Shores of Tripoli

Billy had not been pirated again. Instead a somewhat confused American naval man from the USS

Philadelphia

rowed him directly back to his own ship, where he was handed a pair of trousers, rowed back to the

Elizabeth

, and kept under guard and separated from anyone else while the naval officers of the

Philadelphia

, under the command of William Bainbridge, worked to sort out who was merchant sailor and who was pirate.

In the chaos that still reigned, the pirate ship, which had been standing off the

Elizabeth

a good distance, managed to slip over the horizon, abandoning its captain and coconspirators.

Luckily, the pirates hadn’t had time to take full control of the

Elizabeth

and to search every nook and cranny of the ship. Enough officers of the merchant vessel and other crew members had survived to identify Billy not only as a member of the

Elizabeth

‘s crew but as the nephew of the ship’s owner as well. This was enough to bring him before Bainbridge, who knew how to curry favor with the American merchant class.

Billy hadn’t occupied one of the three passenger cabins on the ship to this point, being relegated to the forecastle initially and then taken into the officer’s quarters. Bainbridge assumed one of the passenger cabins was where he belonged, however, as he was the nephew of the owner, and Billy didn’t object to being assigned a passenger cabin. Bainbridge suggested that Billy might want to go to his cabin on the

Elizabeth

while they dealt with the pirates who survived. He assumed that the hangings would be too traumatizing for a young man who obviously had already experienced the unspeakable—an unspeakable that Bainbridge would ignore happened—and who was of the family of the ship’s owner. No one, including Billy, corrected his impression. It would have been just too confusing for him to understand that Billy was sailing as an apprentice sailor as punishment for enjoying rough sex—with men. Which is precisely what the pirate captain had been giving him when Bainbridge’s forces arrived.

The young man went meekly to a passenger cabin, however, and tried to filter out the sounds of summary trial and execution coming from the deck above. The whole experience had, in fact, been traumatizing for him beyond his fetish for the danger and his perceived love for pirates. His intellectualization both of what pirates did and how they were dealt with when captured had been far more romanticized than the reality that had hit him between the eyes. The fucking by the pirate chief hadn’t been bad at all, and even the teasing of his death had exhilarated Billy and lifted him to the heights of hardness. But the brutal killing of crew members of the

Elizabeth

before his eyes had shaken him to the core—as had the evidence of his own planned demise.

After dispensing with the pirates, Bainbridge augmented the survivors of the

Elizabeth

with naval sailors from the

Philadelphia

, putting one of his own senior officers in charge, and declared that the

Philadelphia

would escort the

Elizabeth

to the Azores, a three-day sail away, where Charles Rawley eventually could be reached to sort out what to do with his interrupted rice delivery and depleted ship’s crew. Bainbridge consulted with Billy on these matters as if he represented the owner, and Billy wagged his head in feigned interest as if he did.

Once more on deck, Billy offered to help set the sails of the

Elizabeth

, which the new commanding officer, Lt. Edward Foster, considered quite a magnanimous offer.

“I know a bit about working in the rigging,” Billy answered. “You saved our ship and some of the crew, and have not just abandoned us and gone your way, so I will be happy to lend a hand to the Azores.”

“Capital,” Foster answered, impressed, and clearly taken with the handsome young ship owner’s kin. “I pray that you will not overtax yourself, however. And do not tarry at it for long. I hope to see you at the officer’s table for supper tonight.”

Billy answered that he’d be pleased to be there, and then, alongside the surviving sailors of the

Elizabeth

and the augmenting naval sailors from the

Philadelphia

, he jumped up into the rigging as nearly as nimble a monkey as any of the other seasoned sailors.

Lieutenant Foster watched him scramble overhead with admiration—and with the glimmer of another interest altogether.

Working alongside the naval sailors was invigorating for Billy. They weren’t a bit like the sailors of a merchantmen. They were all young and in top physical condition—and they were more intelligent and outgoing than the sailors Billy had become used to. He made friends quickly.

There were the naval sailors Clem, Jocko, Slice, and Big Luke, two first voyagers and two in their second year before the mast, but all young and fit and boisterous and easy to joke with. And Billy became friends with two Marines as well, Hal and Dirk. The Marines on board—the contingent having been split between the

Philadelphia

and the

Elizabeth

—were not like the sailors. They knew little of sailing and had no duties in the rigging. The unit was a new one for the Navy, necessitated by the piracy they were combating. The Marines were essentially hand-to-hand combat soldiers being included on ships of the line as assault soldiers as needed upon boarding other vessels. These men were particularly fit, heavy of muscle, and nimble. They spent most of their days in combat training on the deck. Although Hal and Dirk were nearly inseparable, they were quite unlike, Hal being blond and smooth skinned and Dirk dark and hirsute. In physique, however, they were much of one cut, as were all the Marines—magnificently built. The naval sailors Billy befriended were also handsome and well formed. He marveled—out loud—at how different they were, as a group, from the grizzled merchantman vessel sailors Billy knew.

“That is a requirement for serving in the U.S. Navy,” Jocko jokingly responded to Billy when he noted that the sailors on this vessel were quite unlike those on the

Elizabeth

.

“Methinks the main reason is that the naval service itself is so young,” Slice added. “The sea will make us ugly and deformed fast enough, I am sure. You yourself would make a good Navy man, I reckon—if, if course, you were not so small of stature and fair looking.”

He gave Billy a wink then that told the young man that the naval men probably weren’t much off from the ones he’d known on the

Elizabeth

in terms of interests and needs.

Billy broached this subject with the other friend he quickly gained, the cabin boy, Adam, who was even smaller in stature than Billy was, nearly a year younger, willowy of body, and with a pretty face ringed with blond curls and punctuated with watery blue eyes and a sunny smile.

“I hear that naval men are not of the same class as merchant sailors in this way,” Adam answered. “Or at least not as much. They rotate between sea duty and duty on land, and I think this keeps their frustration down somewhat.”

“And then you have no trouble with the sailors on the

Philadelphia

?” Billy asked. This was a wonder to him if it were true. Such as Adam would be swarmed over on the

Elizabeth

.

Adam blushed. “I hear that you would understand. Otherwise I would not speak of it. I have a lover. Lieutenant Foster. Knowing this, the other men do not bother me . . . much.”

“And it is good with Foster?” Billy asked. Billy himself had some interest in that direction. He thought on the pretty, small cabin boy with the nearly six-and-a-half-foot, broad-shouldered ship’s officer, and it made him go hard.

Adam was looking dreamy eyed now. “Yes, he ties me up as if a captive, which arouses me highly, and has a way with the strap that makes me just . . .”

The lad didn’t complete the sentence. Having been put to the strap on more than one occasion himself and succumbing to its dark pleasures in his need for punishment in sex, Billy had experience in this himself. His thoughts went back to the right reverend Apsley in Charleston. But in a visual inspection of Adam’s body, stripped to the waist as were all of the naval sailors—but not the Marines—while they were working in the rigging, Billy could find no evidence of the strap. And he had difficulty thinking of the very straitlaced naval officer, Foster, covering young men not to mention binding them and putting them to the whip.

He was accustomed to such an image now, but there was a time when he would have spilled his seed just imagining a tall, strong, handsome man like Lieutenant Foster working his body with a whip as the man’s cock got hard as a rock for the fucking.

At dinner, Foster treated Billy like the owner of the ship—and so, then, did all of the other officers, including the surviving ones from the

Elizabeth

, who, no doubt, were hoping that Billy would not reveal how they had passed him around from berth to berth during the previous week. For his part, Billy, revealed nothing of the position or treatment he’d received previous to the pirate attack. Nor did he say anything about the nature of how he had fared during the pirate attack. The pirates had been grilled on their behavior before they were hanged, however, and it was not a great secret what the pirate chief had done with Billy. This was known not just in the officers’ quarters but among all of the sailors, merchantmen and naval sailors alike, as word of the licentious travels fast on a sailing vessel, especially when most of the sailors either already knew what Billy could and would do for them or hoped that he would do for them before the cruise was completed.

None, of course, referred to it openly, but undoubtedly Billy’s sexual experience with men and proclivities were shared with all by his former shipmates.

While they ate, Billy watched Foster’s eyes follow Adam around the cabin, as the lad helped with the serving, and he could tell that Adam had not lied about their liaison. He trembled a bit, too, when he saw that Foster gave him a similar interest of the eye.

In their dinner discussion, Foster told Billy why the

Philadelphia

had been in the eastern Atlantic. He noted that for decades, the Barbary Coast countries—those in northern Africa on the Mediterranean Sea, Tripoli, Tunis, Algiers, and Morocco, had sanctioned official piracy on the merchant ships of all of the European and New World countries that were trading in and across the Mediterranean. The Arab states, principally Tripoli and Algiers, demanded tribute for not attacking the shipping, and both the European nations and the new American nation had paid it. There still were pirate attacks, but they were kept at the level of functioning as a reminder of what could happen if the tribute wasn’t paid.

The Pasha of Tripoli, Yussif Karamanli, who had recently deposed his elder brother, Hamet, had increased the demands. The new American president, Thomas Jefferson, who had unsuccessfully opposed the paying of the tribute as early as 1784 when he was seconded to Benjamin Franklin as U.S. envoy to France, balked at the new demands. Now that he was president, he declared, in fact, that the United States would no longer pay any tribute, and he was sending a naval force into the Mediterranean to blockade Tripoli’s ports and to suppress Barbary Coast piracy. The frigate, the USS

Philadelphia

, was on its way to be a key vessel in this effort. That was why it had come across the pirate attack on the Elizabeth, which was flying an American flag and thus had a right to aid from the

Philadelphia

. The two ships would go to the Azores, near the mouth of the Atlantic entrance in the Mediterranean, where the

Elizabeth

would be docked awaiting word of its future from Charleston and the

Philadelphia

‘s crew would be reunited to continue its mission in North Africa.

“I thank you for your hospitality,” Billy said to Lieutenant Foster at the end of the meal, “but I regret that I will need to decline your offer of after-dinner port, as I am exhausted. I know I’ll sleep the sleep of the dead tonight.”

“No, it is for me to thank you for the hospitality,” Foster countered congenially, “It is your ship and your food and port we are enjoying. And I have thoroughly enjoyed our conversation. I can well understand your need for sleep, and I only hope that it is a very pleasant one.”

Billy indeed felt near to collapse as he returned to his cabin. It had been a long and harrowing day. He slipped out of the officer’s clothing that had been provided for him for his visit to the captain’s table, and fell onto the berth—and immediately into a deep sleep.

In the darkest hour of the night, he only slowly came into the consciousness of a man’s body laying fully prone on top of him as he was sprawled on the berth, naked, on his belly.

The man already was deep inside him, slowly stroking, deep, and, in his sleep, Billy had responded as he was accustomed to respond. He was raised slightly on his knees, offering his entrance to a convenient angle for the fuck. He murmured he knew not what, and a deep, somewhat familiar, man’s educated voice answered him with endearments on how sweet and desirable he was and how he would be treated right and given every satisfaction.

The man pulled out of him and took Billy’s hand and pressed it on the hard cock that had been working inside him, whispering, “This is all for you.”

Billy shuddered. The cock was not thick, but it was unusually long. He tried holding his breath as it slowly slid back inside him, but he could not suppress the moan at the feel of the long, deep slide repossessing him.

Billy felt lips at his throat and a tongue in his ear, and he turned his face to one that he could not make out in the darkness and permitted his lips to be possessed. He heard the intake of breath and the sigh when he raised up higher on his knees and opened his stance to allow deeper, more open access to his channel.

This clearly was taken as a signal of acceptance, and, with a groan and grunts, the rhythm and rate of the plowing picked up. It wasn’t a rough fuck, but it was a hard, deep fuck, ending in a flood of cum.

Billy had no idea how long his channel was being mined before he woke, but it wasn’t long before his lover—Billy couldn’t think of this man as an assailant; he was a lover just as the schoolmaster, Sam, had been a lover, or had meant to be—trembled and jerked and held their bodies in suspension for a second or more, and then ejaculated in three strong flowings deep inside Billy’s channel. Billy moaned his total surrender, as rather than pulling out immediately, the cock made four long slides out and then back in. Billy shuddered and then he too came—not for the last time.

The stranger turned Billy onto his back and lay against his side for several moments, running his hands over Billy’s body and murmuring his pleasure and thanks. A hand went to Billy’s cock and began to slow pump him, and Billy mewed quietly and turned his face to the stranger’s for another, long, lingering kiss. He could see the face enough to discern the fairness of it but not well enough to attach a name to it, although he knew he’d heard the voice recently. Billy too took these moments to glide his hands over the smooth, hard torso muscles of the lover. A hand descended to the man’s now, momentarily flaccid, cock, and Billy gasped once again at the length of it, even in repose.

Then lips were working their way down Billy’s body, and the man, who Billy had discerned by the movement of his own hands was magnificently cut and muscled reversed himself above Billy. As a wet mouth descended on Billy’s cock, Billy raised his own mouth to the stranger’s cock, which began to reharden at the touch of Billy’s lips.

He had never sucked another man as tenderly as this—or been sucked as lovingly or thoroughly himself. When it was evident Billy was ready to come again, strong hands raised his buttocks up, his cock slid deep into the throat of this dark-of-the-night lover, and he was drained dry of his cum.

“Are you overtaxed?” the man murmured when they were entwined side by side again.

“Never enough. You . . . you are so long,” Billy whispered back, although it was clear that he had no strength left.

The man gave a low laugh, “And you are able to sheath it all. I could fuck you forever.”

And forever seemed a possibility. The stranger, taller, larger, and stronger than Billy, moved to the edge of the berth and sat there, his feet on the ground. He reached around and gathered Billy to him and sat Billy, facing him, in his lap. Billy was fully pliant, letting the other man manipulate him at will. Billy’s legs were moved to where they ran up the man’s chest on either side of his head—a head and face that Billy still could not make out in the darkness.

The man was hard again, and pulled Billy’s channel onto his cock. Billy’s torso hung out over the decking beyond the edge of the berth and his arms and head dangled down in glorious exhaustion. The man was holding him out with broad, strong hands gripping the young man’s sides just below his pecs, with the man’s thumbs pressing into Billy’s nipples.

In long strokes, with the glans of the man’s penis almost reaching the surface and then, in a long slide, reaching as far up into Billy’s channel as it could, the man started to pull Billy’s body back and forth on his cock. Billy’s knuckles dragged along the deck. He turned his head to the side, encountered the man’s bare foot, and pulled the man’s big toe into his mouth. The man groaned and toe-fucked Billy’s mouth in the same rhythm he was using to fuck Billy’s channel with his cock.

Billy moaned and sighed, released the toe, and in a weak, fluttering voice, told the man how much he was enjoying the fuck, how arousing the length of him was. The rhythm picked up and Billy was being pumped faster and faster. His body flopped around as he was being taken more rapidly and with a frenzy that was making both him and his lover pant hard and groan and grunt with the exertion. With a weak cry of “Oh, Fuckkkk!” Billy ejaculated up the stranger’s flat stomach and he felt his insides, almost simultaneously, being flooded again.

He was pulled off the man’s cock and settled on the bed and turned toward the wall. He was so spent that he didn’t even hear the man leave.

The next morning his eyes went from man to man, trying to discern who had visited him in the night. But he was unable to do so.

The experience had been so much different from the rough and cruel fucking he had been receiving—and had sought out—in the previous weeks, and it left him confused and pensive. It didn’t seem less pleasurable than the full control and attack coupling he thought he had to have. His thoughts went back to the schoolmaster, Sam, and he thought perhaps he was beginning to understand what the man was saying about true lovemaking being an equal give and take.

It had not been that the previous night. But he was struck with the realization that, when he had awakened, his first thought was of wishing he’d had the opportunity to fuck the stranger as lovingly and completely as the stranger had fucked him. And the second realization that struck him was that he had not begged for punishment throughout the entire experience.

To collect and more deeply consider his thoughts on the matter, Billy volunteered to take to the crow’s nest during the afternoon to spy for the sails of the other ships. Late in the afternoon, he did see sails. And when he saw them, the other vessel was near enough to him to make it out even though those below him on deck couldn’t see anything.

“Ship Ho!” his voice rang out.

A chorus of “Where? Flag? Bearing?” rang out from below.

At that instant, though, he thought he recognized the ship. He believed it was the

Black Falcon

, the ship of his sexual master, Benjamin Palmer, Bloody Jack. The

Black Falcon

apparently had not seen them, though, as it was sailing a southwest course away from them.