"It's a great way to throw your money away; that's what it is."
"Well, let's see, Pete. How much have you spent on the site's hookup service, and how many guys have you actually hooked up with?"
"I've had some real hot conversations and cybersex with some of them," Pete sniffed.
"Purely in cyberspace, right? At, what, a dollar a word?" John answered, with a snort. "And I'll bet the photos they showed weren't any more of them than yours are of you."
"But three K at a single throw?" Pete retorted. "Just to go out in the ocean and back and watch young men fuck? And there won't be any hiding behind a fake photo for you, either. You'll have to be in a Speedo, or you'll stick out like a beached whale."
"The boat's going to Bermuda. We'll get off in Bermuda. I've never been to Bermuda. And, besides, I've got a good enough body," John answered indignantly.
Pete wheeled his office chair from beside John, where both had been staring into John's computer screen, and made a big deal of pushing his glasses down on his nose and giving John a sarcastic stare. That tableau held for about ten seconds.
"Well, I do for a man my age. Certainly better than yours."
"OK, I'll grant you both of those."
"And I bet I'm hanging lower and thicker than most of the young guys who will be on the cruise too."
"I'll grant you that too. But there's no chance any of the guys on the boat are even going to get an opportunity to see your—"
At that point Pete broke off because he saw one of the cashiers, Julie, standing in the door to the grocery store manager's office and looking pained. John noticed the change in Pete's demeanor, and his face swiveled toward the doorway.
"Yes, Julie, what is it?" John's fingers went instinctively to his keyword and toggled the screen from the homepage of the Gaycruiser gay male dating site to the chart of last month's inventory statistics at his Baltimore branch of Krogers.
"A display got knocked over at the end of aisle three and there's pickle juice running on the floor and it doesn't look like Eddie's gonna get it cleaned up any too fast. He's already slid and fallen in it twice."
John took a deep breath and let it out in a sigh. "Thanks, Julie. Pete, could you—?"
"Hey, don't look at me, I'm management," Pete interjected. But he was already struggling to his feet.
"Yeah, but you're lower management and I'm upper management."
"Middle management," Pete muttered as he followed Julie's retreating figure through the floor and down the corridor to the main store floor.
What John was muttering at the same time as Pete walked away was, "Bermuda's gotta be better than this—and watching young guys fuck on a cruise ship will be a whole lot better than on a computer screen anyway."
* * * *
John was riddled with mixed emotions—nerves, arousal, a bit of dismay—as he stood in line waiting to register with the clipboard-laden, Speedo-clad tour director at the bottom of the gangplank up to the sleek, small
Poseidon's Spear
, the cruise ship that was to take him two days out and two days back to Bermuda from Baltimore at the top of the Chesapeake Bay.
It was true, as he had actually hoped, that he was the only fifty-something man standing around waiting to get on the ship. The up side, though, was that the other men there were almost universally young hunks he would love to sink his dick into.
The cruise was one of the ones offered by the Gaycruiser Web site on a quarterly basis that augmented their on-line dating service. The fees were stiff, but the Web site no doubt thought that charging sixty men cruising for hookups on their site for the added hookup chance of four days out on the ocean on a sleek yacht where clothing was optional and fucking like bunnies was actually encouraged helped their paid membership statistics. Especially as extra money could be made from selling videos of the cruises on sex sites.
The cruise was going to be extra expensive for John. He had something of a plan—and there wasn't much of anything else in his life to spend money on. So, he'd reserved, and paid a high premium for, one of the suites on the ship. And before arriving, he spent weeks in the gym. His muscle tone was fine—for his age—but he had needed to get a little less thickish around the middle, and he'd at least partially succeeded at that. As he approached the cruise ship from the stern, he'd done a mental comparison of his torso with that of the Poseidon depicted on the fantail, and he didn't think he came off that badly. A man in his fifties had to be expected not to have a willowy figure. He'd had his gray hair styled and highlighted in a shimmery silver that caught the light and the loose hairs plucked from all of the unattractive places so that what was left on his chest was a pleasing—at least to him—patch that trailed intriguingly down his belly to his pubes, which he'd also had trimmed and shaped. He'd left curled tuffs in his arm pits, enough so that they wouldn't give the impression they'd been purposely shaved. And he'd spent enough time in a tanning both for a sort of all-over tan so that he wouldn't look like the office worker that he was when he got to the ship's pool.
And he'd bought some spiffier, expensive-looking clothes at the Tanger Outlet near the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. He'd been lucky to find a Speedo with sort of a bull's eye design on it that would help emphasize his best feature—his thick, eight-inch cock.
When he got up to the tour director, a well-built hunk with blond-highlighted curly hair with a chiseled face and a practiced smile, he opened up his gambit.
"Ah, and you are?" the young man asked dubiously, looking down at his clipboard after a quick look up and down John and a slight sniff of his nose.
"Jonathan Pender. From Baltimore. Although, I'm not sure what home base was given you when the reservation was made. It could have been the Hamptons or Aspen too, I suppose."
The cruise director's slight supercilious smile had already started to turn more respectful as he found John's name on his clipboard, but, hearing what John said, he looked up with a far more welcoming—and interested—look on his face. John was also pleased to note that the men immediately behind him in line had stopped whispering to each other and were more attentive now too. At least they had stopped snickering.
"Yes, well it does say Baltimore, and I see that you are booked into the Neptune suite." This latter discovery had been the reason the tour director's attitude had already changed. "May I be the first to give you a hearty welcome aboard. My name is Tony and don't hesitate to ask if there's anything—absolutely anything—I can do to make riding . . . riding the waves a greater pleasure for you."