[This is a completed four-chapter series of four interlocking stories that will complete posting before the send of September 2017]
Christopher's Story
Chris Wilson became aware of a change in the pattern of the gurgling sound of the respirator across the bedroom in the king-sized bed. Knowing this signaled that Earl would be awake—and perhaps even that he was trying to get attention—Chris put his pen down and turned to look in that direction. He had been at the desk at the window overlooking the turning circle of Broadway producer Earl Youngblood's Long Island mansion. He was reviewing what he'd written of the fiction piece he was writing—novel, novella, short story, or confessional, he didn't know yet—for the umpteenth time. It was, he thought, the key passage in the work. He wanted to get it right.
Earl indeed did appear to be awake. He was on his back and the respirator mask was on his face, but his face was turned toward the window. Chris had no idea how long the elderly man had been watching him. A cursory inspection, though, told Chris why.
The sheet over Earl's midsection was tented. Chris' attentions were needed. He stood and looked out the bedroom window. There was no sign yet of Kenton Walsh's impending arrival. The only activity that Chris could see at the front of the estate were the two gardeners, father and son, Thadeus and Jeremiah, working to smooth out the lines of the boxwood hedges in the center of the turning circle. He would like to stay at the window and watch the two black men work—they were both muscular and handsome men, although the father was a bit grizzled—but Earl's needs always came first.
He moved over to the bed, pulling up the straight chair that backed up to the wall next to it, and placed it beside the bed. Before sitting down in the chair, Chris, pulled the mask off Earl's face just long enough to lean over and kiss him on the lips. The hunger of Earl's kiss, even though he had to hold his breath to engage in it, was all Chris needed to know about what Earl needed—wanted. He replaced the mask, and, while still standing, he let a hand glide under the sheet at Earl's waist, take the elderly man's cock in hand, and begin stroking it. No matter what else ailed Earl, he still managed to produce and sustain a hard on.
Chris sat down in the chair then, leaned over Earl's body, brushed his pajama tops open, and began tonguing into the wispy gray matting on his chest, search for, and finding, in turn, one nipple and then the other. Earl had always liked the nipple play.
After a few minutes of this, Chris kissed down Earl's sternum and belly, pushed the sheet off his pelvis, opened his mouth over Earl's cock, and began the tonguing, sucking, and nipping play that Chris knew Earl wanted from him. It wasn't long before Earl's body jerked and he released his seed in a weak flow down Chris' throat.
The respirator gurgled away and guttural sounds came from under the mask that Chris associated with Earl expressing thanks. Chris wiped his lips off on the sheet, pulled it over Earl's now-flaccid cock, and returned to the desk at the window.
It had been thus with Earl Youngblood, the famous and powerful Broadway play producer for nearly three months now. This certainly wasn't the Earl Youngblood of old. A series of strokes had taken away much of his movement and all of his speech. But he was a strong old bird. Chris firmly believed that the old man's sex drive would be the last bodily function to desert him. Chris, at twenty-six, initially a dancer in off-Broadway productions, then a small-part actor in Broadway plays, and now nearly a full-time caretaker of his first lover, had been with Earl for over seven years, with the exception of a year and a half in the middle of the period during which Chris had gone astray.
Earl had taken him back, though.
Before sitting at the desk to look over the phrase in his story one more time, Chris went to the window and looked down into the turning circle at the entrance. Still no Jaguar. Ken told him he was driving a Jaguar now. Knowing that Earl had quietly and happily fallen asleep again and would not need Chris for at least a few hours, Chris lingered at the window, watching the gardeners work and keeping an eye out for the Jaguar sports car Ken had gushed about over the phone. He had proudly said he had picked off the last new 1957 Jaguar D-Type roadster to be produced and sent to the States to be put on display in a Manhattan car dealer's showroom. Ken, although living in Manhattan himself and having little use for a car in the city other than having bragging rights for it, had always gone for the flashy toys and possessions. As soon as that thought entered Chris' mind, he felt the sting of the reality of it. For a brief time, he'd been just such a possession.
After a few moments, he sat back at the desk and, with a sigh, picked up the now-tattered yellow legal pad he'd poured his heart out on, and a pen, and started yet another review of his story.
"Just settle down and stop pushing at me, Danny. I'm in now."
He wasn't in as far as he was going to get, I was soon to learn. The pain was excruciating, not least because it was so strange compared to anything I'd experienced before. But I'd been assured that it would lessen and that, eventually, I usually wouldn't notice it much at all—not compared with the pleasure it would be giving me. And there was some of that already. The expectation of it; the "it's finally happening" of it.
"Stop pushing on me. I'm in. You're fucked already. Got your cherry. No reason to fight it. Open to me and enjoy it. You're a dancer. Dance on the cock."
I was on all fours on the studio couch in his office—the proverbial casting couch—and he was standing behind me, between my calves that jutted out over the end of the couch. I had twisted around and swung an arm behind me, the palm of my hand extending through his open and separated dress shirt and pushing at his muscular, hairy chest. I was bearing the weight of my twisted torso on a fist buried in the surface of the couch. He was crouched behind me, his hands gripping my hips, his dick inside me. Only a few inches, it turned out. He was going to be much deeper than that soon.
I know I was giving him a wild look. The look in his eyes was one of determination and of being a bit perturbed. I know I was crying out something, but I was trying my best that it not be a demand for him to stop. He wasn't raping me. I'd agreed to it—I'd agreed to it months earlier, in fact. It's just that now it was happening, it was overwhelming.
"Oh, for Christ sake," he growled. And I felt the hands leave my hips and he was twisting around to the nearby chair that he'd hung his coat over. The hands came back with a long, cashmere neck scarf, which he whipped over my head; pulling my wrists together, causing me to collapse my chest on the surface of the couch—my tail still in the air, still skewered by his dick—and tying my wrists together with it. . . .
A car horn from beyond the window interrupted Chris' review. He hadn't changed a word, though. He hadn't changed a word in the last several readings. He read it now more to connect with memories. Of course Chris never could get anything like this published. Certainly not in this era of the buttoned-down late '50s when, as Chris well knew, there was a suppressed sexuality bubbling under the surface but a thick puritanical veneer on top. And, as he also well knew, it was whoever was on top who controlled. And, perhaps more true, it would never get published because it exposed the ways of predatory theater producers.
Outside was a Jaguar roadster convertible, just as Chris was expecting. Thadeus and Jeremiah had stopped clipping the hedge and were standing there in awe of the vehicle. It was exactly what Chris had expected Ken to be driving. And the flamboyant actor popped out of it, over the door without opening it, just as Chris would have expected from him. Chris was sure Ken saw the maneuver in some British movie and had used it himself ever since. Always the "look at me" actor. He probably was completely unaware that, as tall and broad-shouldered as he was, he looked altogether too large for the car.
But he looked good. Chris hadn't seen him in over four years. Earl hadn't taken Chris back to Broadway in that time. Ken was taboo around here when Earl was himself, although Earl and Ken had worked with each other, by mutual need, when Earl was in New York. Ken had always looked like the leading man, tall, well built, elegantly thin, expensively dressed, and with those killer blue eyes, flashy white teeth, beach tan, and curly auburn hair. Mr. Self-Confidence himself.
He must have sensed that Chris was watching him from a second-floor window, because he swept the beret he was wearing from his head and did a curtain-call bow to the very window Chris was standing at.
Chris opened the double window, leaned out, and called down, "I'll be down in just a minute."
He had a bit of an idea why Ken had come at this moment, but Chris would be damned if they would greet each other over the prone and gurgling body of Earl Youngblood. Chris could have just refused the visit, but he assumed Ken wouldn't leave it there—that Chris would have to face this sooner or later.
Beyond the door into the corridor, Chris nodded to the no-nonsense nurse who, clicking away with knitting needles, was sitting in a club chair that had been set against the wall by the door. She nodded back, stuck the needles in a ball of thread, rose, and brushed by him into the room. This had become a regular arrangement. Round-the-clock nursing service had been laid on, but when Chris was in the bedroom with Earl, the nurse took up station in the corridor, leaving the two men alone. This included the nighttime hours, because Chris still slept in the king-size bed with Earl—usually giving Earl the comfort that he still craved and holding the man in his arms and whispering to him of good times past as Earl drifted off to merciful sleep. A nurse was nearby, though, in anticipation of the day and hour she would be needed.
* * * *
"What is that?" Chris asked, indicating the two small suitcases—probably all that fit in the back of the Jaguar—Jeremiah was setting down behind Kenton Walsh in the foyer just inside the front door. Walsh was standing in front them, posing for Chris as the latter came down from the stairs.
"I heard about Earl. I have come to help you cope with his last days."
"Don't be dramatic, Ken," Chris said. "These aren't Earl's last days. He'll be fine. Don't think you'll be settling in." No way was Chris going to let Ken know how bad Earl's condition was.
"I must see him. Take me to him."
"I don't think so, Ken. I think that seeing you appear in his bedroom would be enough to kill him. I didn't tell him you were dropping in for a visit. I wouldn't have agreed to the visit if I'd known it involved suitcases."
"His bedroom?" Ken asked, a hopeful look on his face.
"Our bedroom," Chris shot back, "Earl's and mine." He saw that Jeremiah was standing there between the suitcases, magnificently black, but obviously out of his element inside the house. "Just leave them there, Jeremiah, thank you. You can go back to trimming the boxwood now."
So like Ken to commandeer service to avoid lifting a finger himself, Chris thought.
Ken was smiling, though, as Jeremiah backed out of the front door, leaving the suitcases where they were. A small win for him not having them returned directly to the car, certainly, but on the path to a victory nonetheless.
Chris looked away from him, realizing that he'd made a choice by not sending the suitcases right back. Ken was still irresistible in his own way after all these years. Completely exasperating, but irresistible anyway. Chris could feel the attraction of the man in his body—he had always found Ken arousing—and he walked down the stairs and around the banister and pointed himself toward the kitchen down the hall running beside the staircase so that Ken couldn't see the effect he'd had. This undoubtedly was why Earl had kept Walsh at arms' length from Chris for the last four years.
"Come on through to the kitchen. I'll put the coffee on."
They didn't make it to the kitchen. In the shadow of the back hall, Ken caught up with Chris, backed him into the corridor wall, and pulled in close to him, pushing his knees into the wall on either side of Chris' thighs. He came in for a kiss before Chris could recover from the surprise of the boldness of the man.
Also because of the suddenness of the maneuver, Chris' lips yielded to the familiarity and melting nature of Ken's kiss. Ken grabbed Chris' wrists and raised and pushed the younger man's arms against the wall over his head. It was a hungry kiss from both men. But Chris recovered from the surprise, and Ken jerked his head back.
"Fuck. You bit my lip."
