Chapter Five: Interlude One
His story complete, and Michael snoozing in a deep, exhausted sleep in his arms, Abazar ran the tip of a finger around the young man's nipples, first one and then the other. Michael sighed and trembled in Abazar's arms, but he didn't awake. Slowly Abazar ran a hand down the marble-smooth skin of the young man's chest and belly and then on under the waistband of his drawers, raking lightly through the downy hair of his pubes and then cupping his balls and cock. Abazar leaned down and kissed a nipple and then started to tongue down Michael's sternum.
But he stopped, with regret, disengaged, rose, and moved over to his own cot.
It was entirely too easy. No challenge, and he didn't want to take the youth that way. He wanted Michael prepared and open to him.
Later, as Michael was coming out of his deep sleep, he heard cascading water and for a moment thought that he was free and standing near a sylvan waterfall. But he opened his eyes to the same oppressive stone walls.
He was still hearing the water, though, and as he looked to the source of the sound, he sucked in his breath and almost forgot to breathe again.
Abazar was standing in the corner, under the cistern, and was pouring water over his body. He was naked and it was his nakedness that shocked Michael so and made him start almost to hyperventilate. Abazar was hung like a horse. He stopped the flow of the water and soaped his body up. Michael's eyes traced every movement of Abazar's hands as they floated over his curves and crevices and centered between his hips. He was soaping up a cock that was impossibly long and thick and began to engorge and curve up toward his belly as he worked the soap into it with both his hands.
Abazar stood three-quarters to Michael, seemingly oblivious to the young man watching him work his body—seemingly. He had never looked more like a satyr to Michael than now—now that he was naked, and Michael could see that, below the waist, Abazar was almost as heavily pelted as the satyrs in the drawings Michael had seen. And when he turned his head toward Michael and tilted it down and gave the youth a secret little smile, while still working his cock with his hands, Michael felt sensations he'd never felt before.
"I hope you had a good nap—you slept nearly the whole day away," Abazar said, never losing his smile or the grip on his monster cock.
Michael's eyes moved with great difficulty from Abazar's cock to the high window, where he saw that the daylight had, in fact, fled the sky. "I'm sorry. I don't know what made me so sleepy."
"It's the tension. The not knowing, not being in control. It's to be expected. Don't worry about it. Sleep is an escape in our situation. I slept nearly the whole time too."
Abazar had rinsed himself off and was patting his body dry with his linen drawers, after which he put them back on. They clung to him and were almost transparent in their dampness—little use at all in covering anything up. He slowly walked over to Michael's cot and sat down beside him, whereupon Michael popped up in embarrassment and started to wander aimlessly around the cell, hugging himself with tightly embracing arms as if it were cold in the room, although it was closer to sweltering.
"I suggest you clean yourself as well—while there's still enough light to see by. I believe it's important to not let yourself go to spoil, even in situations like this. And I think it will calm you; you seem so keyed up."
"Perhaps later," Michael said with a shaky voice. "Perhaps when it's a bit darker. I'm not used to . . . I've never . . ."
"Don't be afraid of me," Abazar said in his most soothing voice. "We have been thrown together, but I would never want to do you harm—and I will do whatever I can to protect you. I'm sure you will be free soon. I'm sure your family won't let you stay here much longer."
"My family," Michael said bleakly. "I have no family to speak of. And those that I have are like vultures—pecking at me, wanting what I have and doing all they possibly can do to get it. I don't think I'll ever get out of here."
"How can that . . .? Ah, yes, I see . . ."
"What do you see?"
"Ah, nothing. But you mustn't fret. I'm sure there's someone. That gray suited—"
"Sir Cecil?" Michael burst out with snort. "Yes, I suppose I do represent an investment by him. But someone who cares? No."
"I doubt that. I would say you are a very valuable young man myself. But then, I suppose we are in Cairo, not in America. Why, here in Cairo you would be seen as a Greek god. Here, what you could give would be worth—"
Abazar couldn't be sure Michael was even listening to him now. The young man was pacing and still hugging himself tightly. His voice was reaching a hysterical pitch in what was one of the longest and most revealing of his statements to his cell mate.
"They all look at me with hate and disdain. They want what they think I have, yes, but what do I have? What have I ever—?"
"This is ridiculous," Abazar said, and then, with a voice of authority, as if instructing a child, he continued. "You are coming unglued. That's the last thing that will help you. Come, sit. I will massage your shoulders. You have to do something to calm yourself. I won't bite."
It was the authoritative voice that did it—and Abazar was quick to take note of that. Like an obedient child, Michael came back to the cot and sat down, turning his back to Abazar, who started to work the muscles.
"I feel how tense you are. Tell me about your family, about your life. It will help you relax."
For the next hour, as Abazar rubbed his back in strokes that turned almost into caresses, Michael poured out his woes of being an only child of cold, calculating, ambitious parents, who had been killed in a railroad accident, of his grasping relatives who remained, and of the highly structured, limiting life he'd had—until they were almost in total darkness.
He came back to the reality of how much he was opening to Abazar—much more than he intended—at the sound of the flap in the door opening, and food trays sliding across the floor.
"We eat now," Abazar instructed in the voice of a parent. "Then you clean yourself, while I do some exercises to keep fit—it should be dark enough for you now. And then I will tell you another story. That will soothe you, and I predict you will sleep again like a baby. Tomorrow they will release you. I'm sure. That Sir Cecil sounds like a powerful and resourceful man who will not let you languish here for long."
They started to eat, but Abazar only ate half of his and pulled Michael's away from him half eaten as well.
"I'm not finished," Michael said in surprise.
"Yes, you are," Abazar said, the voice of the parent. "We aren't active in here—can't be as active as we normally would be. You need to eat, but you need to regulate yourself too. Go clean yourself now. And I will exercise my body. It would be best if you did so as well."
As Michael rose and moved tentatively over toward the shower and privy corner. Abazar picked up the trays of the half-eaten food, placing Michael's on the floor in front of the food delivery flap in the door and taking his own over and placing it on the floor at a corner of Michael's cot. Then he stood and stretched out his arm and leg muscles and moved to the center of the chamber.
Abazar gave a little grin of amusement, as he saw Michael huddling in the corner, now clothed in darkness, and rinsing and then soaping and then rinsing himself, being careful not to expose himself. At the same time, however, he was surreptitiously watching as Abazar did some sort of dance-like movements in the middle of the cell to stretch and work his muscles—nothing strenuous. But he talked in low, soothing tones as he worked his body, explaining to Michael what each graceful movement did and how it kept his muscles well worked.
Michael watched in fascination but also in increasing embarrassment, as he felt his body tense up and his cock going hard. This shouldn't be happening to him. He had no idea what was happening to him. He just knew that he couldn't stop watching Abazar's graceful, sensuous movements—and that his gathering thoughts about Abazar were ones he should not be having.
He also was growing groggy. There was a ringing in his ears and he felt lightheaded. Not as bad as he had felt after the earlier meal in the day, though. Just in a haze and sluggish.
Abazar had to repeat himself and raise his voice for Michael to hear him. "Come over to the cot now, Michael. I will tell you another story."
Michael walked toward his cot, slightly stumbling, and mumbling to himself. He knew there was something he was forgetting, but the voice of authority had called. And he wanted to hear the story. What he really wanted was the massaging to start again. That had made him melt.
What Michael forgot when he left the shower was to put his drawers back on, so he came to Abazar dazed and naked.
He sat with his back toward Abazar and Abazar started to gently work the youth's back muscles, while in low, mellow tones, quiet enough that Michael had to arch his back toward the storyteller, bringing his ear close to Abazar's lips, to catch it all.
Michael's senses were suspended in some sort of nirvana, where he could hear Abazar's words and where he could feel what Abazar was doing with his hands—and knew that he'd been taught men didn't do this to other men. But that he didn't care, that he was enjoying sensations he'd never felt before and that he was exhilarated in his inner being that it was Abazar who was touching him. That all of his defenses were down.
