Around The World With Nothing On...
*****
Part 1: Voyage Of Discovery
Me, I'd always been the quiet geeky kid. The Johnny No-Mates with bad acne and National Health glasses. My passion was all directed into electronics from being at primary school. Sex never figured very importantly in my life. I studied. I stayed home nights and worked on my projects, short-wave radio and circuitry. I got good grades at college, naturally, I had few distractions. All I did was work. But, introspective, self-analytical, I gained a fascination with all that's spontaneous, like Jazz, which seems to me to be the perfect fusion of the cerebral with the intuitive. I favour horns, John Surman and Miles Davis.
Then - once I'd turned twenty-years-old, and I'd graduated, I needed hands-on work-experience, and signed on with 'The Argo' as 'sparks'. Sure, I was a little nervous. It's not the kind of vessel I'd hoped for. A small trader, little more than a tramp-steamer. But it will get me the qualifying sea-time I need, and it will take me around the world, which is a bonus for a repressed kid like me.
The taxi drops me off. It's late evening. Outside, on the harbour-edge, the cars still pass and the drunks still pass and the sky is clear and bright with stars and moon and a light breeze is blowing and you can hear the tugs in the harbour chugging and the deep OOOO from their whistles floating across the bay and rolling down the streets of the old town, and even the ferry's mooring winch can be heard, when it was quiet and still, clanging a ferry into the slip.
The first day, the day of departure, is one of immediate changes. I familiarise myself with the radio-shack where I'll work. Not cutting-edge electronics by any stretch of the imagination, but it will suffice, at least it presents me with no real problems. Then there's the cabin I will share with a big engineer called Ivan. Although we're briefly introduced earlier in the day, it's not until the first evening that it begins, when we're alone together.
"You know why zey put us together, in the same cabin, boy?" Ivan sits on his bed, he continues reading his thick volume of Herman Melville, as I busy myself with final preparations for turning in.
"No, I don't know." They call him 'the Bear'. He's maybe Polish, I'm not sure. A big guy with gold rings in his ears, and tattoos that writhe across his shoulders and down his arms. I fold my shirt carefully over the chair-back and stoop to pull off my socks, bare feel slapping cool on the canvas.
"We are friends, you and I. I look after you. You have problems, you tell me and I fix those problems for you. Some guy is leaning on you. No worries, I sort it for you. It's a good arrangement. I be good to you. You be good to me. That's the way it works." Something in the tone of his voice makes me turn. He's put his book aside, and he's eyeing me up and down in a strangely unsettling way. I feel suddenly embarrassed in front of him. Naked, despite my y-fronts.
"W-what do you mean, Ivan? I don't follow you."
"All I ask is that you reciprocate, with a little sexual gratification. I mean zat we make fuck together, you and I. We can do it one of two ways, but we do it. First way is best. You come to me, and I be kind, gentle, you suck Ivan and we be friends, yes? You get to like it soon, you get to like to suck Ivan. Second way is less good, you not like it so much. I come and get your ass. I might come in the night when you're asleep, you'll not know. But I'm strong and you have no choice and I make fuck up your bottom and make you squeal. But either way Ivan gets to fuck you, so it's OK. You decide. Today, tomorrow. I give you time."
I half smile. My blood runs cold. I can't believe what I'm hearing. Is this some kind of cruel joke? Testing me out, seeing how I'll react? I laugh nervously. "No way, Ivan, I don't do that for anyone."
He stands up slowly and crosses the floor, pacing, to stand beside me, towering above me. He's a big guy. I flinch involuntarily, afraid of what he's going to do. "Ivan is very strong." He extends his tattooed biceps, inviting my appraisal, "feel, go on."
Stupidly I touch the iron-hard muscle and make what I consider to be a suitably impressed noise of approval. Hoping that will satisfy him. But no, bear-like his left hand comes around my shoulders, pinioning my arms to my side in a vice-like grip. I writhe and struggle, but the more I resist the greater his amusement, he emits a loud guffawing laugh.
"You know how they say 'in space, no-one can hear you scream'?" he hisses in my ears. "What is true of a spaceship lost in the ocean of space, the same is true of this ocean." Then, incredibly, he lifts me bodily off the floor, helpless as a trapped insect. He ignores my protests, his right hand ruffling my hair affectionately, then touches me under the chin. Then, inexorably, his fingers begin to spider down my chest, over the bare skin of my ribcage, and the softness of my stomach.
"No" I moan despairingly, inhaling desperately as he traces the oval indentation of my navel and the first wispy protruding strands of pubic hair. But his laughter softens as he toys with the elasticated waistband of my shorts, and his fingers crawl beneath. In agony I can feel his strong rough fingers in my pubic hair, and the excruciating contact of his nails along the sensitive length of my penis, then the intimate pressure of his hand curling around it.
"Oh yes, you're a big boy, Ivan likes boys with big cocks."