The New Year's dinner at Judge Atherton's Philadelphia mansion was, in most ways, similar to the hunt banquet Matt had, with trembling trepidation, attended plastered to Perry's comforting side at Ravensworth at Thanksgiving. The ostentatiously large and opulently furnished and decorated—still for Christmas—dining room was the same, as was the glitter of silverware, fine china, and tinkling crystal.
There even were servants here, stealthily moving around, doling out a never-ending parade of rich food and topping up wine glasses. One of them was Emmet, pulling double duty at table with a serving bowl and wearing white gloves—and with the cast-down eyes of "one who serves." Only his tight black trousers, clearly showing the bulge of his crotch brought back to Matt's mind how much he was in thrall to the big black man. Emmet hadn't carried through on bringing others in for a sex string, but Matt hadn't lost interest in what Emmet could do by himself for three days and nights.
The main difference in the atmosphere of this room from that of the hunt banquet at Ravensworth was the number of people at the table. The table was nearly as large as the one at Ravensworth, but there seemed to be miles separating the different little groups that constituted Atherton's family and the one extra person at the table—Matt—who the others all were taking surreptitious looks at when they thought he wasn't looking, all of them wondering just who the hell he was and what he was doing at their New Year's Eve dinner. One of them, though, Matt noticed, giving the claimed architect, although much too young looking to be that, a more knowing and speculative look than the others.
But what was really different from the hunt banquet was the decibel rating in the room. At Ravensworth, the diners could have been considered downright rowdy, just a few dinner rolls short of a food fight, with all having a jolly old time. Here, in the Philadelphia mansion of Judge Atherton, each click of a fork or ting of a tooth on the rim of a wine glass rang out like a shot.
Who was at the table—and who was not—accounted for the silence. At the table, in addition to Judge Atherton, sitting at the head of the table, with, at his insistence, Matt sitting at his right, were, on one side, grouped close together, the judge's daughter, Miriam, and her husband, Rick, and their two young daughters, whose names Matt never could quite pin down. And across the table from them, but a few feet farther away, was another group of four: the judge's other daughter, Rachel, and her husband, Tim, and their teenage son, Ryan, and a slightly younger daughter, again name escaping Matt, whose world revolved around men rather than woman.
That didn't mean, though, that he hadn't noticed that Atherton's younger daughter, Miriam, had been giving him "the eye" ever since they sat down to the table, Matt having avoided as long as he could coming down to the cocktail hour before the meal. Her husband, Rick, was also giving him the same form of "eye."
What was ever-present at this particular meal because of her absence was the woman who should have been sitting at the opposite end of the table from the judge.
When Matt had arrived earlier that afternoon from Brambleton, the judge had met him on the staircase and almost breathlessly and, with great excitement, had taken Matt's arm and pulled him up the stairs, leaving Emmet standing in the foyer holding Matt's suitcase.
"You can take that to the north bedroom, second door on the left, Emmet. Matthew will be coming with me for the moment."
Atherton nearly dragged Matt into a large bedroom on the back of the house, overlooking a long formal garden. He pushed Matt down on the end of the bed in a sitting position and then started pacing back and forth along the foot of the bed, undoing his tie and his shirt and moving on to removing his trousers as he spoke in an excited voice.
"She's gone."
"She?" Matt repeated.
"She. The witch. Ding dong, the witch is dead. My wife is gone—at long last. She's filing for divorce. Has flown out to Nevada. I'm not contesting it, of course."
"You and your wife are getting a divorce?"
"Yes, Matthew. She's got a young man. Isn't that rich? Well, so do I. That's why she wanted just the family here to Christmas, to tell us all. That she was leaving me. She sounded like I should be mortified. She acted like I would balk at being the one filed against, but I told her I'd do anything she wanted. I did try to act the part of someone just wanting her to be happy, even though what I really want is the bitch gone for good. But I'm free to do as I like now. I waited . . ."
He was rambling on. He also was down to his socks. And he had a hard on—or at least what passed for a hard with him. Matt knew what he'd want now. Matt wasn't listening. What was the judge free to do now that he hadn't already been doing? As far as Matt could tell, the judge pretty much did as he liked as it was.
Atherton sat down on the bed beside Matt, put an arm around his shoulders, cupping the back of Matt's head and turning his face to where they could kiss. With his other hand he started to undress Matt. Matt knew better than to help him with that. This part seemed to be what aroused the judge the most, and it did seem to be helping his cock to stand up straighter. At least Matt didn't have to wear women's clothes for this ritual, which the judge had made him do twice in the last week they had been together.
When this was done, the judge leaned over and took Matt's cock in his mouth and gave him suck. This was the time that Matt could reach around and take the judge's cock in his hand and slow stroke him. Atherton had brought packets of condoms and a bottle of lube to the bed when he'd sat down. His lubed fingers went under Matt's balls and between his legs. This was Matt's cue to slit open the condom packet, extract the disk, and crown Atherton's cock. It wouldn't be hard long, and he'd fire off fast—and a bit weakly. So there wouldn't be much in the way of preliminaries. Although during their first time, Atherton had been strong, it had been with the help of pills, and he had noticeably less vigor as the weeks went on.
He hadn't lost interest, though. And it was Matt's job to see that he had a good time. Matt would be taken care of afterward—to the extent that the judge took care of him at all.
"Now," the judge murmured, and Matt raised his hips over the judge's lap and Atherton held his cock erect, it's bulb at Matt's entrance while Matt lowered his channel on the cock. He didn't put his full weight on the older man; he leaned forward and grabbed his ankles with his hands and put weight on the balls of his feet, rocking back and forth on the cock as the judge, holding him by the waist, also rocked back and forth, groaning, giving sounds of sexual pleasure.
When Atherton had come in the exclamation of an "Oh, shit, fuck yes"—virtually the only swear words Matt ever heard the man utter—Matt carefully moved off the cock and to the side. Atherton embraced him again and turned his face, finding the same position where they started. They kissed, while the judge took Matt's cock in his lube-slicked hand and began to stroke him off.
This was when the judge was at his strongest. He held Matt in a vice-hold embrace, while Matt started to breathe heavily and to pant and to writhe under the relentless stroking of his cock—until, with a gasp, he came.
To some extent it was an act. But the old man did know how to bring Matt to an ejaculation with his hand, sometimes rhythmically pressing and releasing on his piss slit with a thumb and other times working his pinky inside the slit. And Atherton seemed to enjoy the ritual encounters immensely, as when they weren't kissing, he was telling Matt how beautiful his body was and how much the judge enjoyed being with him.
Thus, later in the evening when Matt joined the family for dinner at the table with the missing chair at one end, the younger children—perhaps with the exceptions of the teenaged grandson, who looked from his grandfather to this young, blond stranger with a bit of question and speculation showing in his face—were just happy that their grandfather appeared so happy, even if no one but him was speaking, and then only occasionally and in short statements. Two of the adults looked less than happy. The daughter, Miriam, was so smitten with the handsome young man who was the architect restoring the burned-out wing of Brambleton that she didn't notice the worry on the other adults' faces. And her husband, Rick, was looking at Matt with the same slitted-eye interest that the judge did.
As they rose from the table—not before 10:00 p.m., as, of course, they dined at the formal hour, and the children were arguing about which, if any of them, were going to be permitted to stay up and watch the new year ushered in on the television, Atherton leaned over and whispered to Matt, "We'll go ahead and go upstairs. I want to ring in the New Year inside you."
Matt would be surprised if the judge could get it up again today, but he was calling the shots, so Matt just climbed the stairs with Atherton as the children buzzed around, headed toward the basement recreation room, exuberant that they all had been given permission to stay up, while the four adults, each with a different expression on his or her face, watched the judge and his young architect climb the stairs together.
Atherton bade Matt to shower first. When he came out of the master bath, with a towel around him, the judge, in a robe, stopped in passing and embraced him and kissed him.
"We celebrate tonight," he whispered. He showered with the door to the bathroom open, and Matt lay in the center of the bed and watched him. He was still a handsome man. And he was trim and well-muscled for a man his age. And hung. He must have filled out eight and a half or nine when he was younger, Matt thought.
Matt had seen the judge open a medicine chest and take some pills before he went into the shower. And he did a double take when the man stepped out of the shower. More like nine hard, Matt thought as the man walked toward him, naked and toweling off. Matt then knew what the pills the judge had selected had been for, and he worried whether the judge's heart could take what was coming.
But it wasn't his call. He had been bought and paid for, and he fully understood where he fit into the scheme of things—all because of his love of a house.