Hollywood Flames
Stanley Bennett Clay
Domincan Heat, Book Two
While vacationing in the Dominican Republic, handsome Hollywood photographer Jesse met and fell in love with the man of his dreams, Étienne, a gorgeous young bodega worker. After many trials and tribulations, Jesse brought the love of his life home to America, where their hot and steamy romance continues with the same intensity they shared in their island paradise.
When Jesse and his actress sister Frankie suggest the photogenic Étie pursue a Hollywood career, the reluctant beauty attracts more attention than he and Jesse bargained for. Hardy Ferrell, a hot and hunky bisexual TV star, is just one of a slew of Hollywood flames eager to get a taste of Tinsel Town’s hottest new boy candy.
In spite of Étienne’s steadfastness and loyalty, Jesse’s jealousy soon gets the best of him, threatening to destroy the very thing he wanted most. It takes almost losing the love of his life for Jesse to finally realize that the heart of love is trust.
A Romantica® male/male GLBT erotic romance from Ellora’s Cave
Hollywood Flames
Stanley Bennett Clay
Prologue
Los Angeles, California—the Hollywood community in particular—is populated by a disproportionate number of drop-dead gorgeous men. Eye-popping black men, tanned-to-perfection white men, pretty-boy Asians and hot-and-hunky wet-dream Latinos fill the golden streets. They work out their fine-ass bodies in state-of-the-art gyms and jogging along picturesque mountain trails like the Adonis-like angels the City of Angels was built to coddle. Almost any man in Hollywood could be a model in Details magazine, and those who can’t, can sugar daddy, casting-couch or exchange dick and ass for dreams and opportunities in this well-stocked pool of male Hollywood eye-candy.
One theory is that every hot young hunk from every town, ghetto, hamlet, farm and trailer park around the world has been told by more than a few admirers how hot he is. And then comes the requisite encouragement, “You know, with a face like that, you should be in Hollywood.”
More than a few of these sumptuous wannabe Hollywood flames take heed, pack up and ship their sexy little behinds here with dreams of celluloid stardom. For most of them, that dream goes unfulfilled, of course, but few return to their hometowns. Once you get a four-season round of Southern California’s kick-ass weather, it’s hard to go back. I mean, how do you turn your back on year-round sunshine, negligible rain, warm and soothing desert breezes, cool nights on the hottest days and very little of that pesky humidity that turns summer for most of the rest of the country into a hell of sticky funk and locust like-mosquitoes?
Not to mention that much of L.A. County’s economy is dependent on the entertainment industry, one of the gayest industries on the planet in one of the gayest cities in America. So between the down-low rappers and superstars, the nude swimming parties and mano y mano sex soirées, the ease of online hook-ups and the general sexual tolerance and liberal bent of the Tinsel Town mind-set, man-to-man sex-downs are as common as a Malibu hillside fire.
But that’s not the reason my Étie is here, although his matinee idol looks are as stunning as his heart is pure. Étienne left his Dominican Republic home to be with me here in Los Angeles because he loves me and I love him. He’s my own private superstar.
So why in the hell would I allow my jealousies and doubts to intrude upon the perfection of our love? Perfect love in the hands of imperfect man can really implode, especially in a place like Hollywood. Though no man can crush a diamond held in his strongest grasp, that diamond is often lost in the hands of a bumbling fool.
On occasion, I, Jesse Lee Templeton III, have been known to be a bumbling fool. After all we’d been through to get Étienne here to America—breaking federal law with his bogus marriage to my semi-nymph sister, my sister’s brazen come-on to him, the death of his repentant father—you’d think my faith in what we have would be strengthened, not weakened by doubt festering from the sores of my own insecurities.
As the saying goes, there’s no fool like an old fool. But even though I was only forty when Étie, thirteen years my junior, came to live with me, the Hollywood vultures smelled new blood. Their lascivious fangs dripped with desire, which sent me on some strange and foreboding alert. Hell, let me be honest. I was fucking outraged. But it was a quiet rage, the kind that starts with slow but steady embers, flameless perhaps, but even more lethal, as few could see it coming, not even those who love you most. Not even those you love the most.
So now, I beg your indulgence in this cautionary tale of how not to be a bumbling fool, and how not to try to out-flame Hollywood.
Chapter One
The beginning of our life together in Los Angeles was idyllic. Before I went to the Caribbean to bring Étie home, I’d already gotten rid of most of the furnishings and décor of my pre-Étie life. I wanted to start off new and equal with him. We’d be equal in decisions about the home we would share. So I decided to wait until he got here to re-furnish. Together we’d create our nest to the likes, eclecticisms and the give-and-take of each other’s taste.
The bed, however, I did buy on my own, prior to his arrival. I knew the first night we’d share together in America would be a night of fresh new love, spawned from a deep-rooted commitment and a decision seriously pondered.
You see, up until that night, we only made love using condoms and common sense, our sense being the only thing common about how we made love. But after more than a year of letting a thin layer of latex come between our ultimate pleasure, and in light of our personal vows made to each other with only God as our witness, and bi-annual HIV tests that further confirmed our commitment, we decided to affirm our love-born trust in the raw.
My naked dick would soon know the natural feel of his warm and comforting hole, a dark and lovely place already highly recommended by my mouth and tongue. He would then return the favor, fucking me with a loving fury, exploding inside me, filling me with the cream I’ve always dreamed of sucking up.
It was nearly 7:30 in the evening when the cab delivered us to our front door. We were jet-lagged to be sure. The ninety-minute flight from Santo Domingo to Miami, the customs scrutiny in Miami, the two-hour wait for our flight to L.A., that six-hour flight to Los Angeles’ LAX, completely exhausted us. But we were not too exhausted to christen that bed with flesh-on-flesh sex.
We dropped our bags in the barren living room and kissed gently.
“Welcome to your new home, baby,” I said as I held him in my arms.
“I am so happy to be here, Papi,” he said to me in a near whisper, the feel of his thick manhood swelling inside his jeans nudged against my own swelling dick.
I took his hand and led him to the bedroom. The tour of his new home would have to wait. His slipping his other hand down the back of my pants, down my Calvin’s, cupping my ass, was his concurrence.
We entered the bedroom. He slowly stepped in front of me and marveled at the king-sized four-poster. I marveled at the sight of him, so gorgeous in front of me, all six feet, one hundred seventy-five pounds of him. His shimmering jet-black hair curled at the nape of his neck. The tight black T-shirt defined the broad, muscular shoulders. His tight-fitting jeans hugged his beautiful, slightly hoisted, irresistibly sexy bubble-butt. My sandy-colored lover man was cut to perfection.
He turned to me wide-eyed and smiling. “The bed is so beautiful,” he cooed, moving close to me, the slight swoosh of his sweet breath intoxicating me. “It is beautiful like you, my Jesse.”
Our movements were involuntary. My lips kissed his. My arms gathered him to me. I felt his arms wrap around my waist. His fingers delicately explored the small of my back. My nipples perked. Our dicks shuddered shamelessly, imprisoned boners p
ulsing with the want of freedom.
And so we slowly undressed each other, never taking our gazes from each other. We allowed our clothing to slip down our bodies to the floor.
We stood before each other in our full and unabashed nakedness. He kissed me with an angel’s wisp—my mouth, my face, my nose, my neck. I nearly fainted at his touch. My newly liberated penis shot straight up between his legs, beneath his heated balls, beneath his freedom rider dick. Then his tightly muscled thighs clamped down on my thickened joint and squeezed me into jitters with a slow and grinding dance.
He pulled away; we pulled away, for fear of cresting before the christening. I took his hand and led him to the side of the bed. I pulled back the blanket and top sheet neatly, like a chambermaid anxious to please for a big tip.
I wanted that big tip. I wanted to cash it. I wanted to treasure hunt inside him. And so I laid him on our virgin bed and beheld all of his beautiful body, from head to toe, a love banquet laid before me.
I climbed onto the bed, next to him. Slowly, he rolled toward me and kissed me deeply as he wrapped his upper leg around my waist, nudging my ass, thrusting my tingling dick between his legs, beneath his own swollen dick, his plump and hairy balls, along his slightly hairy ass-crack, teasing me relentlessly with a slow and steady rhythm.
I felt his hand reach under me, grab hold of my balls, then find my shaft that slid wantonly across his moistened hole. I felt him seize my rod and guide me to the spot. Even as he shoved his tongue deep down my mouth, I felt my naked dickhead kiss the puckered lips of his hungry ass. I sighed and whimpered as he ever so slowly lowered himself onto me. His tight ass slowly devoured the whole of me. I sank inside him with a frightening, guttural gasp. With lust-filled moans all his own, he stirred me in his warm insides. His handsome face grimaced and he let out a heaving cry I hadn’t heard before. Foreign sounds of breathtaking pleasure escaped from me without resistance. The sweet unbearable thrill of being naked inside him—my dancing dick’s child-like glee let loose in the candy store of his sweet ass, tingled by every stroke, every thrust, each time he slammed against me with a starving, squeezing, devouring wiggle—rendered me helpless against the gluttony of intolerable carnal bliss.
“Oh Papi, yes,” he moaned as he rocked and rolled on top of me, then grabbed his ass cheeks and stretched them wide, inviting maximum penetration.
And so I pounded him with panting pleasure. The feel of his warm asshole taking and sucking and swallowing my delirious rod with a greedy smacking reduced me to the insanity of dizzying delight.
And if that beautiful torture wasn’t enough, against my sweaty chest, he beat his hard-on feverishly as he steadily slammed his smoking ass onto me. We were both panting and huffing and puffing and cursing and screaming. Our bodies shivered, straining toward the peak of our blazing lovemaking. We were on fire with desire, and no quenching was in sight.
Finally, we could hold back no longer. He beat his manhood in triple time. I fucked his ass with equal fervor. Both our hearts pounded insanely, and our explosions were crazily in sync. I flooded his hole in a blast that rendered me helplessly delighted, devastated and dumbfound, ethereal. He shot his thick cream all over my chest and my neck and my mouth. The taste of his cum made me buck with one final thrust, then he collapsed on my chest.
I wrapped my arms around him and nestled my face into his tussled hair. The coconut scent held me in a sweet and steady lull.
Time stood still as we laid there in each other’s arms, in each other’s love.
“Welcome home, baby,” I finally whispered in his ear.
“Thank you, Papi,” he whispered back, cuddling in my arms. “That was best coming home present ever.”
Chapter Two
Los Angeles was an easy adjustment for Étie. In that first year of us living together, time passed quickly and his feel for the city made him right at home. He maintained a closet full of clothes, photographs and duplicate personal items at my sister Frankie’s place just in case an immigration officer popped up for a surprise visit. That Southern California was similar in so many ways to much of the Dominican Republic was a definite plus for him. The year-round sunshine, the warm desert breezes—not as humid as the tropical breezes of his island birthplace, but just as soothing—and the huge Latino population, along with attended cultural influences, embraced him as much as he embraced them.
What did surprise me was how he not only managed to make it through our two-week Christmas vacation in the Big Apple, but how he actually relished it. Sure, I understood his desire to visit New York with its huge Dominican community, but in the dead of winter? How his little island behind survived those two weeks in New York shocked me. Snow and wind chill factor were weather conditions he’d only experienced in movies, on TV and in Jack London fiction. I was so afraid that those nor’easter elements would truly kill my baby, or at the very least send him packing. But his first white Christmas was a real treat for him. He even talked me into making snow angels with him in Central Park.
Back on the home front in Southern California, his independent spirit flourished like the daily sunshine. Having worked most of his life, he couldn’t wait to find a job, even though I had suggested he kick back awhile, enjoy some extended leisure time, something he’d little known in his young, struggling life. Big mistake on my part.
“Do not think that I am just your bitch, Papi, your housewife with nothing to do but sit around all day on your income, eat chocolate and get fat.” Man, did he stun my condescending ass into a state of self-examination. I apologized immediately.
Now don’t get me wrong. He enjoyed as much as I did, lying around our beautiful, sun-drenched apartment. And every so often, on a Saturday night, he’d drag me out of the house, around the corner and down the street to the Catch One Disco. There he’d dance my old ass into a frenzy until the sun came up on Sunday. After a quick shower, he’d prop me up for Agape Spiritual Center’s first service because he’d fallen in love with Michael Beckwith’s inspirational pulpit week-starter as much as I had.
But Étienne Saldano was still the same man I had fallen in love with—his own man, not simply the pretty face I photographed smiling at me from behind the counter at Bodega Colonial.
He landed a job at Jay’s Market bagging groceries. Jay’s Market, as everyone in the neighborhood knew, was the corner jewel and communal trough at Pico Boulevard and Norton Avenue, in walking distance of our Fourth Avenue apartment, and right across the street from the Catch One Disco. Étienne couldn’t have been happier. He loved working for his jovial trilingual Korean employers, working with his Central and South American co-workers and the African-American security. He loved eating tacos and Mexican pastries at the carnicería next door to Jay’s during his lunch break, and getting to know the neighborhood rainbow coalition of grocery shoppers that daily filled the store. I knew our little neighborhood was one of the most diverse in the city, but not until Étie’s daily wide-eyed gushing did I come to fully appreciate the scope of its internationality. Russians, Eastern Europeans, Ethiopians, immigrants from every island in the Caribbean, Koreans, Chinese, you name it, crowded into Jay’s market like delegates at a UN convention.
Étie had Sundays and Mondays off, which was great. I rarely had a photo shoot on Sundays, and if we weren’t having dinner at Mom’s or at some other family member’s place, or hosting a Sunday family get-together at our place, we’d hit the Rose Bowl swap meet in Pasadena. Some Sundays we spent strolling along the Venice Beach boardwalk and people-watch, or drive out to Malibu, swim, lie out under the sun and picnic on the sand.
Monday was our homebody day, hanging around in our PJs looking at movies until three o’clock in the afternoon. Mondays from three to four was our crying hour. It was so named because we’d sit up in bed with popcorn, sodas and a box of tissues, turn on Oprah and cry at the happy, sad, touching, inspirational, tragic and poignant stories O was always good for.
Now let me take it back to family, as in parents, sisters,
brothers, nieces, nephews, cousins, etcetera. Everyone pretty much took to Étie with open arms. Mom and Dad—God rest his beautiful soul—always referred to me as their special child. I don’t know if it was because I was the only one of their offspring who was left-handed or because I was the only one who was gay. I’m sure it was a little bit of both. But my parents, former Woodstock baby-booming hippies, only wanted total love, joy, peace and happiness for their children, all of them. They were hell-bent on preventing anybody else’s social, cultural, religious and political bigotry, vitriol and discrimination from denying any of us that. They protected me, their gay son, their first-born, with the fierceness of mamma grizzlies, from so-called friends, subtle and blatant foes and dissenting family. And they taught me that self-love, dignity and living honestly would be my greatest defense against the negative elements the world would surely try to rain upon me.
If ever there was something that caused them a bit of dismay, it was the one thing I shared with my baby sister Frankie. No, I have never had her sex drive, but both of us have been in and out of, and out of and back into relationships like serial bargain shoppers at Wal-Mart.
Mom and Dad so desperately wanted Frankie and me to find good and decent men to settle down with. But both our track records were rather dismal. Frankie was tallying ex-husbands like James Bond kill notches, and my success with men was about as winning as William Hung’s singing on American Idol. Actually, Mr. Hung’s warbling was a lot more successful than most of my romantic life. Before Étie, I was a total relationship klutz.
First, there was my high school fling with Anthony. Yeah, to him it was a fling. I thought we were a serious couple until I found out he was seriously flinging it with half the guys on the football team.
And then there was lowdown down-low Kelvin who I didn’t know was down low until we received an invitation to his sister’s wedding in Cleveland addressed to the both of us. When I opened it, there was a note inside from his mother. Can’t wait to meet your girlfriend Jessica, son. She sounds absolutely wonderful. When he got home from work, I confronted him. That’s when he told me that nobody in Cleveland, in fact, nobody anywhere, knew he was gay, which explained why he preferred quiet nights at home, every night. I just thought he was a homebody.
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