Jack Strider strides out to meet me as I draw up in his driveway. He's my age. Razored bald, but better preserved. As though he might still have hope. 'Wow, Al, it's really you. I can't believe you're actually here.' The back of his extended hand is stormed with wiry black hairs.
I force a smile and shake his proffered hand. 'My pleasure, Mr Strider.' Gritting my teeth and thinking of the cash-in-hand I'm getting for this, already wired into my account. 'Is all this yours?', pausing on the porch, stopping to look back, indicating the house and grounds, the lawn hissing to itself as the sprinklers lazily revolve, the surrounding walls lined with ornamental corkscrew bushes, and tall pines edged dark against the sky.
'I wish. No, the owner... went missing. His present location is unknown. He bequeathed us temporary use, until he... returns.' Perhaps that should have alerted me? But it didn't.
He has hypnotic eyes. Afterwards it seems strange that I should have consented to his invitation so readily. Did he use a little of the hypnotic power of his eyes to beat down my resistance? Looking back now, I believe he did. There's something electrically charged in his disturbing physicality, his erotic closeness.
And I get a strange sensation stepping over the threshold into the pleasantly air-conditioned interior. A different kind of warmth. An acute pain-joy of living that flares in the dark pool of sorrow. What was it the kid said? 'It feels so... right, like I've arrived home at last.' Psychic sensual energies swirl richly here. It's a nest, an occult coven. They get up to greet me. This is the four, the Club. Laslo Farmer and Jeffy 'Poet' Fander, they seem to form a duo. And Skhiva with Jack Strider, who form another. Skhiva, who wears only powder-blue shorts, welcomes me further in. He is slender, seems more apologetic, less assertive, carrying himself with neither self-assurance nor diffidence, but a sure sense of purpose. We are gathered around a low Scandinavian table. On the table there's an overflowing bowl of succulents, and beside it there's a tube of lube, and a pile of condoms. We will take advantage of the former, but don't use the latter.
Strider eases himself down onto the curved couch wearing an expression of detached amusement. 'You know how it is, when you're young and horny with a burning hunger, but girls are strange alien creatures, impossibly distant and out of reach?, achingly inaccessible, desired and lusted over, but unobtainable. Yet there's all that raging sense of physical urgency to expend. So what do you do... what other course is there but to experiment, if only tentatively, with each other? you form a jerk-off club with your friends. Compare and contrast. Watch me doing this. Touch and feel. What if I do this and you do that? What if I put this in here? What if I...? Sometimes three of us, once or twice it was five of us, but it settles down to a nucleus of the four of us. We circle-jerk, then we take turns jacking each other. Then sucking and fucking. It gets us through. Then we go off into our own lives. Until we get to that point where there's divorce, and wives hit menopause and they're no longer interested, some wives were never much interested in the first place. But we're horny again with that same burning hunger. So what do we do? We get the old band back together. The same four. Those same cocks and mutual easing.' He places his hands on the table, palm down, as if for emphasis.
And they'd watch my clips to set the mood. I get it. Farmer and Jeffy Fander go into the back room to get drinks, when they return they're naked. The heavy shapes of their swaying cocks penduluming as they walk. My eyes quietly appraise their dark good looks, more attractive than threatening.
Skhiva slips off his shorts, he has a long thin shaved cock, he takes over the story, his features cultured, his words coming fast, their tone and intonation suffice to identify him as an aesthetic. 'Jack is the instigator. He usually gets his way. He always has. We'd stopped doing that circle-jerk stuff abruptly when we realised, it was not just 'cock-fun', it was homosexual behaviour, that's what it says, it says 'Queer'. It says 'Homo'. That's the conclusion to draw, the only possible conclusion to draw - isn't it? At the time we'd have been - what, nineteen years old, and we knew no better? And we've never even mentioned it since. Ever. Until now. I was thinking, why is Jack obliquely referring to those long-ago incidents now? Why now? Does Jack want a replay? Just to expend energies. The four of us. Just like it used to be. How would we react? Would we... could he... even now? That down-dangling dick of his had been in my mouth before. And more disturbing than that, I'd actually not disliked the sensation of its being there. That's the most unsettling part. Not so much the doing. More the pleasurable aspect of it. What does that mean? What does arousal mean if it's induced by another person of the same gender? The problem is that arousal. The hard-on response. Surely the regular hetero reaction should be disgust? Repulsion? And when that repulsion doesn't happen - in fact, when the reverse happens. And when it feels so incredibly good. So it happens again, and again. The four of us, just like it used to be. As Jack's power grows, the gravity of the four of us together is more powerful than we are apart.'
The alcohol burns my throat. My head swims. Farmer and Jeffy Fander are easing each other back onto the couch, falling naturally into the sixty-nine position, sucking hungrily. I reach out and run my finger down the length of Skhiva's cock. It stirs under my touch. 'Seems to me you've got something here which is unique... and enviable,' I tell him. It feels good. More than that, it feels natural.
'Have you heard of that Science Fiction idea of the gestalt? A single organism, made up of separate parts. A future-evolution that grows into a composite entity. That is what we are.' I assumed he was talking in metaphor. It's only later I learn he was not talking in metaphor. 'We always had that special bond that brought us together, more than that, something powerful that united us. We are individual atoms that form a single collective molecule. Above and beyond our parallel lives. Sustained and energised by an occasional compatible otherness.' He pauses. Then resumes. 'The problem now, if problem it is, is that Jack has done some online searches, and found this other Club across the Bay. Another four guys who've come to the identical conclusion, with the same circle-jerk solution that we did. Jack feels that we should all meet up and... trade.'
'And you don't consider that a good idea?' I curl my fingers around his cock, feeling it firm and swell in response. Jack Strider is getting undressed. Farmer and Jeffy Fander are enthusiastically sucking each other's cocks.
'He intends today, and this very pleasant visit of yours to be a trial, a try-out for adding future components to our Gestalt.' He seems preoccupied.
'Never allow yourself to be pressurised or coerced into doing something you're not comfortable with' I urge.
'The four of us go way back. We know and trust each other. We work well together. I don't see why we need to bring others into the arrangement. We don't know them. There's the possibility of STDs, loss of confidences, and just the weirdness of bringing strangers into it.' His eyes meet mine, and burn into me. 'With you, of course, it's different.'
'Go with caution' I suggest, 'but go. To touch and be touched is so very special. Regardless of gender or gender orientation. We are human and we need that connection.'
My words seem to act like a trigger. The pack instinct takes over. They circle me like wolves, sniffing me out. They help ease me out of my clothes, until we are all naked. Skin to skin. Cock to cock. Cock to mouth. Mouth to cock. Falling together in a tangle of limbs in a pleasing blur of warm flesh and firm erections, I'm submerging myself in the four-way testosterone pulse. I'm sucking Skhiva's slender cock, his fat balls pressed up against my chin, while someone is sucking mine. If its Farmer, he's playing my cock like a piano maestro plays Chopin. There are hands crawling across my body, my buttocks, my scrotum, I'm enveloped in sensual intimacy, islands of flesh linking into an archipelago of neural connections. As we squirm around into new configurations, a new cock invades me, bigger and on fire with urgency as it slips into my mouth, looking up I see it's Strider, his supernaturally-compelling eyes burn with a ravenous appetite. I take it deep and suck with ferocious energy.
