At the Opera

I didn't manage to get out of bed and stumble to the shower until after noon the next day. When I struggled down to the terrace facing the pyramids, I found that a place had been laid at a table under an umbrella and a small berry-brown servant was standing at attention there as if everything had been awaiting my arrival. Within minutes a full breakfast meal materialized.

As I was eating, staring out at the pyramids, and trying to straighten out what had happened to me the previous night, Rushdy came up the steps to the terrace on the western side of the villa from the direction of the stables and the air strip. He was wearing the same riding outfit I'd first seen him in, and he looked calm and carefree. When he caught my eye following him from the top of the steps, he smiled, not indicating anything unusual had transpired.

But something unusual

had

transpired. He had pimped me out. What I couldn't come to grips with, though, was why and, beyond that, what difference it made that the fuck had been the most total taking I'd ever had. Sex with David or any of the men in New York paled in contrast to what the English general had given me. Did I want to complain about that?

I did feel like I had a complaint, though, that Rushdy himself hadn't fucked me again since the first hurried half hour in the Winter Palace Hotel. Thinking back on that now seemed like he was just checking out whether I had a hole worthy of being pimped.

"Did you have a good sleep?" he asked as he reached the table and sat down close beside me. Just that, no apology, no mention at all of having turned me over to another man to fuck.

I couldn't think of what to say, so I just dipped my head and mouthed an innocuous, "Um, uh."

He reached over and cupped my chin. Raising my face, he leaned in and gave me a tender kiss on my lips. As I opened my mouth to him, though, he drew back.

"I thought perhaps a drive into the desert. Unless you aren't interested. Tonight is the opera."

"David and the commercial crew?" I asked.

"Still in Luxor."

Rushdy was a daredevil driver, racing the Rolls coupe across hardened sands, waving his free arm and laughing at the wind whipping through our hair as he drove straight out into the desert toward the west, past the pyramids of Giza. Thinking we would be stopping, plowed into a sand dune, at any moment, I marked what few landmarks I could see, feeling sure he wasn't paying attention to anything but seeing how much speed he could get out of the yellow convertible.

He must have known exactly where he was going, though, because we whipped around the side of a high sand dune; the Rolls fishtailed to the left, sending me lurching up against his shoulder; and the car slid to a stop in between a small stand of palm trees next to a trickle of water running into a tiny pool.

Before I could right myself, he had stripped off his shirt and mine as well, had his arms around me, and was attacking my lips with his, brutally and passionately kissing me. I was lost to him. My right arm was trapped between our bodies, but I grabbed the back of his head with my left hand, running my hand into his curly, black hair, and held his face against mine.

He broke the kiss, though, and pulled my head brutally back with his left hand buried in my hair as his lips moved down to the throat and then to my nipples. He unbuttoned my fly with his right hand, pulled my cock out, and started to stroke it, slowly at first and then faster. As I groaned and begged him to fuck me properly, sure that he was going to do it, he loosened the hold on the cock, but only enough to make a loose cylinder shape with his hand that I could fuck up into with the movement of my own hips. He kept his grip on my head and all attempts I made to reach his groin with my left hand he brushed away.

He sucked and teethed my nipples, and I repeatedly begged him to fuck me, turning to warning him that I was going to come.

And then I did come. He produced a linen handkerchief, which he tented over my cock in time to take the cum and then, with a laugh, he tossed it over the side of the car, released me to collapse into the far corner of the front seat, struggled back into his white cotton shirt, and handed mine to me.

He put the Rolls in gear and we were racing back toward the pyramids of Giza. I huddled in the corner of the seat, looking at him with wide eyes of both confusion and arousal.

We'd had sex, but he hadn't fucked me. I ached for him to fuck me. Surely that was going to happen when we returned to the villa. But if nothing else he had brought me under his full possession again. It didn't matter what had happened the previous night and what part he had played in that. He made love to me. He was going to fuck me. That was all that mattered.

At the villa, he told me to go to my room and rest for dinner. I left him, assuming he would come to my room. I lay naked on the bed, waiting for him. Eventually, I drifted off to sleep in the heat of the afternoon. He didn't come to me, nor did he send for me. I was too proud to crawl to him. But, in hindsight, it may have been a mistake not to. Had Jared crawled to him? Possibly so. Jared was the kind who would do anything for sex. And Jared had been gloriously fucked. I didn't want to think further on this, so I didn't. I just turned my face to the wall and willed myself to sleep.

* * * *

The trip to the Cairo opera at the Khedivial Opera House in Meiden El Opera square between the Azbakeya and Isamailya districts of Cairo, across the Nile from Giza, was much the same as dinner at Shepheard's had been. Once again we both were in tuxedos, each the most handsome and alluring man in Egypt in our separate ways. The square was lit up as day as Rushdy nosed the yellow Rolls coupe into it. His car was distinctive enough that the crowds parted for him as he pulled up to the front of the building and people turned to smile and gesture and to otherwise treat us both like the toast of the town. I thought of the man as Rushdy now instead of Abazar. We'd had sex again, even if it wasn't completely consummated sex.

We were in a box across the hall from the Allenby box. Sir Cecil Pills was there, sitting behind Allenby and his wife, and the general stood and gave me a little bow as we entered the pasha's box. My ass gave a little twitch at seeing him, and I couldn't help having the hope that I would find myself writhing under him again sometime soon.

As he did at Shepheard's, Rushdy instructed me to stand for a while at the front of the box so that all in the house could, as he said, "have their fill of your beauty and sensuality." I didn't blush at the compliment, being fully aware of my attributes, but, unlike at Shepheard's, I felt like shrinking into the shadows, as if I had "male whore" emblazoned across my chest.

I found this thought disconcerting, however, as I hadn't sold myself to Sir Cecil; I had been pimped to him, and I had, in fact, been selling my body for favors and advancement in New York before I ever came to Egypt. I had no idea—other than the choice of partners having been taken out of my hands—what the difference was here from across the ocean.

And Rushdy certainly had done well for me in the choice of Pills. I once again thought on never having been so thoroughly fucked before. On the drive to the theater the pasha had, finally, brought up the previous night's encounter with Pills, saying that, because of the volatile political climate in Egypt, if I was going to stay with him for any length of time—a notion I hadn't thought about but was intrigued by—I would have to help him maintain his position through political favors. He didn't explicitly say what that entailed, but I caught the drift. I didn't answer him, wanting to think about it before speaking, but I didn't reject what he was suggesting either.

While the orchestra was tuning up, the pasha was nodding and giving little waves to those he knew in the audience. He gave hand signals to more than one of them as well as whispering to the man in the box next to ours. I gave him a quizzical look as I sat down and picked up a program.

"Business associates," he said. "I will have to conduct a bit of business in the lobby during the first interval. I wish to have you by my side. You won't want to be far from my side all evening. We aren't as civilized here as you might imagine; we've had young women—and young men too—kidnapped directly from the opera house and defiled in carriages in the surrounding alleys. Now that you have been seen by all here—"

"I see that the opera tonight is

Aida

," I interjected. "That seems quite the natural opera for Cairo. I'm glad I was here for it." I wanted to change the subject. Putting me on display like this in the theater, when combined with what Rushdy had said in the Rolls about the exchange of favors in the political environment, left little to the imagination why I was being paraded about like this. That too, though, was little different from what was happening when a prominent man took me to the theater in New York. It perhaps just wasn't as bold—and as honest.

The pasha laughed. "

Aida

is the production staged here every other time. It's hard to miss it if you are coming to Cairo. The visitors expect it. It isn't just that it's about ancient Egypt; it's also reputed to have been commissioned to mark the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 as well as to dedicate the opening of this opera house in the same year. But that's a myth. It wasn't finished until a year later—then it did premier here, however. The opera opening Khedivial was

Rigoletto

, another Verdi opera. We seem only to do Verdi here in Cairo. He is so . . . Egyptian in temperament. So hot blooded under the serene surface."

"It will be exciting to see it here nonetheless."

"I can tell you are excited," Rushdy said, taking my hand in one of his and putting his other hand on my crotch. "You look so sexy when you are excited. I could take you on the floor of this box now, during the opera."

I melted to him. I would have let him take me right here on the floor of the box.

Although some of the business associates the pasha met with—and introduced me to—during the first interval were Europeans, most were Egyptians, the latter in Western dress, though. And they conducted whatever business they had, which seemed to be preliminary to a meeting the next day, in a mixture of Arabic and French, which went right over my head. The men didn't mind; they were happy with smiling at me and nodding their heads as if I were in the conversation.

Rushdy and I brushed by the conversation group that Sir Cecil was in on our way back to the second act, having to maneuver out of the direct line to our box in order to do so. The pasha and the general exchanged a few whispers that I didn't hear in the process.

Although I was lost in the opera when it started up again, near the end of that act I looked over into Allenby's box and noticed the Pills wasn't there. I found in the next interval, though, or rather, Rushdy and I found Sir Cecil, when Rushdy took me back along the corridor behind the doors to the boxes toward the stage-end of the theater. In the shadows at the end of the corridor, behind a black drape, there was a door that led into something of a small parlor, no doubt where notables were invited to wait during the intervals to or meet under special circumstances.

An assignation with Pills materialized as my special circumstance. He fucked me hard and fast, both of us mostly clothed in our evening wear, his fly open and my trousers and underdrawers on the carpet below my spread and raised legs, with my bare buttocks on the front edge of a writing desk and my shoulder blades pressed into a red-velvet covered wall.

The general and Rushdy must have perfected this arrangement, as Pills ejaculated and we both had dressed again; Rushdy met us at the door to the small parlor, the two men nodding politely and conspiratorially to each other; and Rushdy had us back into our box before the curtain came up on the final act. I watched Pills return to the Allenby box and bow to his host and hostess there as the curtain was rising, everything looking quite proper and civilized. I rather thought at the moment that this seemed so, so English.