[One Night in XXX Story Event]
The shock set it on how stupid I'd been. Pete Parnell hadn't hired me for his Chicago investment firm
despite
what I had disclosed at my job interview with him about what I'd done in college but
because of
what I'd admitted I had done in college. It wasn't just that I went with other men, but it was that I had been promiscuous for a time and even had participated in threesomes and foursomes. He had drawn that information out of me and had made it clear that he wanted to know everything I had done even if I didn't do it anymore—that he didn't want to discover later that I had hidden something if he was going to employ me. It said it was worse to have one of his employees pilloried in the press for something in the past that blindsided the firm than it was to know about it beforehand. And I'd misjudged why he had taken an interest in me this past year at his firm. I thought he was as hands-on with all of his employees. But he obviously wasn't. He was grooming me, slowly bending me to his own desires.
How did I feel about the attention—and the intention? I had strayed in college but given it up. I'd convinced myself I could live without it—that I wanted to live without it. And I'd stuck to my guns, doing what I could to only think of any men around me as business associates, not as possible sex partners. That hadn't worked so well with Pete Parnell. He was a real hunk and he'd paid such close attention to me.
Now I thought I knew why.
I'd just disconnected a call from him as I sat in Chicago's O'hare International Airport, waiting for my late morning flight—our flight—to San Francisco to leave. He wasn't coming with me, but he wanted me to go ahead and take the meeting late that afternoon on the firm's investment in a San Francisco waterfront condominium and to use the other arrangements he'd made for the trip.
He'd set the trip up for the weekend, although there was just the one meeting with the construction firm this afternoon, Friday. He'd said that we might as well add a day and a half and see some of San Francisco. I'd let him know I'd never been there. I hadn't even thought to wonder why it would take two of us to attend a progress review session on the project. He'd said he needed to go and I needed to see how these things were done. I was such a dimwit not to have thought there was more to it.
I took out the travel packet—I'd only had time to check the hotel reservation and pull out the airline tickets. I saw now that he had set up restaurant reservations as well and a gym, with massage for both of us, in the evening at a place called Eros in The Castro area. Pete was a fitness nut. And he kept himself in really good condition. He was as toned as I was even though he was fifteen years older than I was.
"Pete, where are you?" I'd asked when my cell phone had gone off and he wasn't there yet. He'd said he'd meet me at the gate a half hour before boarding, but we were less than ten minutes away from a boarding that already was fifteen minutes late, and he wasn't here.
"Sorry, I can't come. Last minute problem," I heard him say somewhere from down the line. That somewhere wasn't here, where the plane was about to board. "You'll have to take the meeting without me. Go ahead and use all of the reservations I had set up for the weekend. We'll talk when you get back. We'll have to talk then, Logan."
"I don't understand."
"I know you don't. It's just all moving so fast. This wasn't the way I wanted to do this," Pete answered.
"This wasn't the way you wanted to what?"
"I wanted to go slower with you. Put this all together more adroitly."
"Go slower with me in what?"
"It came to a head earlier than I thought. This weekend was to make sure with you—to win you over for a relationship."
"Win me over for a relationship, Pete? With you? I don't understand."
"Really? You don't understand, Logan? You haven't seen—felt—that we were moving closer together?"
"I didn't mean for us to get into a relationship, Pete."
"That's not an answer to my question. Are you saying it never entered your mind—that you never thought of the possibility?"
I couldn't answer that. I found I couldn't say no to that, if I was to be truthful.
"Tell me, Logan," Pete continued. "Say it. Say you were thinking of being in a sexual relationship with me."
"OK, I admit it," I said after a pause that Pete obviously wasn't going to fill.
"Say you've thought about having sex with me—under me. You admitted that you had bottomed for men."
"I've thought about having sex with you," I said. I wondered if Pete had any idea how hard it was for me to admit that.
"I've left Helen, Logan. I wasn't supposed to happen this fast. But I left her and I want to start a relationship with you—when you come back. I know you're capable of it, and that you are a submissive. We've discussed that much. Go this weekend, have fun, give in to it, and come back to me Sunday night. I'll meet you at the airport. We can go to your place to begin with. Helen will make a fortress of the house against me."
"You aren't coming this weekend because you've left Helen for me?" I asked dumbly. "That's why you're leaving me high and dry here?"
"I'm not leaving you high and dry, Logan. You have a weekend of expensive fun set up after a short meeting where they'll treat you like a prince and all you have to do is smile and nod your head."
"About the arrangements you've made in Frisco, Pete. Like this evening at the gym, this Eros place, for a workout and massage. How close is that to the hotel? I doubt I'll get out of the meeting before nightfall. I'm not sure I'm—"
"Do that, Logan—the workout and massage. It's all paid for, nonrefundable. Life in San Francisco doesn't even start before dark—or end before the next light. Take San Francisco as it comes. You need to loosen up. I'd like to come back to Chicago ready to take me on—or rather for me to take you on. I want you to be more open to it; not so uptight. Think about it—what you want, what you really want. And the hotel cars will take you wherever you want to go. That's already on my tab. I really wanted to do this trip, but I really can't."
"If this weekend is so important to you, I can't see why you're not going," I said. I sounded petulant about this even to myself.
"It's just impossible, Logan. Listen, my kid saw this blowup between his mother and me. Pete Jr. has a ballgame tomorrow morning, and I need to be there for him. I don't care about Helen, but I can't just leave my boy like this. It just hit him at a bad time. We didn't have time to prepare him for this. You can understand that, can't you?"
Crap, I thought. I hadn't even thought about him having a kid. I felt like I was sinking into a morass. It didn't help that it was stirring old arousals I'd tried to put to rest.
"Yeah, I guess. Yes, sure, I can understand about your son," I said after a pause. And I certainly could. I hadn't been prepared for Pete to be this far along in his plans for me—for him and me. We hadn't even done it. None of it. Sure, I'd thought about it. But I'd been fighting the urge. Apparently, I'd been fighting the urge harder than Pete had.
"And this isn't the way I wanted to get something set up with you," Pete was saying. "I know you're skittish and have been avoiding doing what I know you want to do. But, dammit, we'll be so good together. You want this, don't you?"
"I don't know what I want, Pete. When I left Atlanta, it was to change completely. There's been nothing. I've had no intention of doing anything, of going back into that life."
"But you could do it with me, couldn't you?" Pete asked.
Saved by the bell—or at least put off by the bell—the flight agent was calling for boarding. I had a business class seat and Pete, in whose name the tickets had been bought, had the highest level of privilege on every airline known to man. I'd be boarded in the first group.
"They're calling my flight, Pete. I've got to go. I don't know what to tell you. I didn't have any inkling this was where this was headed. I shouldn't have told you of my active gay past in the job interview last year. I intended to give up that life. I'm going now."
He got a last shot, though. "Whatever happens this weekend was in the plans and is fine, Logan. Remember that. It's what I want. I want you to return ready for it."
Did my job depend on it, I wondered. But I couldn't ask him that. That would wound him—and me too.
I disconnected the phone and looked up into the eyes of a dark and sultry hunk sitting across from me in the departure lounge. I had gone to a remote area of the lounge to take this call, but at some point, the movie star-handsome hunk had come over and sat right across from me and I had been so flustered by the phone call that I hadn't noticed him. I wondered what he'd heard. But he was giving me such a knowing, sloppy smile that I'm afraid he heard too much.
I quickly rose and headed for the departure gate, getting there just in time to, red faced, be waved through to the airplane as part of the privileged boarding passengers.
The embarrassment continued after I'd gotten settled in business class. The seat next to me was empty during most of the boarding, which made sense, as that probably would have been Pete's seat and he hadn't made the flight. Before the doors closed, though, a young man plopped down in the aisle seat. It was the dark, sultry hunk who had given me the smile after I'd had my phone conversation with Pete in the departure lounge.
"I hope you don't mind if I sit here," he said, turning his melting smile toward me. "They kept paging someone who wasn't showing up, I'd overheard your phone conversation in the lounge—sorry, you got a little heated and spoke up—and I put two and two together that your boyfriend wasn't showing up. I found out he had been assigned to business class and I managed to get upgraded into the seat. Again, I hope you don't mind."
