The Second Oldest Profession
Paul Dyer
© 2011 by Paul Dyer
Smashwords Edition
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I
I’m not saying older guys can’t be pretty, but WhiteStallion10 wasn’t. He was sort of tough-looking, with a narrow face, flat cheeks; a lean, strong jaw; a wide, red mouth with a slightly crooked upperlip that seemed inclined to sneer; and sandyblond hair, cut military short with a pronounced widow’s peak. His cobaltblue eyes were intense and vibrant. In some of his profile pictures, they seemed almost cruel. Close-set above a long, narrow, slightly hooked nose, they reinforced the overall impression of his supreme contempt for the whole Abercrombie-and-Fitch Syndrome, for prettyboys in general.
At a mere thirtyeight, he was younger than Chief Pierce, but I was too smitten with him to care. Still, he was twenty years older than I, and he himself deemed the age gap sufficiently exciting. A person younger than I could not’ve been on that site—though the age of consent in New Jersey is a simple, unequivocal sixteen—but I guess he wanted to make sure our relationship, should we have one, was pornographically viable.
He stood six-two and weighed onehundred-and-ninetytwo pounds of lean, lithe, deftly chiseled muscle—at least in his arms and throughout his torso, which is all he displayed of himself on the site. His skin had that pale Nordic complexion that is almost colorless in Winter, especially in, let’s say, Norway, Yorkshire, or Siberia, but which had darkened—solely by work-related exposure to sunlight, since he wasn’t one of those faggy blokes who used a sunbed—to a kind of apricot pink.
To add some color, he had tattoos—their dispersal completely contemptuous of the wonderful natural symmetry that prevailed throughout his tight, hard physique. The word STABLE was positioned vertically on his abdomen, in an Old English font, in the customary viridian ink, but cleverly split up: its first two letters above his navel, the remaining four beneath it, so that, through the lightbrown fuzz around his navel and the dusty line of his treasure-trail, he boldly suggested he was a saint of formidable masculine ability, while the whole word led your eye to a place of great phallic weight and eptitude just below. He claimed to have a ten-inch cock, uncut, and the very notion that a body that hard and sculpted and a face that rugged and unpretty would drive this formidable flesh-missile into your ass constituted its own thrill.
He had other tattoos, too, but not too heavily inked: a wolf in Prussian Blue on his left deltoid and a sultry female vampire in scarlet and black on his right; and, around his right nipple, his constellation of Sagittarius in a pattern of blue stars linked by black lines. Most people figured out it was probably his zodiac sign without being able to identify which one on sight.
Much to my mother’s horror—I actually shared this fact with her over dinner, one evening—I liked men who, if they had any complexities at all—poetic or otherwise—at least didn’t air or share them; men who had an inflexible sense of what they wanted, sexually or socially, went after it, and either received it as their due from willing lovers, or pried it out of those who got off on a little coercion.
WhiteStallion10’s profile stated his wants clearly and unapologetically. He liked guys who were the opposite of him: since he was White, he generally liked swarthy guys, but had a marked preference for Black guys in particular; he was tall, athletic, and muscular, so he was looking for guys who were short and slightly chubby; he was really masculine, so he was looking for fem guys; he was in his late thirties, so he was looking for guys in the eighteen-to-twentyone range; he was a daddy, despite his being a little young for the designation, so he was looking for a boy; he was really dominant, sexually, so he was looking for boys who were not only submissive by nature but who really got off on being dominated.
Dark chocolate skin, chubby, short—I checked off on all counts—though the fem and the submissive parts were works in progress and owed their tentativeness not to any innate recoil on my part—far from it—but to my youthful inexperience.
I had learned about this site through Chief Samson Pierce, who had an account there as FirePlugger. It was a hook-up site in general, not a daddy-boy one in particular, but, like I said, it worked best for people who pretty much knew what they wanted going in.
WhiteStallion10 made contact first. With a handle like MammyBoy, I’d instantly caught his attention. I hadn’t had the guts to post any pictures of myself, but I answered the profile questions as to age, build, preferences, and so on with ferocious accuracy, either because I wasn’t yet wise enough to dissemble or because Chief Pierce had once told me that directness and honesty were among my most endearing temperamental qualities. WhiteStallion10 asked me to check out his profile and pictures and bounce him a message back if I liked what I saw. He also wanted to know why there were no pictures. I told him I was shy but that I bounced very nicely, thank you.
I like shy guys he responded. The bouncing joke had me smiling and stroking. I’m anything but shy. Don’t have anything to be shy of. But I like shy guys, because they’re usually good at pleasing a master. I need to see a picture, soon. I’m choosing to believe you’re adorable. Why that handle?
Because it suits my love handles I answered, a little worried that another cute comeback may turn him off.
The next morning brought his return serve Love to sink my fingers into soft flesh while I ram arse.
If I hadn’t made the transition ere now I was finally in love with WhiteStallion10.
II
Career day had come and gone, at my highschool, in a great whirlwind of commerce, art, and technology. I sat it out, watching the other kids dream big. It was hard explaining to teachers and counselors—and my mother—that the only career I wanted was either not on the map, or had been there for so long it didn’t require peptalks from its most accomplished and intrepid representatives.
My mother was a successful lawyer with a practice in both Lesterville and Atlantic City. We were extremely well off. I’d never had to work a day in my eighteen years. Naturally, she wanted me to do something with my life—mothers generally want this for their kids, I’m told—but every suggestion she deployed against my apathy met with a trite but effective counterstrike.
“You’re eighteen years old, Dane,” she reminded me, as if this were some kind of curse. “Have you given any thought to your future?”
“I want to be a housewife.”
My mother, Molly, gave a short derisive laugh, as if only half convinced I was being ironic. As a single Black mother, who’d started out on a farm in Augusta; legally distanced herself from a loutish, abusive man, my sire; worked in diners, sung in gentleman’s lounges, and put herself through law school, she was in no position to have her only child tell her he basically wanted to be Mammy. I’m a little taller than Hattie, and less spherical—in several places—without being remotely svelte. I don’t want to end up on Tom & Jerry or sleep with Tallulah Bankhead. And I’m sure I lack a good deal of Hattie’s trademark sass.
My mom uncoiled herself from the hanging chair in the smaller and cozier of our two dens, where she usually liked to unwind, swinging in its snugly-cushioned theatrical egg and reading some romance novel or mystery on her Nook.
“You’re serious?”
I examined the hardwood.
“Dane?”
I flicked her a glance. She flicked one back—vaguely accusatory. She began pacing, one hand backward on her hip, which was how she did it in court, the other hand usually tapping her monogrammed silver pen against her chin—a gesture that was, reputedly, the terror of prosecution attorneys all over the Tri-States. Missing its favorite prop, her other hand now merely fondled her ear, as if its lobe held a private stash of persuasive rebuttals she could milk for extemporaneous inspiration.
Though she had remarkable fortifying powers, Margaret Beatrice Deenam—sometimes known as the fortysecond element—was not a leaden woman. I’d always known her to be more Athena than Aphrodite, but she had one nerve that had never healed and was always primed for an easy hit: the one relating to Negro clichés.
“What brought this on?”
“It’s been stewing for a long time.”
“So when did you buy the pot?”
“Sometime in Junior High. In the caf. During lunch. At least the dealer was Black.”
“Excuse me?”
Since she was an intelligent woman, with excellent hearing, I didn’t reheat the irony.
“Do you have any idea,” dramatic pause, “of the kind of hell your ancestors went through?”
“Only in February.”
“This isn’t a game, Dane.”
“Just a crossword puzzle.”
“I learned early—”
“Allright, now, Joan.”
“If you think you can spend the next four years sitting on your fat Black ass, instead of going to college—”
“Glad you brought up the derry. That’s just the kind of thing some men are willing to pay for. In fact, I did find a situation right here in town. A nice Caucasian man.”
“In The Cedars?”
“No,” a roll of eyes, a dismissive wave. “Close to the river, but safely within the bounds of propriety.” This was a bluff. I didn’t have his address yet.
“It’s all in the details, they tell me. And how did you find this—uh—situation?”
“The same way all kids lose their souls, mom. On the internet.”
“I was too liberal with you.”
“And my fat Black ass is grateful for that.”
“You expect me to be okay with the fact that my baby’s going to be a maid for some White man? You could be in Harvard or Rutgers this fall.”
“You followed your dream. Why can’t I follow mine?”
“Dreams are supposed to propel us upwards,” her hand corkscrewed through the air with such dramaturgic aplomb I expected it to divorce her wrist and fly out the window like a chocolate dove, “not,” having evidently resisted these avian ambitions, it paused midflight, fingers fanned and harping the air, then plummeted, “drag us down into the muck.” Her proudly lifted head jerked back, perhaps to reinforce the generally ascendant nature of dreams.
I looked around the rattan couch, the Moroccan rug, lifted and examined the soles of my shoes, “Muck? What muck? Have you been bringing your work home again?”
Molly took a deep breath. Her mighty bosom heaved high then settled slowly into place under her Ann Klein blouse, above her slinky waist. Down she went on the couch, “Baby, you can’t be a maid. You just can’t.”
There was real panic there, but I didn’t want to see it.
“Just for the summer. I promise I’ll do Rutgers in the fall. Or Laagerfeldt.”
I crossed my legs—which, given the ambient pudge, was always a challenge—and stared out the window, down the sloping lawn to the silver rivulet marking our property’s northern edge. A floating mallard left a glittering orange wake in the evening sun.
The fortysecond element probably didn’t know I had a thing for older guys. In addition to her wanting me to forge some kind of future for myself, she wanted me to have a decent steady boyfriend, preferably of highschool age, though a college guy—a college student—would not’ve raised any hairs on her neck.
Happily-married fortysix-year-old Fire Chief Samson Pierce would not only have raised those finely-calibrated hairs, the raised hairs would’ve mated and generated more raiseworthy ones in preparation for future amatory crises in my life.
As you may’ve guessed, Chief Pierce and I had a thing going; nothing major, no penetration as yet, but we were certainly headed in that direction, he being indomitably fascinated with my sexually-submissive nature, but there was a wife to consider. True, I’m a more traditional gayman, the kind with a very low tolerance for any kind of sexual morality, but he was an excellent fire chief and I didn’t want to wreck his career. Wasn’t it bad enough that Lesterville had a gay mayor? It seemed wasteful somehow, for me to trifle with the careers of men, especially since I had no desire to cultivate one myself. A career, that is—not a man.
“May I ask the name of your employer?”
“No.” I still couldn’t face her. The mallard gliding along in his ducky world was a less stressful visual. “You’ll check him out.”
“If you met him on the net, I need to. Back in your grandmother’s day, a maid placed herself on the books of a reputable agency before accepting an appointment.”
“Oooo. How thrilling.”
“Have you interviewed yet?”
I shook my head, “Only via email.”
“It sounds sleazy. I can’t let you do this.”
“Find me a reputable agency that handles this kinda thing.”
“I’m not sure I know what this kinda thing is.”
“Let’s keep it that way.”
“What if he’s a serial killer?”
“In Lesterville? Seriously?”
“You’re being naïve.”
“Probably because of my liberal upbringing.”
“Why couldn’t I have been one of those lucky parents with a child who wants to grow up to prosecute criminals,” eyebrows raised, “not date them?”
“What’s more shocking, mom? That I want to date a man who’s into role-playing, or that he’s a poor man who’s into role-playing?”
“That he’s poor, of course. But that’s hardly the point.”
III
His real name was Nigel Greenwood. He was from London, had come here fifteen years ago to be an actor, failed at being an actor, married an American girl—for love, not a greencard—and finally become a permanent resident. The girl he’d married—a mulatto, incidentally—had found him a little chauvinistic for her tastes, but had managed to push the marriage along, entirely—to hear him tell it—because of his massive cock, which she couldn’t get enough of. But, in the end, his reductivist approach to her femininity overcame her sexual addiction and they parted amicably. His wife had been a social worker with a master’s in sociology and he was a construction worker. It played better in romance novels. He still worked construction, and I wondered, during our first meeting, if he was telling me these things to indicate he wasn’t in for another daily grind of baulked expectations with a brainy chick.
Like I said, I’m not exactly the slimmest pencil in the box, so I prefer looser clothes in darker colors. Since the fortysecond element does extremely well for herself, I’ve always had the benefit of the top designers. I wore my hair relaxed rather than straightened, slightly lower than shoulder-length. When I visited Nigel the first time, I wanted to dress pretty, so I wore a loose, tan Perry Ellis shirt, almost a long blouse, its cuffs rolled up twice, with a lace-fringed woman’s tanktop peeking out above the shirt’s naughtily undone first button; a pair of baggy, black-linen Ralph Lauren slacks, its waistline hidden away under the flow of my shirt; men’s slip-on leather shoes by Prada; a white-gold slave bracelet with a tiny orange sapphire set into a star at the midpoint of the chain, and a matching, slightly larger stone set into the simple ring, which I wore on my forefinger; and a generous splash of Euphoria by Calvin Klein.
I already knew he was blue-collar and probably wouldn’t appreciate these refinements, but I didn’t count on his living across the river, in Stevenson, in the kind of hood the fortysecond element would’ve forbidden me from driving within five blocks of. My shiny new teal-blue Prius instantly seemed out of place. The exterior of his small two-storey house looked as if it hadn’t been painted since the Reagan years. Slats of wood were missing from the porch roof. The lawn looked as if it hadn’t been mowed since late last winter—it was now July—and doctors and caregivers would’ve forbidden anyone over seventy from negotiating the flagstone path leading from the sidewalk to the front door.
I have to confess my longing to meet him, my wondering how far we’d go, even on that first meeting, blinded me to the possible dangers that would’ve been obvious to a more experienced person. I should’ve met him in a neutral setting, but when he suggested I meet him at his house—more than suggested, simply instructed me to meet there—I didn’t feel it was a sub’s place to tell her dom where their first meeting should take place.
He was cool without being cold. He offered me wine and found a way to indicate that I would be the one fetching the drinks around here, if things worked out. He let his eyes move appreciatively over me, and the first thing he said to me, after he greeted me and welcomed me to his house was, “You look lovely.”
So did he, in his blue, plaid, cotton shirt with its sleeves torn off, exposing his long, muscular, nicely-veined arms, with an ethereal spray of golden hair shimmering over the thick rippling sinews of his forearms; the front of his shirt open enough to display his chiseled, tattooed chest with its faint fuzz of dirtyblond hair. His tight, liberally faded jeans clung to his lean, muscular legs and profiled his hulking package. Heavy, steeltoed construction boots furnished a fitting and stimulating conclusion to his outfit. He was less pretty in person, but he was raw sex walking, and noone even vaguely attracted to men would’ve turned away from him because he didn’t quite have the face of a model. Another force that radiated from him in unbridled waves was that of his deep, earthshaking masculinity. It charged the air around him and made it spark.
Fifteen years in America hadn’t eroded his accent. He sounded as if he’d stepped off the plane from London yesterday. Like a few other Englishmen I’d met, from more than one social class, he could be completely studly and completely charming at the same time, as if he could move from mucking it up on the football field—what we call soccer—one moment, to escorting an English—or Arab—heiress to lunch the next. He could do suit-and-tie, his casual attire seemed to suggest, but he was sure a fem sub like me wanted to see her man in his most relaxed state, this side of boxers and a three-day shadow.
The interior of the house was clean, but even the superficial tidiness seemed to’ve been achieved by his shunting things out of sight rather than his putting them in their proper places, or even developing such places for items that had been lying around homeless for months or even years. He definitely needed a woman to take care of him.
Despite his rough outfit, he had scrubbed himself down. His meager, darkblond, military-style hair smelled freshly-shampooed; his body smelled of soap; and he had applied tasteful amounts of both deodorant and Old Spice. Not exactly Hugo Boss or Lacoste, but if that’s what I wanted, I knew exactly where to find it. I relaxed into his homely smells and quiet hospitality. My pud was hard, and that was a good sign. He had turned me on before I’d even met him, and he’d only confirmed his command of my hopes and fantasies the moment he’d opened the door.
He placed my white wine in front of me, in an actual wine glass, and uncapped himself a Heineken.
“Cheers,” he said, letting his eyes wander over my body again. “You really do look great. I know that’s the sort of thing a guy’s expected to say, but I mean it. I don’t lie to my girls.”
It was wonderful how comfortable that designation made me feel. I experienced no need to correct him. He didn’t make the term sound as if it denoted weakness, stupidity, subordinacy. In fact, it sounded absurdly romantic, in a commonplace domestic way that required no assistance from cruises and twilight cocktails on the beach.
His skintone seemed even more pale and pink than it did in his photos. Much as these intoxicating images had already flooded and continued to flood my mind, I couldn’t now imagine his working under the sun for more than half an hour without burning, but I knew it was rude to ask caukies questions about their lack of coloring.
“I thought we should meet,” he said, “to see if we were each what the other wanted. So I’m going to suggest something controversial. You’re exactly as I imagined you’d be, much hotter, actually,” he scissored his legs, almost unconsciously. “Everything about you’s just the way I like it.” He leaned forward, rested his elbows on his knees and fixed me with a searching look. Those vibrant, cobaltblue eyes intoxicated me. He made me feel more demure than he probably needed me to be. The notion that I was a sort of mail-order bride under review excited me. It’s all about freedom, isn’t it? Right and wrong depends entirely on whether someone is submitting freely to an act or is being coerced. All our laws and values honor this fundamental concept of free will and yet people surrender their freedom every day—to religion, peer pressure, faddishness, technology, and social habit. “I want to fuck you right now,” he said, “but I’ll only do it if I’m something of a disappointment to you. If you like what you see as much as I like what I see, let’s talk some more, and postpone anything sexual till a later date.”
It was certainly an odd suggestion, as if mediocre sexual arousal deserved to be summarily dispatched with a quickie; sent to bed without lingering dessert, and a splash of espresso, for failing to honor the nutritional rigors of a well-balanced seduction. Aside from the archaic roles of male and female he wanted to see honored in his house, his sexual morés, if the notions that had characterized his last offer were pervasive enough to classify as such, seemed almost quaint. He was measuring the quality of our future in degrees of sexual arousal, baffling the facile distinction between permissiveness and restraint. He wanted me to be a lady, to see if I could respond like one and refuse his quick-flaring scent its instant, masculine kill.
“What do you say?”
“I think we should wait. I would certainly like to.”
He knew I was blushing, despite the darkness of my skin, which, in itself, was clearly something that appealed to him and ranked high on his list of sexual preferences.
He leaned back in his chair. Mounded prominently between his lean, powerful legs, his package seemed even bigger than before, if that was possible. His crooked smile—which could be both museful and leering, ruminant and sexy—was frankly appreciative, satisfied.
We spent the rest of the evening asking each other pointed questions, exploring likes and dislikes, of which, on the surface, we seemed to have little in common. He stressed that some relationships succeeded because the partners completed one another and others because they complemented one another; he suggested that ours would at least begin as the former, until he learned to like a few arias and Russian string quartets and I learned to appreciate soccer—for the skill of the game not the legs of the players—dirt-bike racing, and boxing. He found my ladylike aversion to boxing exciting and offered to take it off the list. He said he had both boxed and played soccer like a fiend in London.
He came over, crouched near my chair, and tilted his head to the light to show me an old boxing scar along his left jaw. He lifted my hand and, with my fingers, traced the white line of puckered skin and hieroglyphic stitches. I was trembling. He replaced my hand carefully in my lap, as if he were folding up a priceless napkin after a light but eminently satisfying meal. His palms were rough; from both work and working out, I surmised. He ran a hand over the thick feline muscles of his thighs as they formed long prominent arches between his narrow hips and his knees, through the slick denim of his jeans, telling me he owed all of that quadricipital heft to his early obsession with soccer.
“I guess it could’ve been ballet, too,” he stood up, so he was standing over me, hands on his hips, his crotch projecting outward like a sudden bulge of rock under which I wanted to shelter my aimless, young life. “Would you’ve liked that better?”
I laughed. He stroked my face and pinched my cheek, “I love the way your laugh lights you up.”
“Does it light you up, too?”
“O, yeah. All of you lights me up. Would you like another glass of wine?”
“No,” I said; though I would’ve relished a let-up in the sexual tension that was hampering the good impression I’d intended to make as both a well-bred, well-read boy and a decorous, house-proud girl who would wash and cook for her man. “I have to drive home.”
He moved away, his trim muscular ass and solid, shapely calves filling out his jeans just as persuasively as his package and thighs did.
How long did he want us to wait? Did he mean he was going to train me to be his wife, while numerous others, in the interim, would continue to be his whores? How could such a stud keep his hands off me for even a day, let alone for the weeks of molding I envisioned?
“Would you like me to follow you to your house, to make sure you arrive safe?”
“I’d like that,” I said, while the revelatory expression on my face—and the answering one on his—told us both I was drawn to the prospect’s romantic rather than pragmatic properties.
He lifted and finished his beer and remained standing, the bottle in his hand. I more or less bathed in the sight of those brush-like thickets of straight, sandyblond hair thrusting out of his muscular armpits. I imagined the flavors they must retain after a day of his working construction, while my cock had definitely begun leaking precum.
I didn’t want him to see where I lived, because he’d probably assumed I was just your average middleclass kid from Lesterville, and his discovering I lived in The Cedars may’ve put a kibosh on the whole deal.
“I live pretty far,” I said.
“New York?”
I laughed again, a little giddy from him and the wine.
“Wait a sec,” he said. “Let me get another beer. I’m not used to keeping my hands off beautiful, plump tarts for more than fifteen minutes.”
I was below the legal age for alcohol. I could drive, vote, and consent to sex; I just couldn’t contaminate any of those delightful options with alcohol until I’d acquired enough cynicism, presumably through a breakdown in the wild adolescent dreams that routinely invest our sacred birthrights with a glow of freedom and romance. By twentyone, I would be cynical enough to drink, not so I could enjoy life more, but so I could hurt less.
Perhaps it was because he was thirtyeight, and few things fazed or frightened him anymore, if they ever had, more than fleetingly—because men as naturally self-confident, dominant, and masculine as he went forth to encounter the world as if it were a tumultuous sea to be tamed and sailed, regardless of whether or not society or individual circumstances had any exotic islands or piratical hauls left to offer them—but he wasn’t awkward or defensive, insecure in front of a stranger, and this only helped me relax much more easily. Then again, as an Englishman, he probably had a far older soul than mine, while I was the novice, on several levels, who still had a lot to prove. In creating an empire on which the sun had presumably never set, the English—that greatest of all maritime peoples in the modern world—had engendered the twilight of all imperialism. And here I sat, a rich American boy, in the low-income house of a vigorously but quietly virile English stud, on my own soil, offering him virgin land he could colonize, master, and command.
He came back with his beer, asking if I’d given any thought to dinner, before setting out, and if I minded if we ordered a pizza. Eventhough I was sure he would take me to the local pub without blushing, deploy his bruiser’s pinktoned white fists to defend his choice and my honor against any smalltown bigots—there were still, surely, one or two left, despite the historic efforts of Rosie, Ellen, and Will & Grace—I could tell he wanted us to confab without tackling the social verdict.
“Hawaiian,” I said.
Standing with his legs squared, quaffing his beer, “Faggot,” he said, flexing his knees, and giving me a crooked, lusty, strangely indulgent halfsmile.
“And what,” I femmed it up a tad, “would a real man order, Mr Greenwood?”
“Sausage and mushroom,” the halfsmile became a drippingly-seductive leer, as he flexed his knees again, then gave a deep, throaty chuckle, and broke his commanding stance, to bend his head in almost bashful laughter. “You better learn these things, if you’re going to be a good housegirl.”
“Are you looking for a maid?”
“I was.” He put his beer down and resumed his seat, sitting on the edge of it. “Then you walked in here, all luscious and womanly, and I never for a moment thought wit could come with a package like that, and suddenly I’m looking for someone who can cook, and clean, and explain Shakespeare to me, and drain my big, low-hanging bollocks every night and three times a day on weekends. Hey,” he said into his cell, “I’d like to order a large pizza. 1404 Birkelund Lane. Yeah, this is Nigel. How’s it going, mate?” Mounded up bigger like that, as he held his cell, his left biceps made its big, tubular vein pump up bigger and bluer against his pale, babypink skin. A faint velvety haze of tiny, silverblond hairs shimmered along its potent, elastic surface and vanished into its shadow against the lean muscle undulating over the outside of his upperarm, under the tattoo of the dark blue wolf.
As my eyes flickered away from his ink-embellished male loveliness, he captured my wandering gaze, perhaps ignorant of where it had been resting, in reverent rapture, only moments before, and said into the phone, “Yes, mate, I’m still here. Hawaiian. Buffalo wings. Twelve pieces. I’m sure I can put them away, even if my girl won’t touch em,” this entirely for my benefit, because why would the guy at the pizza place care? “Thanks, mate.” He clicked his cheap cellphone off, and reclined again, spreading his knees wide, mutely challenging me to have a seat—where he probably sensed I most wanted to—and surf the deeply-cresting denim wave of his package, “It’ll be here in twenty minutes. Is that okay, or will it take you past your bedtime?”
Questions, words, and phrases that may’ve acquired a pejorative or downright offensive character spoken by someone else, regardless of the person’s accent or national origin, emerged in his deep, husky voice as playful and always indulgent.
I reminded myself that his reasonable, intelligent wife had left him—he never tried to repress or sugarcoat his history in his emails—because he was a lout and a boor, who expected her to clean up after him, cater his soccer games and poker nights, and give him head in the kitchen everytime he asked. Well, I’m exaggerating and embellishing a little, but I’m not blind to the source and general character of her eventual disaffection. Of course, she probably wanted kids, and she finally had to accept, as many women who’ve fallen for sexually appealing, emotionally-immature men have often had to, that she could never bring a child into a home where the father, however studly, was still a boy. Maternal expectations, after initially breasting the matrimonial surge with bravery and resilience, often ran aground on the secret, self-absorbed complexity of the eternal stud. Fortunately for him, Nigel was bisexual enough to find his satisfactions with the likes of me. It’s cruel and unusual, the level of maturity women keep demanding from straight men, who have no alternative to this empyrean standard but to remain single; hire a maid, if they can afford one; and either play the singles scene or make do with hookers. Once upon a time men remained boys all through their conquests of the world, their hunting parties, clubs, mistresses, poetry, science, and wars; and the only reason contemporary women demand that men leave their boyhood behind is because women want to make sure they remain the center of a man’s attention. Fidelity is often lionized as a mark of maturity, but it is also fodder for female vanity. How can I tell him that’s not the sort of woman I aspire to be for him? Do the undeniably rapturous transits of my gaze across the muscular landscape of his ultra-masculine body render such assurances superfluous?
“What was that about explaining Shakespeare to you?”
“Do you read Shakespeare?”
“I adore Shakespeare,” I confessed. “I’ve read all his plays and most of his poetry.”
He shook his head, smiling, “I know he’s a major British export, but I never did get what the whole song-and-dance was about. Sure you don’t want to spread your legs right now?” He grabbed and squeezed his crotch for the first time.
“I’m prepared,” with a kind of aristocratic delicacy other Black people may consider White, “to wait.”
“God, you’re hot,” with a crooked, blatantly lascivious grin—and no vulgar gestures.
When, despite an undeniably pretty face, you were persecuted for your pudge through all of elementary and most of highschool, an ejaculation like that—albeit a verbal one—from a body like his can do wonders for a girl’s ego.
I had no doubt that many of his dates, at least from that website on which we met, would’ve been slobbering all over him my now. I was equally certain I was not the only one he’d favored with the romantic approach. But I couldn’t figure out what exactly, beyond the simple dichotomy inherent in his opening gambit, fueled and sustained his choices.
“Okay, fine,” he said, “you don’t know whether I’m a chubby-chaser, a jiggle-jockey, or whatever other colorful terms you American fags have come up with to objectify one another, but you don’t have to pretend you’re the norm with me. Just be yourself. I love a girl who’s just naturally beautiful, like you, and can be herself. Now, if you’re going to be self-conscious, that ruins it. I’m not reprimanding you, Dane. Be as self-conscious as you want, if you really want to. But not on my account and certainly not because that’s what you think society expects of a fat girl. Fuck society. Inside this house, we’re going to make our own society, and that’s what you have to be comfortable with.”
Elation surged inside me, making me talkative, “Don’t you want to know anything about me, aside from what you can see?”
“Sure,” he gestured. “You want to go to college in the fall?”
“Maybe. If I can work it into my other interests.”
“I thought all other interests had to be worked around college.”
“For some people. Did you go to college?”
He shook his head, that crooked, lazy grin never far from his lips, “Barely passed my O-Levels.”
“What’s an O-Level?”
“An inane school-leaving exam in Britain.”
“Here we just graduate. It’s so simple.”
“Simple people, you Americans.”
“Do you hate us?”
“Yeah. That’s why I left London, the center of the world, to live in this American town.”
“I live in The Cedars,” it just slipped out.
“So,” without missing a beat, “you’re a rich boy?”
I nodded and bowed my head, as if my being rich were far more shameful than my skipping college altogether so I could keep house for him.
“Don’t worry,” he said, tapping his boots on the hardwood floor. “I’ve been known to fuck rich people. Till they were ready to leave me all their money and go begging in the street.”
He did follow me home. It wasn’t late, and I think the fortysecond element did tweak aside a curtain and survey my evening’s end. But a fortuitous sycamore gave me and Nigel privacy.
“You do know,” he said, leaning against his care-worn and rather grubby Honda Civic, “what I’m looking for’s a live-in deal?”
I nodded and looked down.
He lifted my chin with a finger, so I was looking into those piercing cobaltblue eyes at unnervingly close range, “You think you can leave this place?”
I was so horny, I would’ve promised to live on the street with him, if it came to that, but the words that sound great in our heads often lose their heroic reverberations when they hit the outside air.
Suddenly, he leaned in and kissed me softly on the mouth, and said in a low, over-sexualized growl, “I want you in my house and in my bed, Dane. Make no mistake about that. But we have to find a way to make that work for both of us. I have some kid flying in from Indiana tomorrow. He says he’d travel thousands of miles to have someone plow his butt with a big, uncut cock and talk dirty to him in an English accent. He’s a dark-skinned Brazilian. We’ve had cam-sex twice, already. He has a real hairy arse. I can go for that, too.”
Exiling the irrational hurt and despair from my tone, I asked, “What do you really want?”
He shrugged, “I don’t know, exactly. If you can’t handle the uncertainty—”
“No,” I gripped his forearm. Its thick, long muscles undulated in my tentative grip, its fine golden hairs shimmering in the muted yellow lights of our lawn.
“Suit yourself,” he said. “But I’m trying hard not to be selfish here.”
“What do you mean?”
“If it were upto me, you’d be naked in an apron right now, doing my dishes, trying not to drop and break anything, while I fingered your plump Black pussy, getting my girl all worked up for one of the most amazing butt-slammings she’s ever had.”
IV
We met, four days and numerous emails later, at the Lesterville Galleria on Trenton, the largest mall in town; though Lesterville, especially if you included the unincorporated gated community of The Cedars, was really more of a small city.
I dressed more butch, but I carried a large red canvas shoulder bag no boy who valued his masculinity in the public eye would ever be caught dead with. Nigel’s jeans were baggier; those scarred, heavy, shit-kicking workboots of his were every bit as clunky and thrilling; his tanktop molded itself to his torso like the wings of angels around the throne of God.
Lesterville’s a pretty liberal town, so people didn’t give us looks, when he hugged me, almost crushing me with all his lean, powerful muscle, and gave me a peck on the lips.
We took a seat on the main level, on a red pleather bench between two trees, each in a beautifully-carved, terracotta Tuscan planter.
“So why’re we here?”
“For the second phase, Dane.”
“How was the Brazilian?”
“I fucked him like it was my last go at an arse as a single man, before I allowed you to ruin my life.”
“Should I be flattered?”
“Very. Since Tilda, I’ve been an insatiable socket-junkie.”
“Is that a Britishism?”
“No. A Nigelism. It covers all orifices.”
“Human and animal?”
“Plant and mineral. And let’s not forget transsexual. Now here’s the deal. I’ve done this a few times before, with girls of all genders. You go and buy me a pair of underwear you think best suits my personality. And I go buy you a pair of underwear I think best suits yours. Consider all factors. Fabric, design, color. I usually chose this mall, because it has no kinky or gag underwear stores. This is serious stuff. Then we wrap these gifts in plain brown paper, meet back here and exchange them. The next time we meet, at my house—unless your mum—”
“No,” I said, almost too loudly.
“—fine—we wear them under our clothes—and we see what happens.”
“I like this game.”
“How long do you think we should spend?”
“Half an hour?”
He shrugged his lips and nodded, “Reasonable.” He slipped an arm around my shoulders. I almost fainted from the delicious smell of his pit. It wasn’t rank; his deodorant still predominated; but it was a hot, muggy day and his pit offered me an intoxicating undertow of man-musk. He leaned in and kissed my cheek again. “If you think keeping my hands off you’s easy, even with a whole retinue of dark, hairy arses to distract me, you probably also believe in Santa Claus.” He sprang up and his bulge sort of thrust itself calmly into my face. He reached down and ran a finger tenderly down my cheek, then swung away from me and sauntered off.
We met back at the red bench and exchanged our gifts.
I put mine away carefully in my red canvas shoulder bag and he told me to keep his in there too, because he was a man and didn’t encumber himself with shopping bags. I rolled my eyes and he slipped an arm around my shoulder and we walked over to the food court.
At lunch, he asked me if I wanted to see a movie. I’m not a film buff; I seldom intellectualize a movie; but I love going to the movies, especially on a date, or with a friend, and I generally prefer blockbusters, with lots of special effects. For some reason, this surprised Nigel, but it also excited him. It gave us something in common. Comicbooks.
We saw Captain America. He warned me not to go into raptures over Chris Evans, or it would hurt his feelings. He and the bulked-up version of Chris had mass and definition in common, so I had nothing to feel envious about, I told him. He told me I could fondle his big, bad biceps, throughout the film, if I wanted to turn the whole thing into a kind of virtual reality ride. And so I did, stroking the stout, supple vein running along his biceps, which he silently pumped up for me, smiling down at me in the dark. It surprised me how babysoft and talc-smooth the skin of his upperarm was, around all that rockhard muscle. At one point, he reached down and fondled my crotch, and whispered, “A real man knows how to keep his girl interested.”
It may sound like we were behaving badly, but we were generally quiet; it was an early show, on a weekday, so there were only about twenty of us in the entire theatre.
At another point, I sort of accidentally slipped my fingers into his armpit, ecstatic that they came away damp. Then I used the same hand to eat my popcorn, sucking on my fingers, savoring the light tincture of his body-flavor mixed in with the butter.
Now the trick was going to be getting my mom to let me move in with Nigel.
V
He sent me one email about his underwear gift. It said, with apparent sincerity Noone, not even Tilda, got me the way you do. Either you’re a great judge of character, or I already mean something to you.
I wrote back—
Both. But the latter’s a much tougher sell.
We were to meet again that weekend.
VI
What unnerved me about Nigel was his caution. I had pretty much agreed to be his domestic bitch, with all the slights and underprivileges appurtenant thereunto, may even have been willing to have the fortysecond element draw up a contract to that effect, but he hadn’t yet enslaved me, put me in my maid’s uniform and place. The next time we met, I assumed we would see each other in the underwear we’d purchased for one another, but he suggested he pick me up at my house and take me out for a meal in The Cedars. He wanted to see how the other half dined.
I didn’t dare reveal my horniness, or that Lesterville’s burly fire chief was a little miffed at me for turning down or ignoring all his invitations of late. I don’t mean to sound shallow, but Samson Pierce and I had been about to take the next step. Sometime during our next assignation—or three at most, since his wife was about to leave town to visit an ailing aunt in Maine—Pierce would have taken my cherry and made me a woman; and I had been looking forward to my metamorphosis.
But I wasn’t nearly as attracted to Samson Pierce as I was to Nigel Greenwood, the latter’s spinetingling accent and promise of hulking phallic mass aside. One of my former boyfriends—or, rather, friends with bennies, since, at eighteen, you don’t really have much of a dating history to call upon—had been a Mexican footballer at White Oak High; I’d relished all the elastic moments my tongue had spent with his dark, agile foreskin. Rafe had shortly thereafter fallen madly in love with Corinne Baumgartner, and they’d planned to marry as soon as they graduated.
“So tell me about all your past lovers,” Nigel said at Mario’s Trattoria, one of the most expensive restaurants in New Jersey, located on Spruce Street, the Rodeo Drive of The Cedars, itself often hailed, in Home & Garden, Architectural Digest, and similar publications, as the Bel-Air of the East.
I flubbed my soup, patted my plump, undeniably pouty, and now delicately painted lips, and took a dainty sip of water.
He studied me with those intense blue eyes, which usually gave me the jitters, not only because of how brilliant and beautiful they were, especially heraldic in a face that was, by all accounts, despite its chiseled angularity, ferociously plain—which only indicated you could sculpt an ugly bust or a handsome one and both would be considered sculpted, so that when you described someone’s face as statuesque you could be referencing either Antinoös or some jowly patrician; but also because I could never tell whether I was being admired or merely evaluated.
“Sure,” his crooked mouth curved up into that alleged sneer, which was always a sort of ironic halfsmile that could give you either the chills you received from a dom or the thrills you derived from a romantic hero, “you haven’t been around as long as I—but you must’ve had more than a few guys in highschool wanting to take advantage of those gorgeous lips—for more than one reason. Or even that luscious, haunting rump.”
Despite the fact that some African-Americans can hide behind their negritude, and despite my own dark-chocolate complexion, I bowed my head to forestall his catching me blush.
Could I tell him, here in this elegant establishment he was desecrating so willfully with his dirty blue-collar talk, that I had cum three times since last night, imagining my spending the day doing his laundry, cleaning his room, cooking his dinner, my body inflamed with the quiet domestic glory of its diligent service to him; and his coming home from that construction site, grabbing me, throwing my skirt over my waist, yanking my panties down, and fucking my overused but still resiliently tight pussy with his mega-meat, the day’s grime and funk still coating his rockhard, tattooed, superhero’s body?
Bringing my fingers away from my glass of iced water to lay them gently against my temple, in a superficially pensive stance, I began to see that my mom may’ve had a point all along. Surely there had to be a limit to my submissiveness. But why should only White people enjoy the privilege of subservience?
I calmed down and told Nigel about Rafe—and the four other highschoolers I’d fooled around with, only one of whom had identified, even at seventeen, as gay, and a total top.
“I’m a virgin,” I suddenly blurted out, a little annoyed.
I was wearing the coral-pink, silk-and-lace panties he’d bought me from Victoria’s Secret at the mall, getting my size insultingly right. What more did he want from me? What secret reserves of restraint did he expect a horny, submissive, eighteen-year-old bottom to have around a quietly forceful, uncompromising stud such as he, who walked around, at the best of times, just dripping with raw sex?
He reclined in his seat, the virility coming off him in quiet, self-assured waves. Just sitting there, at thirtyeight, he was like one of those powerful, ruffianly testosterone factories that usually manifested as soccer stars, brawling sailors, and Australian cowboys. Despite his smart black dress-shirt, which really intensified the paleness of his skin, he seemed excitingly out of place in Mario’s, among numerous elegant denizens of The Cedars whom I recognized and who’d broken their focus on their dinners or dinner companions to acknowledge me. Many of them were or had at some point been my mother’s clients. People had stopped to look at Nigel, too, because his presence in any setting was never easily ignored.
My desire for him was proving to be indomitable, and the anger into which it was steadily sublimating felt almost implacable.
“I did have a boyfriend,” I confessed, sipping my wine. “When you and I met, he and I were—”
The waiter interrupted at that moment, bringing me my fettuccini in duck sauce and Nigel his small Neapolitan pizza. As the waiter cleared away our empty soup bowls, I examined his bulge between the bottle of olive oil and the Parmesan shaker. He had nothing on Nigel. Why was Nigel’s epic package so near and yet so far?
When the waiter had left, Nigel said, “You were about to tell me about your boyfriend.”
I struggled to detect a flicker of jealousy in his tone or expression, but came up blank. This made my indignation less easy to swallow.
“He’s older than you.”
“Married?”
I couldn’t face him, as if he were judging me.
I nodded.
“It never ends well,” he said. “I’m not telling you how to live your life.”
“But I want you,” I began—I couldn’t leave it there, so I finished it, “I want you to tell me how to live my life. Isn’t that how this started? You were older and experienced. You knew exactly what you wanted and I knew exactly what I wanted, and suddenly everything’s existentially fucked up.”
He laughed, reclining powerfully in his chair, hands hanging from the pockets of his new, darkblue, emphatically unfaded jeans. In the black vee of his open collar, against a taut landscape of deep, hard muscle that looked like marble in the pink light of dawn, its vivid cleavage just about showing, I could see a few stars from the constellation of Sagittarius, shimmering darkly through the buff-colored haze of his light, spasmodic chest-hair.
“Did you think I was just playing some game, the other night, when I asked if you wanted to wait?”
I suddenly realized I had made the decision to wait only to appear virtuous, despite my determination, entering his house—and life—to be as submissive as possible, take the maid’s role as far as I could. I had no doubt he’d completely dominated that kid from Indiana, put him through paces that weren’t on any map in my imagination. Nigel had told me he had a relatively well-equipped dungeon in his basement, which many of his boys, and even older lovers—all of them his girls, his bitches—seemed to enjoy. One of the photos on his profile page on that infamous site had shown him wearing a hugely-freighted leather thong, chaps, those workboots, black armbelts; smoking a cigar. I’d been jacking off to that picture far more after meeting him, than I’d done before.
He leaned across the table and took my hand, tracing its slightly plump outline with a coarse workman’s finger.
“You know,” his voice was thick, almost muffled, “every now and then, at work—we’re doing the foundation of a building on Cadogan—someone will leave the gate open, and I’ll be able to look out onto the street, and I’ll see some smart, slightly heavy, Black woman passing by. And for a moment I’ll imagine you’re bringing me lunch. And then I’ll take a closer look, and I’ll know it’s not my girl. Because my girl is a princess, not a maid.”
Finally we faced each other, his blue eyes no longer as distant and brilliantly cold as they could often be, and mine—I couldn’t deny—brimming with tears.
“Thank you,” I whispered. A vague, embryonic epiphany hovered above my cerebral cortex, refusing to step up its development and manifest. I touched my napkin to the corner of each eye, as casually as possible. His hand now rested on mine, the gesture more ambiguous than his workaday anecdote. But what reverberated through its tone was a terrifying confession of weakness at the heart of his great masculinity and strength: the weakness of a deep, long-standing loneliness no girl, or bitch, or wife, or pussyboy had ever alleviated and which he was no longer young enough to simply brush aside.
“What’s your favorite Shakespeare play?”
I laughed. He had moved his princess, more gently than anyone ever had, from emotional danger to emotional safety, even if this was all still, at some level, his chessboard.
“Hamlet,” I told him. “I’ve read it at least twenty times. No single movie version does it justice.”
“The other night,” he lifted my pinkie and held it, caressing it between his thumb and forefinger, “I stopped at Barnes & Noble and bought a copy of Romeo and Juliet. And then I ordered a Hawaiian pizza, poured myself some red wine, sat down to dinner and read the whole fucking play.”
I leaned forward and took his hand, “What did you think?”
“I’m beginning to see what the song and dance is about. But, for the most part, I’d be pretending to like it, because I feel I have to.”
“I just love what he does with language,” I said. “You have to love language to love Shakespeare. Otherwise, you’re right. It’s just a lot of rhetorical noise.”
“Like a monster truck rally?”
“Yes. But with a story arc. Unlike a Deep Purple concert.”
“Deep Purple is sacred ground.”
“How did I know we’d agree on that?”
“Because you’re the brainiest person I’ve ever met. One of these days, I’m gonna take your cherry to ‘Highway Star.’”
“Why, Mr Greenwood,” I held out a limp hand to him, using my mom’s accent, “I do declare no gentleman’s ever made me such a romantic offer.”
“And if this mysterious boyfriend of yours tries, he and I will be walking twenty paces.”
“Not many kids my age would understand what that means.”
“Not many kids your age have held my attention for more than ten minutes.”
VII
Obeying Nigel’s instructions—or commands—to the letter, I entered his house and locked the frontdoor securely behind me. All the blinds and curtains of the streetward windows were shut, but the muted evening light came in from the side windows, investing the suddenly very clean and tidy, if still erratically furnished livingroom with a warm, apricot light. Despite an undeniable overlay of citrine furniture polish and floral rug-cleaner, his smell, indomitable to the desperate, ladylike evasions of household deodorants, lingered everywhere, especially to someone whose nose was attuned to it like a faithful dog’s. As soon as it greeted my nostrils, my dick began to stiffen inside those famous coral-pink panties, which he’d instructed me to wear again.
I stripped down to the panties, and, leaving my clothes and footwear in the livingroom, pattered barefoot and, at my chub-level, very nearly pregnant, into the sparkling-clean kitchen; thence through the door that led down to the basement, which he’d left ominously ajar.
In the livingroom, the whiff of cigar smoke had been gentle, even a little stale, but as I drew closer to the dark, partially-gaping doorway to the basement, the aroma became stronger, sweet and pungent, wafting up to me from the bowels of my best and raunchiest fantasies; drawing me, with its olfactory piper’s melody, to follow it to its source.
The basement was made of solid concrete, painted black. From what I could see, it was neater, cleaner, and more well-kept than the livingroom, diningroom, or kitchen had been on my first visit; though someone had clearly been around since then, doing for him with a vengeance. Wrythen black sconces stuck out of the walls on three sides, at carefully-spaced intervals, like a sorcerer’s hands, frozen in grim, floral patterns, each with three prehensile fingers bearing flickering, crimson pillar candles like darkness making the world a mocking gift of light.
In a corner, Nigel lounged in a simple wooden throne. Painted black, its seat and back upholstered in crimson leather, it bristled with rows of silver studs that served both a functional and a decorative purpose.
His voice flat, “Go get cuffed,” he said, exhaling a draft of spicy, woody smoke from his smoldering cigar. The lance of smoke mushroomed into a cloud that made his blue eyes blaze out of his hazy face as if some supernatural power were making his irises phosphoresce.
He wore a white, ribbed tanktop, sweaty and mud-stained, ripped at the neck; the grey Calvin Klein briefs I’d given him; and those heavy black workboots, without socks. I had never seen his legs before, not even on the website. They were mouth-wateringly beautiful, but more about that later.
His gesture had been barely perceptible, but I noted it right away. I followed his hand to a set of cuffs affixed to the wall opposite the staircase. It took me a moment to realize that I had to kneel before I could cuff my wrists, and then, obviously, only one wrist.
“Face the room,” he said.
There were also cuffs for each ankle, screwed into the floor. It was a little awkward, my having to twist around behind me and lean down, since I wasn’t exactly the most limber Gumby in the toychest, but I managed to get both ankles secured. The fit was snug and just slightly less than comfortable.
I was sure there were other points along these forbidding walls that provided fastenings that left a sub’s back to the room, but that would come later.
“Are you sure you’re ready for this?” It wasn’t an uppercrust English accent, or exactly East End either, but, in his deep, even voice, those tidy vowels and deadpan consonants enriched the timber of his sultry commands.
“Yes, sir.”
“Good boy.”
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