Yorkshire, England, Late Summer, 1890
I felt the sting on my thigh and looked up to see that William had ridden up beside me and struck at me with his riding crop. I turned and twisted in the saddle and when he struck me again it was on the chest. Laughing, I gave my own horse the lash and its head and we were riding over the pastureland of Falconcroft, the castle hovering on the rise above the rolling terrain, me slightly in the lead and William behind me.
I made for a stand of trees down by where the river laced through the Harkwoods' Yorkshire country estate and pulled up there, well inside the cover of the foliage. William rode up beside me, embraced me with one arm, his hand gripping the back of my neck and pulling me up from the saddle. He was florid, in heat. His face loomed in front of me, and he took my mouth in his in a brutal kiss. He bit me on the lip, raising a trickle of blood at the corner of my mouth. "Enough of the teasing," he commanded. Three times more the crop struck at my ass, pulled up from the saddle, as he forced his tongue inside my mouth again in a breathtaking kiss.
Pulling away from him, I was off again, across the fields, headed toward one of the remote horse barns on the property hidden in a fold of a gully below and just out of sight of the castle. William was in pursuit, but my horse was faster and I was younger and lighter. I got to the barn before he did and had time to dismount, pull the saddle off the horse, and release the horse into the enclosed pasture by the barn before turning and entering the dimly lit building. William must have done the same with his horse when he reached the barn, as when he entered, he was carrying the saddle from his horse.
I had used the time to pick out a spot, a hay bale back in the shadows—I agreed that the time for teasing was past and I welcomed what was to come—but William obviously had a contrary idea. He lifted and set his saddle on top of a five-foot slatted wooden partition between two horse stalls and then turned and advanced on me. He was between me and the door to the barn, but that didn't mean much to me. I wasn't planning on going anywhere. It would have been useless to struggle against him even if I intended to do so, which I didn't. He was taller and bulkier than I was—he had me by a good sixty pounds and fifteen years.
I did, teasingly, try a feint around him to the open barn door, but he caught me with a lash of his riding crop on my chest, and when I staggered, he grabbed and pulled me to him, taking me into another possessing kiss. I opened to him immediately, returning the kiss hungrily as he grabbed at my balls through the thin material of my riding breeches. I gasped as he squeezed them—squeeze and release, squeeze and release. He slapped me hard across the mouth, threw me to the ground, and struck at me twice more with the riding crop. There wasn't enough force behind the blows of the crop to be damaging. They were more a declaration of domination—an intent to take; an intent to take hard.
It was clear that my role in this was to be the whimpering, helpless submissive—not a role I usually played, but I was in high heat for the man. I wanted something different as a bottom than I wanted as a top. Few men aroused the need in me to bottom for another man. This man did.
Moaning, I attempted to curl up into a ball but he was leaning down, pulling me up, throwing me over his shoulder, and marching to the wall where he had hung his saddle. He easily lifted my body and set my belly down on the saddle, my torso draped over one side and my legs hanging down on the other. I didn't fight it. My role was to submit.
Somewhere he had come up with leather straps. He came around to the front of me, grabbed my wrists, one after the other, and tied them down on the wooden slats of the wall below me.
"Please don't," I murmured, with a whisper, knowing he wanted me to beg that much and knowing that he'd just laugh, which he did.
On the other side of the stall, he jerked off my boots and then my riding breeches and underdrawers. He tied off my ankles on that side of the wall as he'd done with my wrists on the other side. I, of course, lay there, limp, trembling for him, murmuring empty objections, but letting him have his way.
He hit me repeatedly on the bare buttocks with the riding crop, and I groaned and cried out with each sting of the lash, writhing as best as I could. Embarrassingly, though, I was crying
for
the lash as much as
against
it and begging him to fuck me. I subsided into moans and gasps as his mouth and fingers went to opening up and preparing my ass. I relaxed my anus and passage, as I well knew how to do, and opened quickly to him. I hoped it was enough, and it proved to be. He was vigorous but not oversized. I had taken champion cocks from bruising men.
Climbing the slatted partition with hands and feet on either side of my draped body, he set his feet in the opening in the slats near the top of the wall, worked his cock inside me as I both cried out at the violation and begged him to go deeper. Riding my ass high, like we were in a race for the gold, and he the jockey and me the thoroughbred, he rose and fell on my ass, lashing away at my rump and thighs with his riding crop, picking up speed, depth, and intensity. He was experienced. Size didn't prove to be an issue. He both knew to give the prostate extra attention and how to kiss all sides of the channel walls as he stroked in long, hard, cruel thrusts.
We both trumpeted our coming, he deep inside me and me against the saddle. I whimpered and sighed as he dismounted and kissed my blushing buttocks repeatedly and ran his fingers over the welts he had raised there. He then untied my wrists and ankles, said, "Cheerio. You're a jolly good lay. I enjoyed that. No more teasing now," and strode out of the barn.
I lay there, stretched over the saddle, for a few moments more, both moaning at and reveling in the forceful taking. I only rarely played the submissive, but this was well worth the ride. The American author and composer had seemed more diffident than this earlier, and I'd thought that my teasing would lead to me being dominant. But he proved to be a firecracker and to know just the right parameters of pain and pleasure that would excite me.
Groaning, I pulled myself down from the wall, gingerly pulling on my underdrawers, riding breeches, and boots after carefully running my hands over the welts that weren't too bad and probably would disappear before we all had to gather in the drawing room before supper. Still, there would be a memory of this afternoon in the sting I'd still feel in sitting at the dining table. When I got to the door of the barn, William Bowles was covering the distance between the barn and the main house of Falconcroft, a great pile of Gothic stone appended to a medieval castle keep, at the top of the rise. He was flicking his riding crop against his leg as he jauntily walked along. I moaned at the remembrance of the dominance and slight cruelty of the man I'd only known since the formal and tame luncheon on the lawn earlier in the day. I wondered how he knew I'd take and harden for the lash and lie under him.
* * * *
"I urge you to accept your uncle's invitation to be his secretary for the season in Tangier. I don't like what I hear coming from London these days." Lady Cybil, Lord Harkwood's sister and, not incidentally, my mother, had pulled me to the side of the drawing room during cocktails before dinner. She was looking very distraught, and I wanted nothing more than to assure her.
"He asked as soon as I arrived this morning," I answered. "And of course I said yes. It's very generous of him. The salary is more than satisfactory."
"Good. He's as steady as they come, is Sydney," she said. "He will be a good influence on you, and Tangier should be far enough from London."
For enough from London for what. But, ah, then the London gossip had reached out to Yorkshire, I thought. Who would have thought that such news would travel so far so fast. I'd only been with the group for a few months now. I could see why Mother was worried. I didn't want her to be. Life had been rough for her these last two years. Widowed—tragically—she now was living almost full time under her brother's wing here at Falconcroft. I had still been at Oxford when my father shot himself. It was publicized as a gun-cleaning accident, of course, but everyone knew better. He'd gone bankrupt, having put all of his money into trying to develop what they called a motor car, a somewhat noxious, in many regards, notion that had had no place in England at the close of the nineteenth century. Let the Americans drive down that rat hole, many here said, and I must say I agreed with them.
My relations with my father always had been strained. I worshipped him, of course. He was a handsome man, as all Wilsons were, and perfectly formed, and, I can openly think about it now, massively endowed—as all Wilsons undoubtedly were. But he was an angry man, fast to use the cane. Where many would remember moments of affection from their father, I remember moments of the cane. As I moved into puberty I, surprisingly, found that the cane made me go hard. But those were moments, at least when he paid attention to me. I confess that I sometimes committed sins just for the attention it got me from my father. When I got older and he was still using the cane, I realized that it made him hard too. In that regard, I felt I had a certain amount of control over his emotions.
When I was sent off to public school, I endured the cane rather less—in contrast to most of my fellow students—than I did at home. Perhaps the combination of the man I worshipped and his use of the cane was responsible for . . . but there was no need to dwell on that—especially there, in the drawing room, where I was grateful that men stood while women were permitted to sit. I had not completely recovered from a smarting ass, thanks to William Bowles, who was standing across the room and guffawing with my uncle.
"Perhaps when you're in Tangier you will catch your uncle's archaeology bug," my mother went on to say. "That's a noble pastime."
What she meant was that she didn't like what I was up to London, which it was obvious now that she'd had reports of. It wasn't just Oscar and Alfred and Robert, or Bosie and Robbie, as I knew the latter two as. It was the whole arts thing. Oscar—Oscar Wilde—of course was the anchor of our little group. Robbie and Bosie, Robert Ross and Lord Alfred Douglas, nearly the same age as I was, were the major spokes from Oscar's hub, even closer in with Oscar than I and a few others were. It was all quite tidy. I fucked Robbie and Bosie, and Oscar fucked us all. And he didn't just physically fuck us; he fucked us with his witty prose as he rode our asses.
Assuaged, Mother drifted away and Uncle Sydney, with William Bowles and a very pregnant, small, mousey-looking woman in tow, moved in my direction.
"There you are, Gregory," Lord Harkwood said as he approached. He was a very hardy soul, was my mother's brother. A good bit older than mother and the issue of a different wife, he was florid, large boned—ever moving toward, but not quite at, obesity. Even at something past fifty, his hair was flaming red and his manner was what could be termed an amused gruffness. In other words, the classical country squire. He spoke in louder decibels than anyone else in the room, probably the result of a refusal to wear a device that would enhance his faltering hearing. He wasn't a soft man, by any means. Although heavy, he was more muscle and gristle than fat, a man who obviously spent most of his time in the outdoors engaged in one blood sport or the other.
In contrast, the man he was shepherding over to me was the perfect university don type. He was even dressed the part, his dinner tux looking awkward on his body to the point of hiding how well I now knew his body was fashioned. The horn-rimmed glasses he wore and the diffident nature he was exuding emphasized the isolated scholar impression he made.
"I wish you to meet William Bowles, the novelist and composer. He's from America, but he married locally. This is my nephew, Gregory Wilson," Lord Harkwood said as he pulled Bowles toward me with a beefy hand on his forearm.
