It was mere happenstance that I received the letter at all—and I remembered later that I had every reason to suspect that there had been other letters sent to me at the boarding house that I never saw. I just happened to be the one standing at the front door when the mailman came by and, although I didn't usually do so, I glanced at the addresses on the envelopes he handed me.
The name was spelled with only one R, of course, but it clearly was addressed to me—and it was from a town in Ohio. I didn't know anyone in Ohio that I knew of. In fact, I couldn't name anyone in the world who would be sending me a letter at all.
When I opened it, I had to sit down and read it a third time before the message therein began to sink in. It was from the chairman of the English Department at Oberlin College. My works had been read—I had to return to this statement several times; only a few of my play scripts had ever been seen by anyone else. My works had been read with interest, it said, and Oberlin was prepared to offer me an assistantship if I wished to continue my college education there.
In the next few hours and days—not longer than that, because I was on the wing within a week—I poured over all of the circumstances of my life and everyone who was in it, and only two possibilities occurred to me. There was that strange man who visited me and seemed familiar with me but who had been unable to perform sexually. And, when I thought more on it, there was Alec Cotton, to whom I had sent my draft of
The Boarding House
. The more I thought on it, the more I became convinced that this was the source of my visitation by the angels—I couldn't think of the opportunity as anything else. I never even considered that it might just be a practical joke—and, in hindsight, I'm certainly glad I didn't, because that, by far, was the most logical conclusion. And if I'd thought that was a possibility, chances would have been good I would have marched straightaway to the grate and burned what I would have taken as a cruel joke.
The was another possibility—that it really was my play scripts that had been seen and admired. And I asked around at the playhouse about whether any of the actors and stage people there had sent any of the scripts to anyone, but they all reacted as I reasoned they would—fearing that I was seeking evidence of my work having been stolen for production elsewhere without my permission. Thus, it was not surprising when they all denied any knowledge of the scripts having been disseminated beyond Asheville.
Once I'd decided I would go to Ohio to at least find out what this was about, it was like walking on glass at the boarding house. Mrs. Childress, with her sharp sense of detection, obviously knew something was afoot. I had no idea why she suspected anything until she asked me whether I had any relatives in Ohio. Then I realized that I must have dropped the envelope in the front hall the same day the letter arrived. I certainly couldn't find the envelope later, and I was so shocked by receiving the letter that I easily could have dropped the envelope there.
I stonewalled her, however, and made my plans in private. And the next Sunday, while she was at church, I put the few belongings I had in my valise and trudged to the train station, where I had already bought a ticket for Oberlin, Ohio.
When I finally got in to see the man who had sent me the letter from Oberlin College, I found I hadn't been thinking clearly on the possibilities of why I had been invited to school at Oberlin on an assistantship.
"It is all quite unorthodox," the department chairman said, "but S. D. insisted he couldn't take up the position offered to him here without an assistant—and one of his own choosing—and when we quibbled on the educational assistant he had chosen, he merely said that we could educate you as we pleased—but that you had worked under him before and the two of you were a comfortable fit."
"S. D.? Worked under him before? A comfortable fit?"
"Yes, didn't Professor Dane contact you about this? He seemed quite insistent that you be brought over from Asheville to work with him."
"Ah. Stan. Stanford Dane." I almost pinched myself for being so slow—well, for that and for almost bursting forth with laughter at the double entendre references to my having worked under him and the two of us being a comfortable fit.
I finally got to the office they sent me to, the one they said was Professor Dane's—down a semidark, dusty hallway in one of the college's older buildings. The chairman of the English Department had spoken of it as if it were some hallowed ground and that his department wouldn't agree to move to newer facilities even if the college administration tried to force them to, I took my steps with increased hesitancy. I didn't feel worthy of being here. I knew I would make such a fool of myself for taking on airs above my abilities. And it couldn't be the Stanford Dane I knew who I was going to meet.
Somehow I didn't relate all of this to flamboyant, bigger-than-life, got-to-have-the-best Stanford Dane.
But they were right. The door was open to his office and sitting behind the desk was none other than the Stanford Dane, showman extraordinaire, I had known in Asheville.
"He didn't tell you in the letter who was recommending you?" Stanford said when he looked up from the text on his desk, his face bathed in a beam of sunlight coming through a window that left the rest of the room in semidarkness, and saw me standing there in the shadows just inside his open door. I already knew him well enough, though, to know that it was all for dramatic effect. I'm sure he knew I was there the moment I entered the building and had taken pains in establishing his place on stage.
"Ah, that is a pity," he continued. "I didn't want to do it myself, because I could never quite be sure they would accommodate me. They salivated over my appointment as playwright in residence, but you know how testy the politics can be in a college faculty."
No, I didn't know, actually.
"My plays . . . the ones I directed in Asheville last winter attained quite a bit of acclaim. This wasn't the only college that took note of my successes and abilities."
"Your plays?" I screamed inside my head. "Don't you mean our plays?—the ones I slaved so hard over while you were prancing around the parlors of the wealthy in Asheville?"
I didn't say it, of course. And I didn't really believe it. The plays would have gone nowhere without his signature stamped all over them. If nothing else, I had no argument to give that the ending he loved and that I hated hadn't made
Bound for Home
fail in the eyes of the audiences. I had heard that the play had done well on the New York stage as well, which I took as a lesson for my own skills at assessment. It had humbled me.
"Why, Mr. Dane?" I asked instead. "Why did you send for me? When you left you didn't even say good-bye."
"I was slightly piqued at you, dear boy. But since we were parted, I discovered that I missed you."
I should have been satisfied with that—and I would have been—if he hadn't eventually gotten around to a deeper reason.
"I'm grateful, of course, for the opportunity to study. And to work with you—"
"I would like to know how grateful, Charlie. I would like to have that cleared up right at the beginning."
"Oh, very. I—"
"Don't just tell me, Charlie. I would like for you to show me, please."
With that he rolled his chair back away from the desk I know was facing as I stood between desk and door.
"Close the door, Charlie, please—and come kneel between my thighs."
"Here? Now? In a public building? The glass in the door isn't clear, but with the backlighting from the window—"
"Yes, here, now, Charlie. Don't you remember that we had a discussion about danger enhancing the ecstasy—on our first day together? Have you lost your sense of adventure?"
I knelt between his thighs then and unbuttoned his trousers and pulled that monster cock of his out, already in partial arousal, and closed my lips over the bulb to begin the ritual of what I knew he enjoyed the most.
When he was in full erection, he commanded me to rise, strip off my trousers and drawers and lean over the desktop with my belly on a pile of notebooks he'd been grading.
I moaned as in times of old as he reached between my legs and began milking my cock and ran his tongue into my ass. He knew all of me—what I liked better and what I liked best. He was the master of me—which, I knew, was the whole purpose of this welcoming session. But when he had his long, thick, strong cock moving deep inside me and I was writhing under his attentions and not caring about anything but that he hadn't given me this for so long, I again, almost instantly, was entirely his.
Immediately after his ejaculation, he put his lips to my ears and stabbed me with the real reason I had been sent for.
"You didn't ask what your duties would be as my assistant, Charles."
"They seem fairly obvious now," I countered with a groan.
"Beyond that—that's just a pledge of your loyalty—beyond that, I've been working on scripts since Asheville, but they seem to need something more. You did so well with the Asheville play that what I want your assistance with is cleaning my plays up and enhancing them."
"You want me to write your plays?"
"The plays are mine, Charles," and not having taken his still-hard cock all of the way out of me, I gasped as he slammed it deep up into me again—showing me that his forbearance had its limits. "I want you to work on them as you did in Asheville—no more and no less. You seemed content to learn from me then. Has that changed?"
"No," I whimpered. And I'm ashamed to say that my "no" was really because he was withdrawing his cock from inside me once again. He was still hard; I knew that he was capable of fucking me again—and the second and subsequent ones had always been the more pleasurable ones.
"Rise and dress now, Charles. This is perhaps a bit more public than we should chance further. But I'm not finished with you."
"No," I whimpered again, this time making clear that I wasn't finished properly either.
As we dressed, he wrote something on a scrap of paper and handed it to me. "This is my address. As soon as you are settled into your dormitory room this afternoon, attend me at my house, please."
"I am to live at the college, not with you?" I asked. I tried not to make it come out as a whine, but I'm sure I didn't succeed.
"Yes, it would be inconvenient—and perhaps a bit too obvious—if I were to take you into my home. You're a student now. You should be happy to make the most of this time among other students. As long as you don't get too familiar with any of them, of course."
