get in our way when we’re working.”
“I won’t,” Carson assured my father, and he didn’t. He spent the morning capturing images of the men in my family as we went about our daily chores.
That afternoon, after stuffing ourselves with my mother’s beef fajitas and sweet tea, Carson assured me he could drive a stick. So I saddled up my quarter horse and had him follow me in my F-350 out to where most of the herd was grazing.
Away from my family things changed.
After we stopped, Carson climbed into the bed of my truck and I circled the truck on my horse. Even though digital technology had replaced film since I had last been on the business end of a camera lens, I still knew how to pose. Moving with the light, I presented my best side to Carson, tilted my head forward and back, turned it left and right, and did all that I could to ensure that he had the best possible shots.
Then I climbed off my horse and Carson climbed down from the truck. He took several more photos of me with my horse and with some of the Herefords, and some of me walking through the mesquite. When the wind kicked up for a brief spell, he even caught a few shots of tumbleweed blowing past me as I held onto my hat.
Working with natural light and without makeup artists, hair stylists, wardrobe people, and the herd of other necessary and unnecessary people I had learned to tolerate at high-end fashion shoots, we didn’t stop until the sun had slipped low in the evening sky.
I hitched my horse to the driver’s side door handle and sat with Carson on the lowered tailgate of my F-350, leaning close together to view the day’s photos on his digital camera’s small screen.
After examining several dozen photos, Carson put one hand on my jean-clad thigh, turned to me, and said, “The camera loves you.”
It always had, but I didn’t tell him that. Instead I covered his hand with mine and slid it up my thigh so that he could feel my rapidly stiffening cock through the thick material of my Wrangler jeans.
Without a word, Carson set his camera aside. I tilted my hat back and pushed his gimme cap off, letting it fall to the dirt at his feet. I covered his mouth with mine, and our tongues met in a fiery dance of repressed desire.
My hands roamed over his still-clothed body, just as his traveled over mine. He was slender but firm, with strong arms, trim waist, tight butt, and a full package. He found my belt buckle and undid it, unfastened my jeans and reached inside my briefs to wrap his hand around my cock.
My eyes snapped open. No man had touched me there in years and I worried that I would be too eager, too quick to cum and I tried desperately to think of something—anything—that might delay that moment. Instead I remembered men and moments from my past—the photographer’s assistant, the sugar daddy who wanted to make me his, other models, in the bathroom of a New York City nightclub, in the makeup trailer in New Orleans, on the beach in the Bahamas. That was all behind me, memories I had repressed and needed to repress again. So I pushed those thoughts from my mind and instead concentrated on events happening right then, right there.
Soon I sat on the tailgate with my jeans and my briefs bunched around my boots, and Carson stood before me. I leaned back on the pickup’s bed, bracing myself with my hands, my erect cock jutting up like a saddle horn from the graying thatch of my pubic hair.
When the photographer bent forward and took the swollen head of my cock in his mouth, I saw the last vestiges of the sun slip behind the horizon and I moaned with pleasure. He licked away the glistening drop of pre-cum, painted the head of my cock with his tongue, and then slowly took my entire length into his oral cavity.
Carson drew back until his teeth caught on my glans and then did it again. As his head bobbed up and down in my lap, the photographer reached between my thighs, palmed my nut sack, and teased the sensitive spot behind my sack with the tip of one finger.
My hips began rising to meet his descending face, and I wrapped my hands around the back of his head. I held him as my hips moved faster and faster and I knew I couldn’t restrain myself much longer.
When Carson squeezed my swollen sack, I came, firing a thick wad of hot spunk against the back of his throat. He swallowed and swallowed again.
He held me in his mouth until my cock softened and withdrew. Then Carson straightened up and stared into my eyes. He said, “I’ve wanted to do that ever since I saw you in the diner.”
“I wish you hadn’t waited so long,” I told him. “I thought I was going to explode.”
I wrapped one hand around the back of his head and pulled him forward. I kissed him again, a deep, penetrating kiss that had me tasting my own cum, and I felt my cock begin to snake back to life.
The closest thing either of us had to lube was a half-used tube of moisturizing cream I kept in the glove box of the pickup. I told him to get it, and while he did I stripped out of my boots, jeans, and briefs and threw them into the bed of the pickup.
When Carson returned, I made him do the same. Then I spun him around and bent him over the tailgate. I smeared moisturizing cream on my middle two fingers and slipped them down the crack of his ass to his tight little sphincter.
I massaged moisturizer into his ass crack until he relaxed and I could slip one slick finger into his shitter shutter. I used my free hand to dribble more moisturizer down the length of his crack and was soon able to slip a second finger into him.
“Quit teasing me, cowboy,” Carson said hoarsely.
I withdrew my fingers, grabbed his hips, and pressed the head of my cock against the photographer’s sphincter. He pushed back as I thrust forward, and then I was in him. I drew back and pushed forward, holding his hips so tight I left bruises that we didn’t notice until later.
I slammed into him again and again and soon discovered that Carson was less familiar with a stick shift than he had let on. He’d stopped my F-350 on a barely perceptible downslope, had left the truck in neutral, and hadn’t set the emergency brake. My repeated pounding rocked the truck and it began to roll out from under Carson.
He grabbed the tailgate but couldn’t stop the truck’s forward momentum, and I couldn’t stop fucking him even though I saw what was happening.
“Let go,” I insisted as the weight of the rolling truck began to pull Carson out from under me. “Let go!”
As the photographer released his grip on my F-350, I slammed into him one last time and fired a second wad of hot spunk deep inside him.
We stood together, my spasming cock deep in his ass, and watched as my truck rolled about fifty feet, my quarter horse walking calming beside it. The rolling truck startled some inquisitive Herefords that had moseyed in our direction as if seeking a how-to primer in doing it people-style.
Carson started laughing first and I soon joined him. After he pulled away from me and straightened up, I wrapped my arm around his shoulders we walked barefoot and bare-assed to where the truck had come to a halt.
During the following year, Carson and I developed a relati
onship that went beyond randy sex and runaway pickup trucks. As he continued traveling around the country photographing all manner of contemporary cowboys, we remained in touch via cell phone. When his schedule permitted, he stopped at the ranch and spent a day or a night or several days and nights with me. Only occasionally, because cattle don’t take weekends off, I drove to Austin to stay with Carson in his apartment.
The book slowly came together, but except for that one evening sitting on the tailgate of my truck, I never saw any of Carson’s photographs. He told me he’d selected several photos of me, including some with my father and brothers, but never told me how they’d been used. I never saw page proofs and didn’t know until the book was published and a copy presented to me by my lover that my photograph graced the cover.
There I was astride my quarter horse, a herd of Herefords in the background, a faraway look in my eyes, looking every bit the buff, weather-hardened cattleman I had become and nothing at all like the young fashion model I had once been.
“You shouldn’t have put me on the cover,” I told him. He still didn’t know that I had once been a professional model. When I saw the smile on Carson’s face begin to fade, I added, “But thank you.”
I thumbed through the book and checked the photo captions, which, thankfully, identified me by my real name—J. C. Beck—not as Jase Beck, the name I had used back when I was modeling. I hoped no one would put the two together.
Two weeks later, as we were about to sit down for dinner—my parents, my brothers and their families, and Carson—the phone rang. We all had cell phones and didn’t often receive calls on the landline, so my father stepped into the foyer to answer the ringing phone.
A moment later he called to me and handed me the phone when I joined him in the foyer. As soon as I pressed the handset to my ear, I heard Delray, my former agent-for-a-day. He said, “You’re a hard man to track down.”
