Chapter Seven: Durango Interlude
The next morning, after breakfast at a small way station where there was another change in drivers and the two elderly ladies got off—in the middle of nowhere, as far as Glade could tell—Tex followed Glade back to his seat. Tex sat down beside Glade and jacked him off again while murmuring in his ear about how nice he was—and how really sweet he'd been the night before.
"We'll be in Durango this afternoon," he said when he was finished with the hand job and Glade was lying back in the seat, mellow and satisfied.
"Will we?" Glade murmured.
"It's pretty expensive in Denver, you know," Tex said from out of the blue.
"Is it?" Glade asked.
"Sure you got enough to get started there?"
"There's never enough, I've found."
"Could you make good use of, say, two hundred more?" Tex asked.
"Who couldn't?" Glade responded. He was just making small talk, not really following the conversation that closely. Tex gave great hand jobs.
But Tex wasn't just making small talk. "You know you can stop off in Durango and get on the bus later on the same ticket?"
"Can you?" Glade said.
"Yes, you can. You know, I've been thinkin'. Dusty and me had promised to bring something back to the boys at the ranch from Abilene and we plumb forgot to do that."
"Did you?"
"Yep. We got a pole in the middle of our bunk house. You could stop over for a day or two and give them guys a pole dance. I'm sure I could collect at least $200 for you if you entertained the boys. They've got more money than they had time to go into Durango and get their rocks off. What do ya say to that?"
"Just pole dancing? I wouldn't have to give them sex?"
"Well, maybe $500 for the works. Not sure I could control the guys in the bunkhouse once you got them heated up."
What Glade was thinking was that no matter how far down the road this bus had taken him, he was still in Abilene. But what he said was, "Sure, why not?" As Glade had already noted, Tex gave the best of hand jobs and there he was, hand on Glade's belly, stroking the rosebud tattoo with his thumb while he was making his proposition.
The ranch was a good hundred miles out of Durango in the direction of nowhere, but the bunk house did, indeed, have a wooden pole holding up the center of it. There were six interested cowboys out there in nowhere in addition to Tex and Dusty. Glade danced for them to a scratchy record on an old-fashioned record player, wearing one of the sparkly gold G-strings he'd brought with him from Rapier. Glade wowed them and then they fucked him—all eight of them in succession over a three-hour period. A few had seconds. It was clear they didn't get into Durango often enough to sufficiently get their rocks off.
Glade heard Tex telling the other cowboys how turned on he got when his rosebud tattoo was rubbed, and they all made sure to give it attention, and thus they all got enthusiastic fucks.
They may have gone another exhausting round, but the foreman broke up the party and extracted Glade and helped him hobble out of the bunkhouse and into his cabin—where the foreman bent Glade over a chair and satisfied his own need.
Glade made $750 off that afternoon of work, and Tex suggested that he stay on for a while—that the cowboys worked harder with a daily fuck and that there was plenty of money from where the $750 had come from.
But Glade really, really wanted to get out of Abilene, in more ways than just geographically.
Tex was good for his promise; he drove Glade back to the bus station in time to catch the next bus rambling through from Abilene to Denver. The bus he'd meant to take left before they got there and Glade had to take a later one, though, because Tex stopped behind a rock formation before dropping down into Durango and fucked Glade again in the backseat of the ranch's station wagon. Tex gave him another fifty for that, though.
* * * *
The bus between Durango and Denver was more crowded than it had been on its initial leg into Durango. It was getting closer to big towns, and there was much more of a variety of people getting on and off as the bus rumbled along.
In Colorado Springs a middle-aged guy in a business suit got on. He caught Glade's attention, because he looked like someone who should be driving a Mercedes rather than riding in a Greyhound bus. He was smartly dressed; was in good, and obviously pampered condition; and he was flashing a big diamond ring. It struck Glade that this looked like just the sort of guy he was looking for in Denver.
The man looked around the bus as he got on. It was half full, although most of the passengers were in the front half. His eyes caught Glades and stopped there. Thinking what Glade had been thinking about how the man was the type who filled his Denver bill, Glade gave him a more welcome smile than was absolutely necessary. The man's eyes sparkled up and he returned Glade's smile. Then he was moving toward Glade, who, despite the connection their eyes had made, was surprised when the man came all of the way back to where Glade was sitting and sat down in the aisle seat next to him. There were other vacant seats back here, but the man ignored them all and sat next to Glade.
He took his suit coat off and slung it into the overhead bin before he sat down. His warm arm was rubbing up against Glade's, and his thigh was touching Glade's. Glade felt like he was going to hyperventilate. He looked down and was somewhat distressed that if the man looked in his lap too, he'd see that the young man was tenting up. It wasn't so much that the man was drop-dead gorgeous as that Glade's mind was racing ahead at the prospect of having one man to keep him and to take care of him.
But he wasn't looking at Glade's lap, or so Glade thought. He came on with a briefcase and had taken some papers out of it and was sifting through those, looking for something.
The bus was out on the highway now.
"Wouldn't you know it?" the man muttered.
"What?" Glade asked more out of politeness than curiosity.
"They gave me a receipt back there at the garage, and now I can't find it. It had their telephone number on it. I'll need that to find out when the car will be fixed."
"The car?" Glade asked, surprised. The man was on a bus.
"Yeah. My Merc broke down back there in Colorado Springs. God, I haven't had to ride a bus in years. But I needed to get back to Denver by this evening and the bus station was right there by the garage. It would have been more complicated to get a rental car. You come from far away?"
"From Abilene," Glade answered.
"Working there, were you?"
"Yeah, a place called Rapier." Glade had no idea why he told the man that. All he could think of was that he had been disconcerted by the man touching him. That and assuming he'd have no idea what Rapier was.
"Ah, I see," the man said.
And, for a moment, it seemed like he did, indeed, see. He had turned to Glade and was giving him a hard look. To try to cover, Glade asked him about where he lived and what he did for a living.
"I'm a few miles out of Denver. Out toward the mountains. Run a specialty service of sorts out there. A few other businesses in town. You might be more interested in what I have going in Golden, though."
Glade let that sit. He didn't pursue the question further.
The man gave Glade a look as if expecting Glade to ask him about the business in Golden. But when Glade didn't, the man settled back in his seat and started talking to Glade about his family.
"No boys, damn it, but the range of ages in girls," he snorted as his monologue moved along. "And each of them comes with a set of different age-stage attitudes. Daughters are such a challenge. You have any girlfriends with tattoos?"
"No girlfriends," Glade answered. He was trying to keep his answers short. Glade was sure that the man would be able to hear his arousal in his voice if he said too much.
"Well then, boyfriends perhaps?" He'd let it come out straight, as if there was nothing behind it. But Glade saw him eyeing his tented lap and began to figure out he was building up to something. Glade said nothing, but he knew the man could feel the intake of his breath and how tense he'd gotten.
"Tattoos aren't so bad," Glade said after a pause.
"Oh, you got any?" he asked.
"One."