Do You Trust Me 8

Angelo had been so tense through his set at the café this evening, that he was afraid that it could be heard in his voice or in a change in how he coaxed the music out of the strings of his guitar. But those sitting around a smoking and drinking long after the food service had been shut down didn't seem to have reacted any differently than before, with just those exceptions. Although all of the regulars in the café were encouraging and always bantered with Angelo in a way that showed him he was liked and at home in the seaside Italian village of Positano, where he'd been born and raised, they had come to receive his musical sets in the café in the evening as a given that was just part of the atmosphere of the place.

Angelo didn't mind. He was doing this mostly because he liked it, although the little bit that the café owner, Maria, paid him plus the occasional tip from a tourist were welcome supplements to his income. Angelo was a fisherman, sailing out alone in his small boat six mornings a week, casting his net, and, by twilight bringing his catch, meager as it usually was, to the fish markets on the pier in the small harbor of Positano. This picturesque village closely climbed the steep slopes from the Mediterranean of the surrounding mountains that paralleled Italy's eastern coast west along a rugged coastline from Salerno.

And this was all just temporary for Angelo, including the fishing with the boat he had inherited from his father who had inherited it from his own father. Angelo would be going to America at the first opportunity—to maybe be in the movies. That was his dream. And Angelo was a dreamer.

And not just a dreamer. Angelo was also seen as a dream by the women of Positano and by not a few men of the village as well. He had dark, sultry, movie star looks. And perhaps that was what had set off his dream of going to America. For as long as he could remember, people were telling him that, with his looks, he should be in Hollywood—or at least in Rome.

What had suddenly made Angelo tense in playing his café set and had upset his world was Guido, another young fisherman who had been in playful competition with Angelo in casting the nets off the Positano shore for a couple of years. Guido was sitting at the bar, nursing as few drinks as possible for Maria to let him occupy a barstool and smoke cigarette after cigarette, as he had done nearly every evening that Angelo had played. Guido was also dark and sultry, and very well put together. He just was two steps behind Angelo in every department of desirability and had known he was since the two were boys. Hence—at least Angelo had thought—the friendly competition and why Guido always seemed to be there, somewhere, in the background wherever Angelo was. Of course Positano was not a large town, so—other than the looks of wanted, combined with envy, Guido gave Angelo—there wasn't much to be remarked that they were always somewhere in proximity of one another.

It had been what Guido had asked Angelo to do the evening before after Angelo had finished his set that had changed Angelo's world, made him nervous in the close-scrutiny nearness of Guido, and made Angelo rethink why Guido was always hovering around.

Guido had asked—no begged—Angelo to fuck him, saying that he had wanted this ever since the two were in school together.

Angelo hadn't, in a million years, caught Guido's attention to him as signaling any such desire.

He had refused, of course, as gently as he could. He had told Guido that there was no chance that he could be a friend to Guido in that way. What he didn't tell Guido was why. Guido had made it quite clear that he wanted Angelo inside him. But to the extent that Angelo had ever thought of having sex with another man—which had, in fact, crossed his mind, sometimes in ways that disturbed him and had, thus far, caused him to hold himself above having sex with anyone, man or woman—those thoughts had been him in the same position of need and want as Guido had declared he suffered and wanted Angelo to deliver him from. If Angelo was ever to have sex with a man, he wanted the other man inside him.

But Guido, although he had done no more than to show and express regret, had not taken Angelo's answer as a "forever no." He had simply asked Angelo to think about it. And here he was, tonight, sitting in his customary place at the bar, fully attentive to and ever smiling upon Angelo. The difference now was the Angelo now knew what Guido wanted—and it wasn't just the continuance of a friendship of two young men who had grown up together in a small seaside town and who both went to sea as fishermen in boats handed down to them by their fathers and their fathers' fathers.

Guido's attentive smile now bored into Angelo as he played. And it wasn't just Guido this evening. Often tourists came in to the café, having heard him play his guitar and sing, and sat watching him. A good many of them would want to watch Angelo even if he didn't do anything but exist as the beauty in form that he was.

And sometimes the foreign residents of the town—people who weren't passing tourists and may even have been here for decades but who were still considered foreign visitors in one way or another because they hadn't been born and raised in Positano—came to the café, having heard about Angelo and both his beauty and his music. Some of these were, in fact, foreigners. Some of the wealthiest people in the town—and who were treated with distant respect because of the revenue they brought to the region—were actually foreigners. There was a whole enclave of them to the south of the town, living in villas along the coats and beyond the mountain spur that went down to the sea there and defined the edge of the town. Villas were strung along the coast to the south, perched on the rocky slopes of the mountains and with steps down to small, private beaches below, each separated from the neighboring villa by rock formations tumbling down to the sea.

It was off these beaches that Angelo did most of his fishing, both because the fish ran well there and because Angelo enjoyed watching the activity in the villas of the rich foreigners through his binoculars. And some of the foreigners, aware of Angelo's frequent fishing visits off their coast also watched him move, in his skimpy loincloth bathing suit around his fishing vessel.

Angelo like to watch because often the villa owners and their young guests came down to their private beaches in the nude. And sometimes they fucked on the beach. Angelo enjoyed watching this, no matter what the mix was in the coupling of the sexes.

That's why Angelo knew who the two men at the table who were scrutinizing him as closely at Guido—and causing him as much embarrassment—were. The older man owned one of the largest villas perched above the sea, one with extensive verandas and frequently with young, very good looking and well-muscled men roaming around in very little. Angelo already knew the older man to be Doran Kokinos, a grossly wealthy Greek shipping magnate, who spent several months a year in his Positano coast villa. The man was in his late fifties at least and, though solidly built and well-muscled, was squat and a bit rotund and extremely hirsute with salt-and-pepper hair. His features all were thickish and slightly piggish, and he glowered more than looked at whatever caught his attention, under bushy eyebrows. But he had impeccable taste in young men, and he fucked them well on the beach.

Angelo knew Kokinos fucked men—and young men—because Angelo had, through his binoculars, spied him doing so from time to time on his terraces or down on the beach. And Angelo's binoculars were high powered enough for Angelo to know that what Kokinos lacked in body beauty, he made up for in cock girth and length.

Kokinos had been in the café for hours this evening, the first time Angelo had known him to be there, and his glower had been trained on Angelo, piercing his composure during both of Angelo's musical sets. What occurred to Angelo, though, and that had deepened his embarrassment and apprehension, was that perhaps this wasn't the first visit of Doran Kokinos to the café. Perhaps he had been here before and perhaps before he had trained his attention on Angelo just as he had done this evening—and Angelo, in his innocence, had just not caught what was in the air. Perhaps the single, simple declaration by Guido the previous evening had awakened Angelo to a reality that had, in his innocence, not been part of his real world before—but inevitably was part of that world now.

And when Angelo thought upon that, the image of that cock of Kokinos's sinking in and withdrawing from and then sinking in again the ass of the young prey of the day on the beach below his villa gave Angelo a chill of envy. The man's ugliness in other ways seemed only to add to the mystery and fantasy of Angelo's sexual longings.

To his added embarrassment, Angelo, in turn, had had to struggle not to give his undivided attention this evening to Kokinos's table companion. The man was younger than Kokinos—by far—but older than Angelo's own barely twenty years. The man struck Angelo as an American—a blond, athletic American. Perhaps it was the apparent openness of him and the ready smile. Whatever it was, he had charisma and an assurance about himself that was justified by his rugged good looks. Now there, Angelo had thought, when he first noticed the young man—noticed him noticing Angelo—is a true Hollywood movie star type.

Angelo couldn't remember having ever seen him with his binoculars, and that thought had set off another thought that he wondered what the man looked like in the altogether or in a skimpy Speedo, a thought that had made Angelo forget what song he was singing at the time and made him stop, apologize, blame it on being thirsty, taken a swig of his water, and then start of a song that may have been the same one he had stumbled on but again may not have been for all the attention he was giving it.

Angelo was distressed at the longings that Guido had loosed in him the previous day by openly talking of sex between men. Angelo had mostly been able to suppress his thinking—at least consciously—of these things to this point. Guido had unleashed that monster from the cave Angelo had locked it in.

In that patron-, raucous discussion-, and smoke-filled café room, with patrons tumbling out onto the tables set up at the edge of the narrow, cobblestoned, winding street, Angelo had struggled through two sets feeling that he was pinned to the wall by three sets of eyes—Guido's, Doran Kokinos's, and the mysterious, mesmerizing blond. This was the first time he'd ever felt like this. And, in his imagination, Angelo was lying under each of the men, his hips rotating, and something throbbing and thrusting stretching his insides.

And it was all Guido's fault.

Forcing himself not to look at any of the three when his set was over, Angelo put his guitar in the stand next to his stool, where it would still be the next time he came to the café to play and sing, and turned to go through the door behind him covered by a beaded curtain that led through a corridor to the kitchen on one side, bathrooms on the other, a storeroom and Maria's office and then to an exit that hovered ten feet above the street below the one the café was located on. Descending the rickety wooden staircase there would put Angelo just one street above his own, where he had two rooms and a kitchenette and bathroom at the top of the building he had inherited and where the rent from the two floors below his made his life as comfortable as most any other resident of Positano.

He was just beyond the doors to the rest rooms, however, when Guido caught up to him, swung him around and pinned his back to the wall with his body. Guido was slightly taller and heavier than Angelo, and he was just as strong. Caught by surprise, Angelo was slow to react with any sense of defensiveness.

"Please, Angelo. Take me to your rooms. Or come with me to mine. I can't deny my want for you any longer."

"Guido, no. I can't. I told you yester—"

Angelo wasn't able to finish the sentence, as Guido was pressing at his lips with his own and crushing him against the wall. One of Guido's hands was pressing on Angelo's crotch.

Caught completely by surprise, Angelo was slow to react. He was looking around wildly, not knowing why he was here like this, why Guido was in such a frenzy, or what he should do next. His eyes caught the movement of the beaded curtain separating the back corridor from the main café room, and he saw movement there. A man. The blond man Angelo thought of as the suave American.

The expression on the American's face was one of surprise. But then it turned to an amused smile, and, rather than withdrawing, the man stood there, watching.

Adrenalin finally surged through Angelo's body, and he broke away from Guido with a, "We can't . . . I can't . . . sorry," and he rushed through the door at the end of the corridor and almost lost his footing on the precarious wooden steps of the staircase down to the lower street.

Once in his room, he turned off his lights and moved out onto the small terrace he had that overlooked the Mediterranean and the lower town as it cascaded down to the harbor. He stood, watching the moonlight on the sea for several moments, trembling and overwhelmed by the strange, unfamiliar sensations accosting him. He was surprised—and embarrassed—to realize that he was hard.

He stripped off his trousers, briefs, and T-shirt and laid down on the chaise lounge on the terrace, and, as he looked up at the bright constellations in the clear night sky, he began to masturbate. What was this terrible—but perhaps glorious—monster that Guido had awakened in him? He had no idea, and his emotions were conflicted. As he slowly and rhythmically beat himself off, though, he realized that an image of a man was floating in his brain and feeding his arousal. It wasn't Guido, though. It was the image of that smiling all-American blond, standing, naked, in the doorway at the café, the beads of the curtain caressing his body, as he watched Angelo masturbating—and stroked his own hard cock with a loose fist.

A second image swam up. An ugly face and a squat but solid body. And much black curly hair. But an air of authority—and a bit of cruelty—and an invading monstrous cock that had Angelo panting and whimpering of how filling it was. As the mastering cock in Angelo's fantasy began to pump his channel, he threw his head back, ejaculated onto his stomach, and muttered the name Doran Kokinos.

Instead of giving him the lift he expected, these fantasies brought a sourness to Angelo's mood. This was wrong. He wanted to think of lying under a beautiful man like the blond American or even Guido—before Guido had burst that bubble and revealed himself as a receiver rather than a driver—not one who was old and ugly such as Kokinos. Did the aura of authority or the size of the cock really make that much difference? And, even if the cock was all important, he had not seen what the blond American had to offer.

* * * *

"Are you just going to leave me down here, or will you give me a hand up?"

Angelo looked around in shock, not seeing where the voice was coming from, complete nonplused to hear a voice at all. He was on his fishing boat, all alone, or so he thought, off the beaches below the villas of the rich foreigners strung along the Amalfi coast south of Postiano.

He had set his nets and then gone to the stern of the boat with his binoculars and scanned the beaches and the villas perched on the side of the mountains above as he liked to do. He told himself that he hadn't stationed the boat off of Doran Kokinos's villa on purpose, but, of course, he had. And in doing so, he had been rewarded.

Not long after taking up his station, he had seen activity on one of the villa's terraces and then the figure of a tall, well-built—and very well-equipped, he could see, because the man was naked—young man descending the stone steps between the villa and the beach. He had a beach towel over one arm and a canvas bag slung over his shoulder.

To Angelo's great interest, the young man engaged in a few aerobic exercises while standing next to the towel that he had unfurled on the beach in front of a sky-blue cabana tent.

After a few moments of surreptitious work with the binoculars, Angelo ascertained that It was the same blond man Angelo had seen at the café, sitting with Doran Kokinos, the previous evening.

Angelo laid down flat on his belly at the stern of the boat, with just the lens of the binoculars showing above the gunwales and watched the blond, who he thought of as "the American," do his calisthenics. The rough wood of the boat hull punished Angelo's bare chest, but unheeding of that, he unbuttoned the fly of his skimpy shorts, pulled out his hardening cock, encircled the staff with the hand that wasn't holding the binoculars, and moved his hips, letting the head of his cock rub across the pile of the netting in the bottom of the boat.

When the blond man turned and went into the cabana tent, Angelo realized that he should have pulled in his nets some time ago to see if he'd caught any fish and then set them again. It took him nearly a half an hour to do that, and he had just finished when he heard the voice.

"I say, you going to leave me just hanging onto the side?"

Angelo raced back to the stern of the boat. Two well-muscled, lightly tanned arms, emerging from the water next to the boat, were slung over the gunwales. He grabbed for the arms and helped the blond American climb on board the boat. He was naked and wet, but he had the canvas bag slung over his back by a string around his neck.

Both the surprise of his arrival and the beauty of his body took Angelo's breath away.

"You wouldn't happen to have a dry towel, would you?" he asked in broken Italian.

"Yes. Yes, I have. Just a minute," Angelo stammered.

"You speak English," the blond said, sounding quite relieved.

"I take in school. I go to America some day and I want to speak good American. You American?" he asked shyly.

"Yes, I'm American. And I'm shuddering from the cold water at the moment. It's a longer swim than I anticipated."

"Uh," Angelo muttered, still dumbfounded by the man's appearance and by the casual, comfortable attitude he was taking despite his nudity.

"The towel? You were going to find me a towel?"

"Yes, of course," Angelo stammered, as he back peddled toward the small cabin at the center of the boat.

When he came back, the American was still standing there, in a provocative pose, but he'd opened the canvas bag and extracted a bottle of liquor and a couple of plastic glasses. "I hope you don't mind Johnny Walker Red. It was the most ready at hand in Dodo's bar."

"Dodo?"

"Doran Kokinos. I believe you saw us at the café last night. He was very impressed with you. In fact, he'd like to meet you. I call him Dodo. For some reason he prefers that. He's Greek, you know. He probably doesn't know the connotation of that in the States. It does seem to suit him. But here I am, running on, and you're probably very thirsty from all of the fishing work you've been doing—not to mention the work with the binoculars."

Angelo had barely been able to keep up with what the American had been saying. He had no trouble understanding the part about binoculars, though, and he blushed from the realization he'd been caught as a voyeur. And he was even more nonplused to see that the American was hard and not seeming to be the least self-conscious about it.

And, yes, he knew Johnny Walker well, although he'd rarely been able to cage more than a couple of shots of it himself. The foreigners had it shipped in by the case during the Christmas season and handed bottles of it out as gratuities for those in the village who had supported their lifestyle with goods and services throughout the year. For two weeks after Christmas, in the new year, the Johnny Walker red became the gold standard of Positano and was filtered down in smaller bottles throughout the fabric of the town—until it was all gone until the next year. Angelo rarely got more than two shots of it himself in a year. And here the American—the beautifully built and handsome American of the open, broad smile—was offering to share an entire bottle with him.