Arena Stage

by habu

  “What? I don’t know how that . . . I don’t know—”

  “We have a basic problem, here, Sean,” Handelsman said. He was smiling at me—assessing me. “There’s something pretty newsworthy—that Creigh Masters’s plays haven’t been Creigh Masters’s plays for some time, at least since his popularity has resurged. And there’s something of more personal concern to me. I haven’t been getting enough because Creigh Masters has been poking my lover. Now, how do you think those two things fit together, Sean? And what do you think we could do to smooth that over?”

  “I don’t know . . . I—” He was moving entirely too fast for me.

  “I understand you are devoted to Creigh Masters, Sean. Is that true?”

  “Yes,” I said in a low voice. I couldn’t look at him now. I was pressed to the opposite wall, looking at my feet.

  “And you’d do anything to save Creigh Masters’s reputation, wouldn’t you, Sean?”

  “Yes,” I said, although I took a little longer to answer this time.

  “You know I’ve fancied you since that first day you came into the meeting in the dance studio,” Handelsman said. His voice was thick now, hoarse and low.

  “No, no, I didn’t imagine . . . Mr. Handelsman . . .”

  “Would you be comfortable with me taking your clothes off for you, Sean, or would you like to do that yourself?”

  Handelsman fucked me while sitting on the edge of the chaise lounge at the back of his office. I sat on his cock facing away from him, and staring at what we were doing in the mirror above the dressing table he was using as a desk—until I couldn’t take the shame anymore. Then I just let my head hang and counted the squares in the linoleum on the floor.

  He wasn’t particularly big, and he took me slowly. He had his arms wrapped around my torso and one hand playing with my nipples and the other pumping my cock off, while, at his direction, I rose and fell on his erection. He had his face buried in the hollow of my neck from the back and hummed me a lullaby as we fucked, first to my ejaculation, and then to his, filling out the bulb of a condom inside my channel.

  All the time he was fucking me, he was murmuring how nice I was, how much he’d wanted me for weeks, and how alive I made him feel.

  I was crying softly, not the least because—pathetically—this was the most affection I’d had in three years.

  In the end, after we’d come, he turned my face to his and kissed the tears on my cheek and then my lips.

  “That was nice, very nice,” He whispered. “We will have to do this every day.”

  “Mr. Masters,” I choked out. “I’ve pledged.”

  “Shush, little one,” he murmured. “You are doing this for Mr. Masters. In time, though, I hope you will be doing this for us.”

  “But . . . but,” I whispered. “What if he ever found out?”

  Handelsman gave a low, dry laugh. “What makes you think he doesn’t know? Why do you think he left you with me this afternoon?”

  I said nothing about my meeting with Handelsman when I returned late that afternoon to the 7th Street townhouse after the director had given me another lesson in director couching, laying me on my back on the chaise lounge with my legs open to him as he scooted his knees under my buttocks and fucked me slowly and as sensuously as I ever could have hoped that Mr. Masters would—and didn’t.

  Mr. Masters asked nothing about the long, private meeting either, which, I guess, was enough for me to be at least suspicious about what Mr. Masters knew of Handelsman’s intent.

  “Come see if you can make heads or tails of these bills, Sean,” he called out to me from the desk in the living room as I entered the townhouse.

  I was somewhat taken aback, because I handled all the bills. I wasn’t even aware he knew where I kept them.

  I sighed and walked over to the desk. “I’ve been meaning to talk to you about those, Mr. Masters. But you’ve been so . . . busy of recent evenings.”

  “Well, we’re all alone tonight,” he said, and he smiled up at me. It was his “I want to be serviced” smile.

  I gave him a confused look.

  “Gil isn’t here tonight,” he said. “I’ve told him not to come over tonight. It’s just the two of us. You can sleep upstairs again tonight.”

  A sense of relief flooded into me. I hated facing him after what I’d done with Handelsman, even if I’d done it to protect him. But maybe the thing with Gil was over; maybe we could get back to normalcy now.

  “The bills,” I said. “What they mean is that we’ll have to really cut back—at least until a check comes through on the Defiance production. And maybe . . . maybe it’s time to start thinking about the next script. I . . . I have something written, if you’d like to take a look at it.”

  He ignored my offer of another script and continued on another track of his own. “You know I’m sure Miloslav would like you for the dance troupe for this production.” He’d said it quietly, as if he was testing the waters, as if he hadn’t really let that elephant out into the room.

  “Are you saying—?” I was flabbergasted, floored. Mr. Masters knew what Miloslav Cersenka demanded of his dancers. And he’d been adamant about my staying away from the dance—and not fucking with other men. I was doubly floored. But the casual way he was suggesting I give myself to Cersenka after all he’d demanded about exclusiveness—added to the possibility that he had given me to Handelsman as well. Well, I was speechless. At least for the moment.

  “I’m saying we need money, and the dancing troupe will be paid well. And I know you’ve been practicing for the possibility of returning. I’m saying you could help pay the bills if you wanted to.”

  He even knew I’d been practicing. I staggered to a chair and sat down. But he was standing up as I sat down.

  “Come, let’s go upstairs,” he said. And he held his hand out to me. “I’ve told Gil to go to the boat tonight. I want you tonight.”

  Mr. Masters’s fucking was rough and dominating in contrast to the lovemaking of Handelsman earlier that afternoon. And his dick was massive in both length and thickness in relationship to Handelsman. He covered me with his heavy body and was thrusting into me, insistently, before I was quite ready for him. My cries and groans aroused him even more, and he devoured me with his body, with his personal need. It was all about him. And I responded in kind, melding to it being all about him. Listening for his moan or his sigh or for a simple “yes” from him and then adjusting to what he wanted. Opening to him, surrendering my all, moving my hips to the rhythm of him long after I was well past exhaustion. Giving him whatever he wanted.

  Long about the time the sun was only then setting outside the plate-glass window overlooking the envelope-sized back garden, Mr. Masters, both of us having ejaculated, held me close in his arms, his cock deep inside me, recovering, him already having promised that what we’d done so far was just a preliminary. And me believing him, having been here before.

  In that brief interlude between fucks, where I was panting heavily and knew I’d be feeling his cock stir again inside me well before I was ready to resume taking him, he leaned his lips in to my ear and whispered, in a low, hoarse voice, “And, so, does Lenny Handelsman fuck you as good as I do?”

  Chapter Five: Gil

  I hadn’t planned on letting Masters get to me—it was perhaps the last thing I’d ever say I’d do. He didn’t fool me a bit, the pompous, egotistical user. But there was a reason he was able to bend so many to his will. He had charisma. He also could fuck like no one else I’d ever met.

  I only found that out by a crooked route, though. One night, three weeks into rehearsals for Defiance at Arena Stage, I came back aboard the Boxoffice late in the evening, having spent a couple of hours on the prowl, building up my escape fund at the expense of horny men at the Bachelor Pad who wanted a bit of what I could give. The boat was deserted from fan tail through the main salon. I have no idea where Creighton Masters had been lurking. When I got to the owner’s stateroom, however, Lenny was on the bed, naked
. And, when he saw me in the doorway, he beckoned me to come onto the bed and earn my keep.

  I’d actually been more than a little worried about where I stood in the earning-my-keep department, because Lenny had been spending much of his fucking time—and, yes, I mean that literally—with Masters. I got the distinct impression I was being forced out. And I felt like I still hadn’t saved up enough money on the side to make my escape from this life. I don’t want to even start getting into the wounded pride bit. But there was that too. Masters was a good thirty years older than I was. The very idea of having to compete with him burnt me to a crisp—little did I know then just how fucking good he was.

  Anyway, I was there on top of Handelsman, having dragged him to the foot of the bed and made him stand on the floor there, bent over the bed, and I was servicing him deep and in rapid strokes, when I suddenly felt a hand palming my belly and the thick fingers of another one greased up and forcing themselves into my asshole.

  I turned my head and saw that it was Masters and that he was naked. He and Handelsman must have already been at it and Masters had wandered off somewhere before I got there and come back, seen I’d arrived in Handelsman’s asshole, and decided he wanted to play too.

  I made threatening, growling noises to warn Masters off.

  “Ride with it Gil,” Handelsman muttered through clinched teeth. “It turns me on.” I was being reminded who paid my bills.

  “Well, it don’t turn me on, Lenny. Get your fucking fingers out of there, Masters.”

  Masters laughed at that, and when I think of it now, I have to laugh too. Fucking me with his fingers was exactly what he was doing. But I didn’t think it was all that funny at the time.

  Lenny just hissed “behave” between groans, and my position with Lenny was too precarious to challenge that demand.

  Within minutes, though, I was beyond caring—or complaining. Once Masters got his cock inside me and began to perform his magic, I was lost. I could understand now why Sean was so willing to put up with his dominating crap. The man had some of the best fuck techniques I’d ever felt.

  Sometime during the next hour, Lenny had disappeared altogether, and it was just Masters and me, Masters working me like the master he was.

  Then Lenny returned to bed, and we spent the rest of the night together, entwined in each other’s arms and workin’ our hips in unison from time to time.

  My first regret when I woke up the next morning—not my only regret, because I wasn’t so gaga over Masters’s cock that I didn’t regret being caught up in that particular whirlpool—my first regret was for Sean. That I was now muscling in on his food bowl just as I had been fearing Masters was muscling in on mine. And I still had a twinge of regret toward Sean when I reasoned my way out of that, telling myself that Sean was quickly becoming the moneymaker of that pair and that he deserved better than Masters. And maybe he’d see that in Masters hooking up with me, and I could be the conduit for him escaping his situation. But when I still couldn’t shake the regret, I realized I had to start thinking about my own feelings toward Sean—just protective, or did it go farther than that?

  That was the first full night that Masters had stayed away from the 7th Street

  townhouse. Sean had certainly looked perplexed the next afternoon when he arrived at the stage rehearsals and found Lenny and Masters there already, pretty as you please, no explanations from Masters on where he’d been all night. Sean, of course, knew where Masters had been. What he didn’t know was that Masters had been with me on the boat and in Lenny’s bed as well.

  The big shock came then, five days later. By then the pattern had been established. Masters would come back to the Boxoffice while Sean was at the stage doing the script rewrites. Lenny and Masters would have drinks on the fan tail and discuss the day’s rehearsals and then they’d have a late supper together in the salon. Lenny would leave Masters in the salon to drink his after-dinner brandy and smoke his cigar, and Lenny would retire to the owner’s stateroom after knocking on the door of the cabin where I had been spending the evening, waiting to be summoned—or, if I’d gone out while they were having their drinks and supper to pick up a bit of tail that would pay for it and add to my escape fund, I jolly well needed to be back on the boat before Lenny retired.

  I would go into the owner’s stateroom with Lenny and fuck him for a while, and then Masters would appear and fuck me while I was fucking Lenny, and Lenny eventually would go off for a shower, leaving Masters still plowing me. That was part of the Masters’s mystique—he could fuck for hours.

  Except for the first night, though, Masters would end up going back to the townhouse.

  But that fifth night, when I returned to the Boxoffice, Lenny was pouring two snifters of brandy and breaking out a set of cigars and proceeded to sit in a chair near where Masters was sitting and joined him in the brandy and smoke.

  When I entered the salon, I saw the change in pattern and started back toward the corridor leading to the cabins.

  “I’d prefer that you stayed, Gil,” Lenny said. “In fact, please come over here and service Creigh’s cock.”

  I stood there, shocked. I’d let Masters fuck me; I hadn’t given him a blow job before. The guy had to be really something special for me to give him a blow job.

  “I don’t think so, Lenny,” I said.

  I don’t know what had gone on between Lenny and Masters that was making Lenny act this way, but he was suddenly all hard assed.

  “Do you like your job, Gil?” he asked. His voice was very cold.

  “It’s OK,” I said. “Nothing I couldn’t replace, though.”

  “Where do you go of evenings, Gil? When you leave here. Where could Jack have seen you, say two nights ago? And what could he have seen you doing?”

  Jack was the head lighting guy at the theater. I thought maybe I’d seen him in the Bachelor Pad gay bar a couple of times. So this was it. This wasn’t about Masters at all. This was about me and fucking with other men, men Lenny hadn’t selected. This was punishment.

  I could have brought it to a head, ignored Lenny’s demand, not accepted the punishment, and seen if he was bluffing. Lenny never had it so good. He’d never had cocking to equal mine. Except, maybe, until Masters had come back into his life. And, now that I thought about it, he’d been with Masters before he employed me. Suddenly the balance wasn’t looking all that much in my favor. And I didn’t think I’d put together enough money yet to comfortably give up this job.

  Also, I looked at Masters, and he had his cock out of his fly and was holding it up for me to see in all its glory. That was a little hard to deny as well.

  I went over and knelt in front of Masters and sucked him off, as Lenny and Masters leaned into each other and kissed and cooed.

  When I was done with Masters, I started back toward the cabins again, but they weren’t finished with me.

  “You’re going with Creigh tonight, Gil,” Lenny said in a soft voice that still had a hard tone to it.

  “Lenny—” I started. But I saw the hard look in his eyes, and Masters was standing and holding a hand out.

  Sean hadn’t returned from the theater when we arrived at the 7th Street townhouse, and so the first he knew that Masters was cocking me at all was when he came home and found us in Masters’s bed—in his, Sean’s, bed.

  I almost died at the look on his face when he came into the room, and I hated myself when he turned and quietly went downstairs and began making up the sofa in the living room as a bed. But I hated Masters more.

  For a couple of weeks after that, I would go back to the Boxoffice over lunch hours and do Lenny in his bed and then, at night, I’d be in Masters’s bed being done by him.

  The hate I had for Masters and what we did mounted in me, and it became virulent as I watched what this was doing to Sean. And then the morning Sean admitted to me that it was he who had been the resurgence in Masters’s success in the theater, Sean who had been doing most of the work on the newer, better received scripts, I
’d had enough.

  That day, before stage rehearsals started, before Sean came to the theater, I told Lenny that Masters was a fraud, that he hadn’t recouped his writing genius at all, and that Sean was the real writing genius now. And there, in front of Lenny, when Masters appeared in the theater, I told Masters that my days in his bed were over.

  I had no idea what Lenny would do, but by now he’d apparently had accomplished the punishment he wanted to inflict on me, and he’d probably gotten tired of sharing me with Masters, and the revelation—which he should have figured out himself—that Sean was the one responsible for the high quality of the play and the sustaining of that quality through rewrites. And he said nothing when I lowered the boom on Masters.

  Masters, the egotist that he was, also said nothing. He just laughed it off—played like I wasn’t anything to him anyway and he’d only been fucking me in his bed because Lenny had said he wanted it to be that way. Before he’d left the building, I’m sure he’d convinced himself he was the one who cut it off with me.

  Later I made sure that I had a nice little chat with Jack, the senior lighting technician. I couldn’t blame him, really; he owed me nothing, and he owed Lenny everything. He probably thought he was doing the right thing for Lenny. And maybe it only didn’t look right as seen from my perspective.

  I was holding the long ladder for him while he was adjusting lights above the stage after the rehearsal had started. Lenny wanted to see how the actors were highlighted in the lights at several points of the stage to serve his blocking concepts—and he’d said this would be the extent of the rehearsal that day, that he was giving the actors the rest of the afternoon off.

  When Jack came down the ladder, I didn’t move away, and he came down more or less inside my embrace. He was mortified when I told him I knew he’d sussed me out to Lenny on my visits to the Bachelor Pad.

  “God, Gil, I am so sorry. I just mentioned it in passing. I had no idea Lenny didn’t know you went there . . . I . . . I . . . oh, god, Gil, I wouldn’t do that to you on purpose for anything. I—”