The Peter & Charlie Trilogy

by Gordon Merrick

  Charlie worked himself into him slowly and gently, his soul melting with tenderness and an unfamiliar, selflessly poignant concern for his well-being and happiness. He had never been more aware of the power of possession conferred on him by his prodigious sex. Jeff made him feel that he existed only to be possessed by it. He felt a warmth in the cold core of himself. The fire sprang up and spread all through him, warming his spirit. His throat tightened and tears welled up in his eyes. He lay still on the boy’s body and felt the contact between them all the length of him. He swallowed with difficulty and flung away his defenses. “God, you’re incredible,” he whispered against Jeff’s ear.

  Jeff made no response, his quiescence not a rebuff but a vast surrender. Charlie lay on him and felt his sex swelling deep within him. His breath caught with incredulity at what was happening in him and he uttered a moan that grew in volume as tension gathered and was shatteringly dissolved in orgasm. Jeff grabbed for the towel and pushed it under him as his body leaped with Charlie’s. They both lay still once more.

  “How extraordinary,” Jeff murmured with a deep tremor of wonder in his voice. “We came without moving. We made each other come without even trying. You took me and didn’t humiliate me. It doesn’t have to be degrading.”

  “Did you think it did?”

  “Mike made me think so. Do you know why I wanted to just lie here and do nothing and let you have me any way you wanted?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know. Tell me.”

  “I worship you. I wanted to know if I could worship you without making it evil. I didn’t want to take anything for myself. I’m yours. It’s too much for me to grasp. I know gods don’t want mortals for long, but I’m yours for now. You’re inside me, Charlie. Isn’t it amazing? If this had happened a day or two ago, everything would be different.”

  “You know it couldn’t have, but you’d better explain a few things.” Without withdrawing from him, Charlie started to shift his weight from his back but Jeff’s hands were immediately on his thighs, holding him.

  “Don’t move. I want you there. I want to feel all your weight on me. That’s obvious. I don’t know if I can explain anything else.”

  “You can’t be in love with someone new every day. What do you feel about Mike?”

  “I’m in love with him. Still. I didn’t worship him. I tried to tell Peter. I can’t think of you as ordinary mortals. It’s on a different level. Peter’s a playful Dionysian god. You’re a majestic god. You’re Apollo. You’re probably fatal.” He made a rumble of laughter in his chest.

  “I don’t feel much like a god. I just want to look after you, take care of you, love you.”

  “You’re being unfaithful to Peter. Can you explain that?”

  “I’ve already tried to justify it in my mind. I can almost convince myself that he would approve. He sort of turned you over to me. Of course, nothing would’ve happened if you hadn’t made me want to give my life to you in some way.”

  “I make you feel all that?” Jeff asked with a little lilt of incredulity in his voice. “How beautiful. You’re still hard, aren’t you.”

  “Again,” Charlie said accurately.

  “Really? You’re so enormous I can’t tell the difference. Peter told me about you, but I couldn’t imagine it. I want to look at it for hours. I’ve never seen anything so colossally beautiful. I could go on talking about it all day.”

  “Talking about it makes me want to do something with it.” He withdrew slowly and slowly drove into him again.

  Jeff suddenly brought his body into play. He worked his hips and uttered a series of brief cries as Charlie filled him again. “Oh, God! Charlie! Let me pretend you’re a mortal this time. Let me do it all with you. Make love—I want you to fuck me hard so it hurts. I want to feel where you’ve been tomorrow and the next day and the day after that.”

  “This isn’t going to be the last time, you know.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  “I want you to stay with me tonight. After that, who knows? It’s too much to think about yet.” The words tumbled from him, fired by unknown emotions that boiled beneath desire. It was unimaginable that this child could threaten the attachments of a lifetime, but while he held the slim hungry body and moved himself within it, he felt that he could never let it go. “I love you, dammit,” he gasped. “Don’t you understand?”

  Light clear laughter broke from Jeff. “I know it isn’t possible, but I love you to say it. Show me. Yes, like that. You are Apollo. Nobody else could be so colossal.”

  They abandoned themselves to their bodies. Charlie was staggered by the frenzy of passion in him. There was nothing artful in what he was doing. He was swept up into a delirium of passion while he strove to satisfy the ravenous hunger that was in the boy. Jeff broke into wild sobs through which he kept crying Charlie’s name. When orgasm finally overcame it, the body in Charlie’s arms felt as if it would fly apart; he found himself grappling with it like a wrestler, exerting all his strength to hold it while he drove his own orgasm into it.

  The silence that followed seemed to echo with their exertions. Charlie lay stunned, spent, appalled but triumphant. Love was in him, love compounded of fury and tenderness, a longing to expose himself fearlessly. He felt Jeff’s enormous vulnerability to hurt and he felt a coward for having surrounded himself with so many guards. Let them go. Loving Jeff was a battle. In the aftermath of this preliminary encounter, it seemed a battle he must win. It might not survive the night, but as long as the fire burned in him he would let it rage.

  He felt his sex shrinking and he roused himself with an effort and withdrew carefully and sprang up from the bunk. He went to the washbasin. When he was finished, he returned to the bunk and leaned over and touched the back of Jeff’s neck. The boy’s body was shaken by a long shudder.

  “Hadn’t you better wash up?” Charlie asked.

  Jeff gathered himself together and sat up on the edge of the bunk, holding the towel against himself. “Don’t look,” he said, his face averted.

  “I won’t do anything you don’t want me to do, kiddo. Ever, I hope.” He turned away as Jeff rose and hurried from him. Charlie tried to keep his mind a blank. There were too many questions crowding in on it. He gave his attention to a stain on the bulkhead in front of him. His eyes found curious forms in it.

  “All right,” Jeff said after a few minutes.

  Charlie turned. Jeff stood halfway between him and the washbasin, one of the small towels hitched around his loins. Slim hips. He was struck anew by the beauty of the dark head. Love burned up in him as he looked at the young body he had possessed. He longed to watch it ripen and mature, help him to come to terms with it and himself.

  Jeff kept his eyes on Charlie’s. “You don’t despise me now?”

  “Why should I?”

  “Because I enjoyed it so much. Because I let myself go like that.”

  Charlie laughed. “Making love isn’t supposed to be a court ballet.”

  Jeff’s eyes cleared. It had the effect of filling his face with youthful carelessness, in such contrast to his habitual melancholy that he might have been wreathed in smiles. “Mike made fun of me. I know there’s something wrong with me—I mean, being in love with Mike and loving it so with you. Peter warned me about turning into a whore, but maybe this couldn’t happen right now with anybody but you. And Peter, if he wanted me.”

  Charlie was sharply conscious of the danger signals, but he didn’t retreat before them. He couldn’t blame Jeff for wanting Peter. Fortunately, there was no chance of his getting him. He went to Jeff and unhitched the towel and threw it aside. “You don’t have to cover yourself when you’re with me.” He studied Jeff’s face. “Your mouth is so beautiful. I haven’t had time to kiss it properly.” He did so.

  This time, Jeff responded avidly, letting his body go against Charlie’s. As they drew apart, Charlie saw that he had aroused the boy into full erection again. A phenomenon of youth, but it was thrilling to have this power over him. Jeff
took Charlie’s sex in his hand and dropped his eyes to it.

  “At last. If you only knew how often I’ve dreamed of seeing it and touching it. It’s colossal even without an erection. It’s obsessive. I want to see it like this and I want to see it towering up in front of you the way it did a little while ago. Could you get another erection with me now?”

  “Given a little time. We’ve had quite a workout. We don’t have to try to set a record. Come on. We better put some clothes on. We have things to talk about before we get there. We won’t be very coherent if we’re naked together.”

  “Just one more minute.” He dropped down and took Charlie’s sex in both hands and put the head in his mouth. He rolled his tongue around it and released it and put his hands on Charlie’s thighs and gazed at it. “Oh, yes, I can give you an erection,” he murmured. “Just hanging, so long and heavy and beginning to get hard, it’s absolutely spellbinding. And to know what it will become—huge and demanding and taking anything it wants. If I make it get like that, it will want me.”

  Charlie put his hand under Jeff’s almost beardless chin and caressed it as he lifted him. Jeff’s eyes met his. “I love you, you know,” Charlie repeated with a further painful opening of his heart. Their eyes held for a moment, Jeff’s deep and yearning and strangely impersonal.

  They parted and gathered up their clothes and put them on. Charlie pulled the envelopes out of his hip pocket and led Jeff to the other bunk and sat and pulled him down beside him and put his arm around him. For the moment, there was peace between them. The way the boy let his body go to him confirmed his total possession of it and heightened his sense of responsibility for him. Jeff was his now. “Well, now. Peter told me all about everything. The only difference is that we don’t have to put up the money, after all. Sid is getting it from Dimitri. Peter said something about statements. Is that what these are?”

  “Yes. I did the official one in Greek and English.”

  “We won’t really need them, either, now that you’re here. Take them to your father. I don’t know if he’s gone home yet. When last heard of, he was staying at the Gripari house with Joe Peterson.”

  Jeff turned to him with a rapid little movement of his head. “You mean it? He’s left home? He doesn’t know about the house?”

  “I don’t know. Anyway, look for him at Joe’s first. I’d like you to talk to him before you see your mother. You’ll tell him everything, won’t you?”

  “Not about us?”

  Charlie started to speak and stopped, staggered that there was an “us” to tell about. Us—Peter and I—and Jeff? After the initial shock, it filled him with inexplicable contentment. For this little while, he could continue to act without counting the consequences. He had until Peter’s return tomorrow for this freedom to work its transformations. Perhaps by then he might know what “us” meant. “No,” he said with some reluctance. “I don’t see what we have to do with everything that’s been happening the last couple of days. Stick to that. If your father hasn’t been to the police yet, tell him that Peter wants him to go right away.”

  Jeff opened the envelopes and peered into them. He handed one back to Charlie. “You’re supposed to keep this for Peter.”

  “I don’t think that matters now. Your father’s going to want to know about Mike and why you let Dimitri have the money. Are you ready to talk about that?”

  “Tell him I’m a raging faggot? I don’t see how I can, but I’ll try to answer truthfully if he asks me anything. Hold me, Charlie.”

  The piteous note in his voice cut straight through to all Charlie’s tenderness and love. He gripped him closer and lifted a hand to his face and turned to him and kissed his mouth again. He had to shift his legs to accommodate the burgeoning of his sex. Jeff’s hands found it. Charlie relinquished his mouth. “We don’t have to set a record. You want to spend the night with me, don’t you?”

  “Of course, but that’s hours away. We haven’t even got to Poros yet.” Very deliberately, he unbuttoned Charlie’s shirt and ran his hands exploringly over his torso, his eyes intent on it. He slipped from the bunk to his knees and pushed Charlie’s legs apart and moved in between them. “There’s plenty of time,” he said, his hands working unhurriedly to attain their goal. When they had done so, their touch brought Charlie’s sex surging up between them. Jeff sat back and his eyes roamed over it. “Ye Gods, how it soars. Right up to your chest. I could sit here and stare at it for hours.” Jeff tugged at the shorts and Charlie lifted his hips and allowed his thighs to be stripped. Jeff held the sex and stroked his cheeks and forehead with it, held it against his eyes, leaned the side of his head against it. “I hurt so everywhere. Wherever I touch myself with this, I feel healed.”

  It was explicit, almost ritualized worship, filled with awe and a terrible passion, not for Charlie but for the towering flesh and the male principle it embodied. The reign of the monumental phallus had returned with a vengeance. It seemed to Charlie that he would scarcely have had the right to deny access to an object that inspired such fervor in its disciple. His self-imposed reticence about it seemed perverse before the extravagance of this adulation. He knew that the worship hadn’t opened out to include all of him. Jeff was capable of love, he could feel it trembling in him, like an unshed tear, on the rim of his sexuality but Charlie hadn’t made it spill over. There were moments during the strange rite—rapt, remote, ecstatic—in which Jeff’s eyes and hands and mouth were mesmerically engaged, when Charlie had to fight back an impulse to seize him and force himself on his attention. Instead, Jeff led him into the ritual, placing Charlie’s hands on himself, indicating how he wanted him to hold and caress himself, while his own hands and mouth conducted additional ceremonies.

  At last, he pulled off the unbuttoned shirt and placed Charlie’s hands on the mattress so that he was leaning back, propped on his arms, his legs sprawling, all of his body slack and disengaged so that the sex seemed to stand free with an immense thrusting power of its own. Jeff once more took possession of it with both hands, stroking it slowly with tantalizing adoration, holding it all over, working every possible variation until he found the combination that brought it immediately to the edge of orgasm. Charlie cried out as he felt it coming. Jeff had dropped down so that he was staring up wide-eyed at the point of emission. He let the first jet leap into the air and then scrambled up to draw the rest into his mouth. When it was over, he wiped his face with the back of his hands and gazed up at Charlie from eyes soft with wonder and gratitude. “Charlie,” he murmured.

  It brought Charlie forward with his arms out to hold him, touched by his young indifference to the fragility of the love he could offer him. He held his head against his bare chest and kissed his hair. “It was a bit lonely,” he said, “but I’m glad for anything I can give you.”

  Jeff pulled back from him and looked him searchingly in the eyes. “Anything? Everything! Don’t you understand what that meant to me? I’ve been waiting for it all my life. It’s the fulfillment of my destiny. So many things have come clear.”

  Charlie looked into the face that seemed to grow more beautiful with familiarity, and smiled at the grandiloquent phrases. “I’d like you to tell me later. We’d better pull ourselves together. We’re almost there.”

  Charlie dressed again while Jeff put on his jacket and stuffed his tie into a pocket. At the door, Charlie kissed his lips and looked into his eyes. “I wish I could tell you to come right up as soon as you can, but I’ll need a little time. I left things in mild disorder at the house. There’ll be the kids and Martha and so forth to cope with. Come at ten. I’ll be waiting for you in Peter’s room. You know.”

  Jeff ran his hand over his crotch. “I’ll find you,” he said.

  In the confusion of arrival and debarkation, he clung to Charlie’s side. They were jostled by the crowd and could allow themselves furtive little contacts of their hands. When they were off and headed in toward town, Charlie kept a hand on his shoulder. He passed the steps he usually took up t
o the house and continued into a tangle of narrow streets. They offered a sense of semiprivacy. Charlie stopped and faced him. “I’ve got to leave you somewhere,” he said. “I guess this is as good a place as any. I’d like to kiss you before I let you go.”

  “Why don’t you?”

  “Here?”

  “The Greeks don’t care. They kiss each other all the time. Nobody else matters.”

  “I suppose you’re right.” He laughed and their mouths met. He allowed himself only an instant to savor the eagerly parted lips and then drew hastily back, but doing it in the open, here on home territory, made him realize more vividly what the day had done for him. Life had become an adventure once more. All the stale old patterns had been smashed. Anything could happen. “I’ll be waiting,” he said. He turned abruptly and strode off.

  Jeff stood where he was and watched him go, spellbound by the carriage of the masterful body, his mind filled with images of the great phallus. The magnificent figure turned a corner and was gone. Even if he never saw Charlie again, he would always hold him in his mind. He had no need of fantasies any more.

  He set off through the familiar streets, scarcely seeing them. He felt as if he had been gone for a long time and had no real sense of returning. He had gone forever, had, in a sense, departed life. There was a new confidence in his body—he was aware of an impulse to flaunt it; it had been so stupendously used and loved—but there was only darkness in his soul.

  If anybody could have dispelled it, it was Charlie, but he hadn’t and couldn’t. Mike had shown him the level of his needs. There had been a fierce bestiality in their moments of intimacy that had exposed the extent of what he labeled dispassionately as his depravity. He still longed to sacrifice himself to the limitless cruelty of Mike’s ego. The air he breathed with Charlie was too rarified. He didn’t want the beauty he offered him except for the beauty of his colossal cock taking him. He had come into possession of himself overnight and what he had found filled him with despair. He was in love; he had been broken by his love and couldn’t be mended.