Summer Deceptions

He deceived me.

Or did I deceive myself?

The late June wedding was being held on the Nags Head beach not more than six blocks down the Outer Banks from my East Driftwood Street cottage just south of Kitty Hawk. I wasn't at the wedding ceremony. I was home, where I was drinking beer, crushing cans, watching the clock, and seething. I was slouching in a broken Adirondack chair on my back patio, wearing just an electric blue Speedo, because I had originally intended to walk the two and a half blocks to the beach and swimming out as close to Bermuda as I could before I went under. But the day was so clear that I was afraid if I walked out on the beach from here I could see down to where the wedding was progressing on the beach opposite to the Jockey's Ridge State Park.

Frank was leering at me from next door. But I hadn't let Frank have me ever before and this wasn't going to be the day that I started doing that. I struggled out of the chair and padded around to the front of the cottage, finding myself looking at the Mustang and the Harley and wondering which one I should take, without giving any thought to why I thought I planned on going anywhere.

I certainly wasn't going to go to the wedding, which would be over now anyway. I wasn't invited. It would have been tacky to invite me, even though it was equally tacky not to do so to those who didn't know that I hadn't been invited—and why. I'll bet anyone else who had ever been in the band had been invited, and I was an original member—well, almost. I bet it would be mentioned in the press that I wasn't there.

Those not in the "know" probably thought I was on tour somewhere else. They'd be dancing on the beach and glugging champagne. A lot of money would have been spent on this wedding. I had been told the reception would be right there on the beach and a seaplane would land and fly the bride and groom off to a honeymoon in Havana. Key West would have been more appropriate, I thought—with me invited to meet them there.

The Harley, I thought. I would take the Harley.

I turned and went back into the cottage and pulled on a white shirt and black shorts. I added a black bow tie, and then I was ready to fit right in. I put those on right over the Speedo. Having thought "Harley," I decided on high-top boots. I didn't fool around on footwear when I was taking the motorcycle.

I motored the ten blocks south and three blocks over to the beach. I heard them before I saw them. I wondered how they managed to get by the noise abatement ordinances, and then I didn't. We made this town with loud music. They weren't going to deny anyone in the band on this point. We put this town back on the map.

The attire I'd chosen was a good call. I fit right in as a waiter. One of them even was wearing high-top boots. No one said a thing when I pulled a bucket full of ice with a champagne bottle in it off the top of a mobile beverage cart. I did get the attention of those nearby when I pulled the bottle out of the bucket and swung it against the side of the cart. It made a clunk sound, loud where I was standing but not reaching where the wedding party was doing some sort of chain dance around the beach. I had planned a louder noise and more attention arresting, but the sucker wouldn't shatter and it dropped to the sand intact. Tucking the bucket under my arm, I walked out through the wedding crowd, tracking down the Conga line.

Happily, the groom was leading the line. The bride was behind him. I walked to where the line would have to go through me to progress. It stopped, in a bit of confusion and varied expressions. Some recognized me; some didn't. A few snobs only saw a waiter. I'd have to say that the members of the band never turned into snobs, so those I wanted to recognize me did.

This included both the groom and the bride.

The groom took the full force of the ice when I swung the bucket at him. I held onto the bucket, of course. I didn't want to go to jail; I just wanted to make a point—a splash; an objection to deception.

"Mike?" Marilee blurted. "What the hell?"

It wasn't her fault.

I turned and walked straight back the way I'd come onto the beach. I climbed on the Harley and headed south on South Virginia Dare Trail, toward Hatteras Island. End of the world. A fitting place from which to start swimming to Bermuda. What beach, though? I wasn't in the mood for people—certainly not a beach with a lifeguard. Maybe the old Greenwood Lighthouse ruin. No one ever used that beach.

* * * *

I set my compass for the southern end of the outer banks and let the sound of the engine lull me into bringing it all back up for the fourteenth time today.

I hadn't always loved Bud Taylor. Like many of the local whites in Nags Head, I was leery of him. He was a big, smart-ass bruiser. He was black and had dreadlocks, and initially he was in my face, crowding me and intimidating me. It was only over time that we got to where we got and to where the bottom suddenly dropped out of any part of my life that didn't have Bud in it.

I was born and raised right here in Nags Head. My parents and I lived in the cottage I now live in on East Driftwood. They moved to Florida three years ago. I bought them a nice house down there and I stayed here, taking over our house. This was first base for the band in the early years, and the house was good enough for me anyway. I could have bought something big and fancy for myself three years ago as well as the house I bought for my parents, but I never was a big and fancy kind of guy. I went to First Flight High School just up the road from my house and across from the field where the Wright brothers tested the first airplane. I was good in music and drama and pretty piss poor in most everything else.

There's a summer-production outdoor play called

The Lost Colony

that's been given for the last eighty years over in Manteo, on Roanoke Island, just across the causeway from my place. This was where one of the earliest English settlements was in America but where, when the colonists' ships went to England for supplies and came back, they found the place deserted with few clues where the settlers went. There wasn't any evidence found that they died there, on the spot. The first English settler born in America, Virginia Dare, was born here—or so the area claims—but she too had vanished. I had acted in

The Lost Colony

as a summer job from the time I was a child. I still do, in adult roles. It's in my blood, and it helps keep me grounded here.

I'm twenty-six now, but I was eighteen, nearly nineteen, when I came out of high school in 2011 and needed a job. The play paid, but it was only a summer job and only paid for the summer. Now I am on staff part time—they wanted to use my name and credits—but I'm not taking pay now. It isn't money I need now. When I graduated high school, I knew music and I knew the technical side of putting productions on stage. I got a part time job at a honky-tonk over on the south end of Roanoke island in Wanchese, which is a center for ocean fishing. The place was—and is—called Harry's, and, yes, I knew it was a gay bar. Big burly fishermen came in there because it was a gay club—because they wanted to be comfortable with what they were and because they might score.

At first that didn't mean anything to me. I just kept the lights and sound for their stage in working order and helped set up and break down equipment for the bands that went through. I didn't shy away from working in a gay bar, though, because I guess I'd known for some time I leaned in that direction even if I hadn't done anything about it. And truth be known, I didn't mind being ogled by the burly fishermen.

I'd been getting hit on for a couple of years. I guess I was what was called a pretty boy. I was a bit undersized but athletic. I was in good shape. And I was what you'd call a looker, with blond hair and golden highlights and a face that got me noticed a lot. And I was in drama and music, so men I came into contact with made assumptions—and, sometimes, passes. I didn't respond for some time after going to work there. But I thought about my effect on the men who catcalled me, and I knew that someday I probably would respond.

I almost responded to one teacher at the high school, an English literature and art teacher, Russ Manly, who wasn't much older than his students were and who was a real stud, I thought. And he seemed to be interested in me—not just as a student but in more intimate ways—but he mysteriously disappeared from the school half way through the second semester of my senior year.

I almost responded to Mr. Manly, and I know he was sending signals, and eventually I did respond to someone, but it took a while—and it took persistence by Bud Taylor as well. By the time Bud came sniffing around, though, I'd worked at Harry's long enough to take the sexual innuendo and random feeling up and propositioning in stride.

Not all of the bands playing Harry's were floaters. The place developed a couple of house bands. One of those was named simply the Bob Hawley Band, which formed from talented locals around the lead singer with that name. It had a strange and intoxicating unique sound, adding a couple of fiddles to the usual country rock instruments for a "what was that?" effect. The band was a mix of white and black guys in their early and mid-twenties in 2011, although the black guys obviously were in charge, the decisionmakers. They were the dominant ones. They were the ones with the most talent too.

I started off working with them on sound and lighting and setting up and breaking down equipment. Sometimes I hummed along when they practiced, though. They noticed that I had a voice. And by the end of that first summer after high school, I was singing backup in their sets. They cut some demos and their unique sound slowly spread out across coastal North Carolina and then the mid-Atlantic states, and by 2014 we had gone national. The money came in then. I no longer was helping with sound and lights or setup or break down. I was

in

the band and I was lead singer on some of our award-winning singles. We were here, buzzing around Roanoke Island mostly and cutting our records here, but we also were doing a couple of national tours each year.

By 2014 I also was sleeping with and under Bud Taylor. Bud Taylor was fucking me.

Bud Taylor was a tall, wiry black man of twenty-five, six years older than I was, when we first met that summer of 2011. He was hard-bodied, an auto mechanic when he first joined the band. He had dreadlocks and a face that could most politely be called "interesting" and charismatic. He was about as black as black could be. That covered his looks other than what I later was to find out—that he was hung like a bull.

But there was another Bud Taylor inside him, a more artistic and sensitive man who kept that inside until it started coming out with the unfolding of fame. Even though he was an auto mechanic, he had gone to college and he had majored in English and was a poet. It just that in Nags Head at the time, blacks weren't expected to go to college, and, even if they did, they weren't expected to go higher than auto mechanic if they wanted to stay in Nags Head.

On top of being educated and a poet he played the meanest fiddle that ever was. He had a deep bass voice too and can be heard in the background of some of the band's recordings. He dressed elegantly and he moved like a dancer. When the band was on stage, eyes invariably went to him and watched him swaying in perfect rhythm to the music. Somehow they got the message that Bud Taylor was the music.

Bob Hawley was no dummy. The lead singer might be in the center under a spot, but Bud Taylor would have his own spotlight on him off to the side too. The audience standing just below the stage swayed with Bud. Bob Hawley wasn't a swayer.

The day Bud Taylor and I met—the day in June of 2011 I was called in to set the spots for a local band and help it get set up—Bud Taylor told me that he'd like to take me out to his truck when the band took a break and fuck me. He obviously thought that anyone working at Harry's was gay and could be had—and I apparently looked like a submissive to him. He obviously was also charismatic enough that he could get the tail he wanted to get. I'd thought of going with him by that point, but I had no idea he'd decided to fuck me.

He was more intrigued and determined, he told me later, when he finally had had me, when I told him I wasn't interested and hadn't gone with a man, than he was disappointed or angry I'd turned him down that first time. One of Bud's talents was to take everything with good humor. But he didn't stop trying. He didn't even let up trying, and Christmas of that year, he had worn me down and he popped my male cherry.

All through the summer and fall of 2011, Bud wore me down. He joked with me with suggestive terms and scenarios and touched me and found ways and times and places to be alone with me. He never was threatening about it. He was cultivating me, not trapping me. Invariably we asked me if I was ready to go with him, being "taken care of" by him. On Christmas Eve, I'd been worn down and charmed to the point where I was ready.

It helped that I was half drunk and we had been assigned to share a hotel room. The band was on the top of the world that night. We had played an opening band slot at a Christmas Eve concert in Atlanta. Immediately after the show we were notified that we were being signed with a Nashville record label. We gathered at the hotel bar to celebrate. Bud sat by me and was all touchy feely and ordering drinks for himself that he was passing to me to make sure I had plenty to drink. It was legal for me to drink in the hotel bar, but I hadn't done much of it yet in my life.

I can't remember getting from the hotel bar to our room, although Bud was there in the room. Even half looped, I accepted that he was there. It was as much his room as mine. There were two double beds in the room. I had some awareness that he was holding me and kissing me. He had maneuvered me into position before and gotten in a couple of kisses and a grope before I had escaped him. I wasn't alarmed that he was bare-chested. We were from the beach. We all went to the beach together. We usually practiced bare-chested. I didn't know how I got all naked, though, and was shocked that he had nothing on below—but that was because I'd seen his cock for the first time and was in shock that it was so black and big and in full erection.

He seduced me with pleasure. The pleasure of listening to his rich bass voice cajoling me. The pleasure of his kisses and of his hands on my body. The arousing pleasure of him turning my back to him, holding me in close, rubbing that massive cock of his on the small of my back and pushing it between my thighs, under my balls, rubbing over my puckering rim. The pleasure of him laying me on my back on the bed and grasping my ankles, pushing my knees up into my chest, rolling my pelvis up, taking my cock and balls in his mouth, and sucking, sucking, and sucking until I jerked and came with a little cry. And the pleasure of his mouth and tongue on my asshole, working me deep, working me open.

And then the pain. He knew I was a virgin. He knew he was a hung bull. He was half drunk too, and he'd worked at me so long that he was almost crazed with lust and arousal. He took time getting inside me only because I was so tight and unused. Granted, I'm sure he tried to talk me through it, telling me to relax and to breathe, giving me instruction on how to open to him, how to receive the huge, insistent shaft, but I was in panic and pain. My thinking was wild, the cock was massive, and the sensation of being invaded, filled, and stretch alien and threatening. I couldn't focus.

But we were both animals in heat, and he could be patient only for so long.

I do remember him muttering, "Fuck it," and then just taking me, letting loose and taking me hard and fast and deep, holding me close in his powerful arms and getting on with it and on with it and on with it until he got to getting it over with. He got it his huge dick in as fast as he physically could, regardless of my cries and groans and writhing under him and digging my nails into his shoulders. I was overpowered and nearly unconscious and exhausted when he was inside as deep as he could go.

"It's done. I'm in. Lay there and take it," he commanded. "You're spiked now."

I recognized he was right. I also was learning that I was a true submissive, subject to expressed control and command. I surrendered; he had mastered me. As he started to pump me, I lay there, open and vulnerable to him, giving neither help nor opposition as he fucked me to his ejaculation.

Our eyes made contact and I'm sure he could see the shock and helplessness in my expression. "Stay with me, baby," he murmured. "It will get better and better. We'll be so good with each other." I turned my face to the side and sobbed. He continued thrusting inside me. At least one of us was going to get his full measure of pleasure.

He didn't apologize in so many words afterward, but he held me more tenderly in his arms, kissed me, and stroked my body with his long, sensuous, brown fingers—the same fingers that pulled such divine music from his fiddle. That probably would mean nothing to guys who weren't musicians, but it was a special feeling to me for my body to be played by the same fingers Bud Taylor used to make magic on his fiddle.

"You gonna turn me down next time, Baby?" he asked. "We good with this now? If not, I won't touch you again."

"We're good with this now," I whimpered.

"If you're good with it, I'll be doin' you again tonight. I'll do you right this time."

"Yes," was all I could manage to say.

"Stay with me, Baby," he repeated. Apparently we had a different understanding of what that meant.

We slept on one bed, with him wrapped around me, as I sobbed lightly and moaned, unable to sleep, although he snored for a while. Before dawn, he woke and fucked me again from behind.

"We gonna do it again now, baby," he said. It wasn't a question.

"Yes," I answered.

He took it slower the second time and was more affectionate. It was enough better that I gave him what he wanted. This time I was calm enough to listen to his directions and to follow them. I made him moan this time too. It helped tremendously that we worked together this time. It also helped that I had already been reamed open to his needs. This time when he'd worked his way in most of the way, successfully guiding me through relaxing and willing myself open to him, breathing regularly, holding my buttocks and arching my back into a position that gave him a straight angle up into me, he held, throbbing inside me as I opened to him.

"Concentrate on your spreading open for me," he whispered. "Think of the wonder of the fusion of the two of us, two men becoming one, and of the coming dance of the fuck, doing what comes natural. Concentrate on bring out the pleasure and on the wonder of me moving inside you."

His poet had clicked in. The way he said it, as poetry, in that deep bass voice of me, made my groans fade into sighing and moans. "Do it. Do it. Fuck me," I whispered.

And he did it. He started to move inside me, slow, languid pressing in, withdrawing, pressing in.

"Feel it. Feel us become one. Go with the fuck," he murmured in my ear and kissed me there. His hands were gliding over my body, one of them reaching for, finding, and stroking my cock.

And then we were fucking in rhythm. It was still painful; this was only my second time and the first one had been torn out of me. But, as he gave patient instruction, I thought of the lovely, big black cock inside me, Bud taking his enjoyment from me, the awe of the big black bull needing to be inside me. He stroked faster, reached deeper, deep inside the soft core of me, the two of us rocking with each other, both concentrating on the working of the cock inside me, and, for the first time, I felt the muscles of my passage walls undulating over the stroking cock, making love to it as it made love to me deep—and then flooded me with the spouting of his warm cum. Once, twice, yet again. He hadn't worn a condom. All raw, natural, ultimately pleasure flowing in, even for me.