This story is from Gayly Complicated, our collection of stories about the complications of male/male relationships.
* * *
Klaus
The next few seconds were crucial. I had to lock on Victor's wrists at exactly the right instant as he came out of his backward flip off the bar. If I missed, he would hit the hard wooden stage below us. We never used a net; men like us went through life without a safety net—only the strength and reliability of each other. And right at this instant, trembling as I never had before, I couldn't promise Victor strength, and I no longer believed in his reliability. In this business of split-second timing and regimentation, reliability was premier.
Victor had taken me in as a teenager when I had run away from home in Berlin when circuses were all the rage of Europe. He had trained me and nurtured me and protected me in the dangerous undercurrents that were circus life. And then when I had come of age, he had seduced me and shown me the ways of man loving man. He had glided the long, elegant fingers of his strong hands down my belly and beneath my balls and had entreated me in a low, hoarse voice to give him entrance, permission to both take and give pleasure. And trusting and loving him deeply, I had spread my legs for him, endured the initial pain and uncertainty, and then begged him not to stop as those fingers found and parted my virginal bud and stretched and moistened me for the full, sobbing possession of his commanding manhood.
Circuses went out of style in Europe about the same time the Soviet empire was shattering and the European Union was, at last, taking meaningful shape. The thrill of uncertainly in Europe was dissipating. People wanted more subtle and sophisticated thrills in their lives, it seemed. Victor had to start reducing the number of trapeze artists in his troupe. The women went first, and then Serge and Fritz. Nothing told me that Victor loved me more than that he had let them go and not me. They were fully professional. My talents were more pronounced in his bed.
Just when I thought he would have to fold the act altogether, he discovered that the tastes in death-defying high trapeze acts were not dead in Europe; they had only become specialized, more sophisticated, more erotic. And there were opportunities that suited Victor and me exactly. There were private venues—special couples and men's clubs and gyms—in the underbelly of Europe—all over Europe—that welcomed specialized circus acts and were willing to pay well for them.
Thus was born the Circus Maximus, a very private circus act for very special venues.
There were always four of us in the act. But at first Victor tried an act with him and me performing on the high trapezes above two young Indonesian girls, who became better acquainted with each other on the stage below as Victor and I performed ever-more daring and dangerous flips and catches on the trapezes overhead. When we were done on the trapezes, we slid down on silken ropes and, as our finale, each fully stripped and fucked one of the Indonesian girls to the delight of the audiences.
Victor was to find that the all-male venues far surpassed those of the more conventional hedonists in profit and availability, though, and he settled on an act using two men from China instead of the Indonesian girls. And Victor found this more to his liking too. Teng was a monster of a muscle man and Ming was diminutive in comparison—still handsome and well formed, but not more than half the size of his counterpart.
Now while the scantily clad Victor and I flew overhead, Teng harried Ming below us, almost, but not quite to the point of penetration. When Victor and I descended on the silken cords in the new form of the act, Victor hung the diminutive Ming up on one of the trapeze poles by silken bonds on his wrists and Teng did the same with me on another pole, and Victor fucked Ming from the rear and Teng took me in mirrored form to the audience's moaning satisfaction.
The current act then ended with Victor and me climbing the silken cords again, doing one more death-defying pass on the trapeze, and winding up on one of the trapeze platforms with me doing a handstand, my body draped up Victor's, and Victor fucking down into me to a final burst of lights at the point of an ejaculation that wasn't always feigned.
Thus far the small, picky, well-heeled audiences had loved the act. And whereas Teng was as cruel with me each time as he was with Ming, Victor had claimed that Ming didn't interest him and that his sex with the small Chinese performer was feigned, only for show. And I had believed him—and trusted him—and had been rock solid in my catches of him high over the stage even though he was the heavier of we two by far and even when sometimes I felt he would pull my arms out of their sockets when hand didn't meet forearm precisely. But there had been no question I would be there for him, my protector and lover. No question. Until now.
The next to most difficult pass was this forward flip. It was happening now. I must not think about what I saw. I must make this catch.
Victor had said his fucking of Ming was only an act, that it meant nothing to him, and that, in contrast to what Teng did to me in each performance, Victor wasn't really even penetrating Ming in the act. Just faking it to a removed audience whose eyes were blinded by the stage lights and saw what they wanted to see. But he certainly was penetrating Ming when I saw them in Victor's dressing room the previous evening.
There had been a daybed in the dressing room, and I had arrived at the theater hours before Victor had expected me. I had said I needed a new pair of the ballet slippers we used in our high flying act and would have to go across Zurich—we were performing in Zurich's Aaah-Club in the Marktgasse—that afternoon to pick them up. But then I had found I already had another new pair and called and asked the shop to send the pair they had on to our next venue, at the Boléro on the Wollestraat in Bruges' Garenmarkt district, and I thus appeared at the theater much before Victor expected me.
I don't know if Victor would have been able to change appearances if I had knocked on the dressing room door—his cock was fully encased in the ass of the naked Ming, and they were both breathing heavily with heaving chests at the exertion of the fuck—but it had been years since I had knocked on Victor's door. There were no secrets between us. Or at least I had thought there were none. Before last night.
Neither of them had noticed me at first. Victor, fully naked, was kneeling on the daybed, his ass cheeks bouncing up and down on the heels of his feet. The small Chinese youth was on his back facing Victor, his thighs pulled up over Victor's hips and his butt mounds sliding along Victor's thighs, as Victor, with strong hands holding the small man's waist, pulled Ming back and forth on his prodigious, hard, skewering dick.
Not long after I found them, and while I was still too much in shock to say or do anything, Ming cried out in passion and spouted his cream up Victor's belly—and Victor, in turn, groaned and jerked, and spent himself inside the Chinese youth's channel. There was nothing the least bit feigned about this sex act.
Victor was turned away from me, but Ming saw me when freed of the throes of passion, and the satisfied, sly look he gave me spoke volumes.
I turned and fled the room, not knowing if Ming told Victor what I'd seen.
That night was just a "spot" run through of the act on the Aaah-Club stage, making sure the equipment was set up correctly and the distances were proper—nothing is more important in the high trapeze world than that the distances between everything are properly measured. Victor didn't seem to notice that I was particularly quiet and pale or that Ming went out of his way to stand in my spotlights and to be bitchy—until Teng dragged him off into the wings and fucked him silly on a stack of backdrop curtains to the cries of pain and indignation from the possibly newly empowered Ming.
Tonight was the first real performance in Zurich since I saw Victor fucking Ming. Tonight we would know how hard reliability could be tested. I knew I didn't want Victor to fall. But I couldn't be sure that what I told myself I "knew" was what I really "knew." And I felt sick to my stomach, and all atremble, and weak in my muscles as we set up and tested the bars for our swing out and fastened our eyes on each other's to gauge the exact moment of our takeoff, off over the bare, wooden stage.
At the last split second, Victor's eyes showed astonishment and fear and a deep questioning—caused I'm sure by whatever he saw in my eyes in that instant. But it was too late to check; we both had already leaned out over the platforms into our bars far too much not to swing out. As I swung out, I experienced contrasting, warring feelings that I never had felt before.
* * * *
Victor
At the last split second, I knew. I knew that Klaus was different tonight. The way he looked at me. What was wrong? I had no idea. And I was afraid, as I had never been before with him.
Fear is the most dangerous thing in an act like ours. The fear of not being caught by your partner, of falling. It's that which makes you fall. That I also knew, and I tried to crush it, to let go of everything but my faith in Klaus, in his professionalism, if nothing else.
"No. No. Think of nothing except what I must do and do it right. Klaus will be there. Klaus will be there. Klaus will be there to catch me," I repeated to myself as I swung out.
I executed my backward flip perfectly and Klaus caught me. A good firm catch. As he should, as he should. All is well in that way at least. Now turn, and run my feet and legs up between his arms and slide down. Now, there, yes, his arms wrapped firmly about my legs as I hang upside down and reach up, stroke my cock through the padded fabric of my tiny costume, the padding making my package look massive and my cock hard. Yes, the audience loves that. He has me firmly.
But why? Why the look? Oh . . . no don't think of that, just stroke and smile and get ready—count, count, to swing off and catch my own bar again. We have done this so many times, so many times.
3 . . . 2 . . . 1 . . .
I remember when I first saw Klaus hanging around the tent of the circus my act was performing with at the time, and looking lost and brash all at once. Too young to be living on the streets, I had thought, and I had wanted to save him from that. And I took him in—he said he wanted to be in the circus, and he was lithe and light, easy to use in the act.
He had no great talent but tried hard and learned well enough. In the beginning he was so lean and light we tossed him back and forth between us, Serge, Fritz, and me, even the girl, Ludmilla, had caught him and thrown him back to me when he first joined us.
Then he had grown up and grown to be a wild, lean young man of great beauty. I was suddenly in love with him, for his youth and beauty. And when he was grown he had responded to me as no man ever had since Franz. Franz who had gone to America to train and teach gymnastics while I had accepted I would never be internationally competitive and remained in Germany and moved on to the trapeze and circus life.
But now Klaus has grown into a well-filled man, not tall and broad of muscle like me, but also not longer small and lithe. And sometimes I have a passionate lusting for lithe, small bodies. To fuck men who seem delicate and fragile as they moan and twist beneath me. That is my secret fetish. Klaus is still shorter than me and leaner, but not as he once was; he is the man I want in my life. But sex and heat, ahhh, sometimes what I feel in my cock and balls when some lithe and slender young man is available. Ahhh.
Ming. Now Ming is all that one could want in litheness and small size. Yes, at first I had not fucked him properly upon the stage, but feeling his small, seemingly defenseless body under me night after night, I had finally been desperate to have him. But I controlled myself, for I knew Klaus had never been with another man except for when our act required it. But Ming was so desirable. So desirable . . .
Ming. Ming. I do not really like to hear the way Teng takes Klaus, but it is a good act and Klaus does not complain.
In fact, Ming says that Klaus likes what Teng does—that he sometimes likes it rough and hard. I am not sure if what he ways is true. I don't think so. I think Ming makes it up.
