Avril’s Ploy

Troy was staring into the Cross Keys Winery shelf of the dimly lit wine cellar in the basement of Professor Hammond's house, his arms extended and his hands grasping the edge of the shelf, as Brad Baylor, Hammond's "significant other" rose up from behind him where he'd been knelt, working Troy's hole with his tongue. The strong hands of the James Madison University assistant football coach grasped Troy by the hips as he came in close behind Troy. Instinctively, feeling Brad's erection between his bare thighs, Troy widened his stance and moaned. The coach dry fucked the young student between his squeezed thighs.

"We have to be quick about it," Troy murmured. "Can't be gone for long." Dry fucking like this was a frequent "getting it off" technique in the dorms at JMU, and Troy briefly wondered if there would be more than this.

"No problem," Brad whispered into Troy's ear as he nuzzled the English Department sophomore's neck with his scratchy chin. "I've been hard for you for the last hour."

In anticipation of Troy's reaction, Brad covered they young man's mouth with one hand to muffle Troy's cry, moved his cock into position with the other, and gave a little upward thrust with his hips, penetrating Troy's channel from behind. He moved up into the soft, yielding channel deep before starting to pump him.

No, this wasn't going to be the typical safe dry fuck of the dormitories, Troy realized. The coach

had

told him he wanted to fuck him for real, and Troy now believed he hadn't just been teasing.

Troy looked around wildly at the shelving stretching along in front of him until his eyes focused on a Cross Keys Meritage label and he left it there, his mind going to Aaron, the Staunton men's clothes store owner who had hired Troy as a clerk and then a model, bedded him, paid for him to start college here at JMU, and who had recently died in an automobile wreck, leaving a wife and two children to inherit—and Troy all alone and penniless. Troy was still devastated. Aaron had taken him like this, like Brad was doing, although he wasn't as rough about it as Brad was—or as long or thick.

Troy had struggled a bit against Brad's roughness as first, but when Brad had established a rhythm of the fuck, Troy, ever the submissive, settled down, memories of Aaron and Aaron's lovemaking sufficing and the very fact that Troy had a man inside him again, giving him a sense of comfort and satisfaction—even though it was while he was supposedly selecting wine for the Thanksgiving dinner party going on over their heads.

Brad was quick about it: in, finished, and out within seven minutes of invasion. He stepped back from Troy to strip off the spent condom with the sound of a snap, and Troy, his knees having gone to rubber and Brad no longer holding him up with a strong arm around his waist, sank to the floor in front of the wine shelf. He turned his head and dully watched as the muscular football coach expertly tossed the spent rubber into a waste basket. Everything was done with efficiency and fluid movement. The coach obviously had done this many times before—just not with Troy. Was Troy just a notch on his belt or would they do it again when there was more time? Brad had played him like he was aching for him.

For a brief minute Troy wondered who would empty that waste basket—Brad or Professor Hammond?—and he felt the sting of guilt. Avril Hammond was one of his professors, the chairman of the English department. Hammond had been good and attentive to him—great to him in his grief over the loss of Aaron, who Hammond had known as he had known about Troy's relationship to Aaron. So few others knew or cared that Troy was grieving. Brad was living with Hammond, no doubt sleeping with him as well, and this . . . this would be seen as a betrayal, wouldn't it, if Avril found out about it?

"Give me five minutes to get back into play upstairs before you come up," Brad said, as he zipped up his trousers.

"Yes," Troy answered dully.

"You're a sweet lay. Nice ass and tight gut. We'll do this again sometime soon."

"Yes," Troy murmured. Was he glad Brad said he wanted to lay him again? Yes, Troy hadn't gotten any full sex since Aaron had died.

When Troy got upstairs, he took his time opening the bottles of wine he'd brought up and then went into the large dining room of the old plantation house that Harrisonburg, Virginia, had swallowed into its outskirts near the campus of James Madison University and poured the wine at the dozen place settings around the table. Brad was in the other room boisterously passing around hors d'oeuvres to the other ten male guests Professor Hammond had gathered for a Thanksgiving Day dinner party.

Brad poked his head into the dining room to see that Troy was back and then returned to the living room to ring a "dinner is served" bell.

As the men moved into the dining room, still chatting among themselves, Avril Hammond stopped beside Troy and said, "And what do we have here?"

For the briefest second, Troy was afraid that there was something revealed in his demeanor or dishevelment of dress that told Hammond that his companion had just been in the basement fucking Troy. He didn't respond immediately and knew that he looked confused—and, probably, guilty.

"The wine, Troy, my boy. What wine did you choose for us?" Troy lifted the bottle and turned the label toward Hammond. "Ah Cross Keys Meritage. Very discerning selection." Laughing, he helped his guests find their seats. Troy and Brad exchanged a furtive look and then Troy went to his seat. There were a few other students at the table, but there were some important men there as well. Troy was fortunate to have been invited here for Thanksgiving. Hammond had been so good and understanding to Troy in ways that had gone beyond Hammond being one of Troy's professors. Troy was sitting near Hammond's end and Brad was at the other end of the very long table from Hammond. Troy thought that was just as well. He didn't know if he could do fluffy chit chat with a man who had just ejaculated inside him.

* * * *

With one exception, the dozen men at Avril Hammond's Thanksgiving dinner were an understandable group. There was no gender—or basic lifestyle interest—separation here that Troy could figure. This was a gay male gathering—Hammond had told Troy it would be when he invited him here—although some men here seemed more comfortable and active with it than others. There was a near-even divide across them in age group, four being successful men in their fifties, three being in their late twenties or early thirties, four being JMU students, and that one exception who didn't appear to fit in at the party.

There was a racial divide. Two of the men were black. This included the host himself, Avril Hammond, who was in his fifties and every inch in appearance and demeanor the university English department chairman that he was in life. He was tall, handsome, in a Jamaican mixed-raced background way, slim, and in control. The other black, in his early fifties, was Lawrence Shelton, an art professor at JMU, specializing in photography. Lawrence was neither as distinguished looking nor as handsome as Avril was, but he was formidable enough. He was tall but had a bit of meat on his bones. He wasn't ugly, but he commanded his environment with penetrating eyes that saw and observed everyone.

One of the men was of Chinese ancestry and it was fairly obvious why he was there—he had brought the food, and quite a spread it was. Chan Tang, another of the men of fifty, was nearly as distinguished as Avril Hammond and was twice as imperial. He was the executive chef for the ritzy Homestead Resort in the mountains southeast of Harrisonburg, in Hot Springs, Virginia. He did a lot of catering and he had become friends with Hammond because of their shared interests in younger men. Chan was of normal height but more than normal girth, as befitted his life preparing rich food. Hammond had warned Troy to beware of the man, that he could be a cruel man. He exuded that image this evening.

Three of the older men were attached for the evening to others there, although Shelton and Chan weren't as attached as Hammond was trying to be. One of the older men wasn't, the man sitting between him and Hammond, a quiet novelist, Gideon Grimes, who Hammond had told Troy should be of interest to Troy.

Troy knew that there were strains in Hammond's relationship with the man living with him, Brad Baylor, who had hooked up with Hammond when he was an undergraduate student at JMU, who had been a football star at the school, and who Hammond had helped secure an assistant football coach position here to keep him in Harrisonburg and in Hammond's bed, topping the professor. As Troy well knew, though, Baylor had a roving eye. Troy just hoped Hammond didn't know that and that Baylor's interest would move on before Hammond found that out. Troy couldn't resist Baylor. He was grieving and in need and Baylor was a hunk and a half—and he was a dominator, like Aaron had been. Troy went completely submissive for a man who commanded him.

Chan Tang's relationship with the late twenties' History department instructor, Cory Kavanagh, and Lawrence Shelton's relationship with early thirties music department instructor, Marcus Taylor were more loose than Hammond's fixation on Baylor. Both Chan and Shelton fucked other young men when they had the opportunity. Their "others," though, were more interested in permanent, monogamous relationships. Chan and Shelton, of course, were dominant and topped in their relationships.

The fourth older man, Gideon Grimes, was someone Troy recognized, as he was a mid-market novelist, who Troy had heard in readings, and was an instructor in creative writing at JMU. Grimes was a tall, well-muscled man, who was handsome in a graying sandy-haired way but who seemed sad, a bit detached, and withdrawn this evening. He gave the impression that perhaps he was ever constructing phrases and weaving plots in his mind and thus wasn't fully "there" in the present circumstance.

Four of the guests were undergraduate English department students, invited to the party, Troy surmised, to provide eye candy for the older tops there. This group included Troy himself, relatively small of stature, dark and sultry looking, and somehow always quickly picked out for attention by dominant men. His relationship with Aaron had brought stability to his life—and a bit of protection from being hit on by other men. This Thanksgiving dinner party was really the first public gathering he'd attended, feeling bereft and unprotected, since the funeral, and indeed, he hadn't been here longer than an hour before the host's boyfriend was humping him in the wine cellar.

One of the students, star running back of the football team Dale Hunter, knew exactly what he was doing here. He was the campus gay male stud. He was there because he was a pet project on the gridiron of Brad Baylor, who had gotten Hammond to invite him and who had come because he knew that fresh meat had been invited to charge the juices of Hammond's senior guests.

Troy certainly was one of the eye candy invitees, and he knew enough of Dale Hunter to do what he could to avoid him. Dale wasn't really hitting on him this evening, though, probably, Troy thought and was afraid, because Brad Baylor had told the football star that Troy was off limits.

Not off limits, clearly, were the other three guests. Jacob Bernstein, every inch the good-looking, dark-haired, hirsute Jew, and Tim MacDonald, a somewhat effeminate, androgynous, and beautiful and delicate-looking blond, had both been brought in from the English department. Although if either was cut out of the herd and pinned to the floor by one of the preying tops tonight, it wouldn't be their first experience, it would be close enough to the first to be a traumatic and memorable experience for them. In recognition of this, the two were almost clinging to each other, at least thus far in the dinner, which, as this was basically a university gathering, was moving along nicely with glib and lively conversation up and down the table.

The odd one out—that one exception to how the rest fit in with each other—was noticeable because he wasn't engaging in the conversation and wasn't dressed as nattily as the rest. That one exception was Peter Lambert, a young man who, as good looking as any of the narcissistic men present, had no relation to JMU. He was a clerk at one of the local supermarkets, Krogers. He was there, everyone had been told over drinks in the living room before dinner, because he went to the same gym as Brad Baylor. In mentioning him to Troy, Brad had given a fuller explanation: Lambert had been fucked by Brad and was vetted as of interest for the evening to a few of Hammond's guests. He was cleanly attired, but his T-shirt, worn jeans, and open-toed sandals were not in keeping with the meticulously preppy and expensive party clothes of the rest. He also was as self-conscious as the undergraduate English majors present, but more aware that he had nothing to contribute to the sophisticated conversation of this gathering and filled in his time with drinking the wine—on top of the beer he'd had during the social hour.

Dinner went on for nearly two hours, with the quality and quantity of food vying with the high-level conversation for accolades. Hammond had seated everyone with a purpose, Troy suspected as the dinner went on. The first clue of this was when Hammond gave a series of toasts at the beginning of the meal. One of them caught Troy in the solar plexus. Hammond actually referred to Troy's recent loss of his significant other and benefactor, Aaron, who was well known in the region; noted that this was Troy's first outing since the funeral; hoped that Troy now could find the means to continue his studies; and urged everyone to wish him well. Immediately thereafter, Hammond had launched into a similar toast to Gideon Grimes, noting that the novelist had recently lost his wife, Penny, and was, Hammond had heard, working his feelings about that out in the novel he currently was working on. This, also for him, was the first social outing since his wife's funeral.

Troy had only a moment to wonder why a heterosexual man had been brought into what clearly was a gay male gathering—and that this possibly might explain why Grimes had been somewhat withdrawn during the social hour, when Hammond added, "Gideon has been of two minds, and I'm looking forward to the possibility that he will come back to us. He and I were very special friends before he found his sainted Penny. Would you say that was fairly stated, Gideon?" Grimes had simply nodded his head in acquiescence.

And that's when Troy began to observe the possible method behind the seating chart. Grimes had been seated to Hammond's right, in the guest of honor spot, and Troy had been seated on the other side of Grimes. Perhaps Hammond was trying to rekindle something with the novelist, Troy first thought. But that didn't meld with his obvious devotion to Brad Baylor, sitting at the other end of the table.

The longer the dinner progressed, though, the more it became apparent that Hammond was trying to get Grimes and Troy to converse with each other—which they did, in fact, do, getting into deeper areas of their separate griefs than went with the general level of conviviality across the table. On top of this, the Krogers clerk, Peter Lambert, had been seated to the left of Troy. Although Troy exchanged a few civilities with Lambert, it was obvious that the clerk was out of his element and didn't want to try to talk much. He wanted to drink more. This seating seemed to be contrived by Hammond to throw Troy and the novelist together, Troy thought. And then when he saw Brad seated at the other end of the table from him, too far away to exchange any conversation in private, Troy began to worry about what Hammond might be trying to do. Did Hammond have an inkling after all that Brad had been hitting on Troy?

All of this speculating was wiped away, though, eventually, when Hammond rose from the table, raised his empty glass, and declared, "I think we need to check out the drink cart in the living room. Could you do the honors behind the bar, Brad, at least until everyone has been set up with a drink? And as for the rest of us, I think we need to move on to the dancing?"

Dancing? Troy thought. He'd never before been to one of these, but . . .

Hammond obviously was serious, though, Brad had preceded them into the large living room and slow, dreamy dance music already was coming out of the living room. Troy had wondered how an evening like this—purposely gay—would go. Slow dancing. Of course. And later, maybe . . .

* * * *

The living room was large, running the full depth of the original house, and, with a couple of sofas pulled back, there was plenty of room for dancing. Couples could even drift out into the even larger, all-glass, stone-floored conservatory, stuffed with large plants, that opened off the rear of the living room through an open double-door French door. The lights had been turned down low in the living room. Hammond obviously wanted the atmosphere to be romantic. He also wanted to maximize the possibilities. He continuously urged couples to mix and match—and to dance close together. He told them there were bedrooms available upstairs.

The dancing started at an overall level of comfort, established couples dancing together. Lawrence Shelton, the art professor, was dancing with his live-in, Marcus Taylor, the music department instructor. Chan Tang, the chef, was dancing with Cory Kavanagh, the history department instructor. The two English department undergraduates were huddled together. Troy was sitting with them and the three were chatting, ever conscious that someone might ask them to dance, thereby expressing an interest that would have to be considered. Brad, in fact, had headed for Troy to ask him to dance, but had been intercepted and taken onto the floor by Hammond. The novelist, Grimes, was sitting across the room from Troy, nursing a brandy and gazing into the distance, beyond the walls. The overly confident football player, Dale Hunter, had latched onto the Krogers clerk, Peter Lambert, and was squeezing the life out of the poor young man while they danced. They were kissing as much as dancing

After a couple of dances, the couplings changed. Lawrence Shelton pulled Troy up to the floor, Brad was dancing with the Krogers clerk, Chan Tang had Tim MacDonald in his clutches, Dale Hunter was mauling Jacob Bernstein, and the rest were standing around, talking university affairs, and ogling and, no doubt, rating the younger guests obviously brought there to interest the older guests.

Lawrence Shelton wasted no time at all expressing an interest in Troy while he held him close, just swaying in place, and squeezed one of Troy's butt cheeks with his hand.

"You modeled clothes for Aaron Bainbridge, didn't you?" he asked.

"Yes. For his catalog."

"So, you have experience as a photographer's model."

"A bit. There wasn't much catalog work involved."

"You have a very nice body. And you have the looks of a movie star."

"Umm, thanks," Troy said. He looked around the room to see if there might be rescue in sight. Shelton was not his type at all. And he had the hands of an octopus. The room had thinned out a bit. He saw Hammond pry Brad away from Peter Lambert and send him on an errand. Dale Hunter immediately took up Lambert and moved their dancing out into the conservatory. Chan wasn't anywhere to be seen, and Cory Kavanagh didn't look too pleased about that. The delicate blond student, Tim MacDonald, also was missing. Hammond was pulling Jacob Bernstein around the room, but they weren't dancing. Gideon Grimes was sitting where he'd been before.

"I do photography," Shelton whispered into Troy's ear.