Affairs of State

[daddybear54]

Chapter 1  Sunrise on Alcantara

 

 

Rich came slowly awake, lying on his side and stretching like a contented cat. His eyes opened, taking in the dim daylight filtering into the bedroom around the shutter panels at the patio glass doors. He had good reason to feel contented. He’d fallen asleep last night after pumping two rounds of seed into Tommy’s ass, and then feeling Tommy’s long Asian dick shooting its usual big load deep inside his butt. Nothing like a good load of sperm up inside your ass to help you sleep well, he thought.

 

As that thought crossed his mind, he felt Tommy’s arms tighten around him, the hard muscles flexing as he drew Rich closer. That wasn’t the only hard part he felt, becoming aware of Tommy’s dick snuggling right into his crack, obviously hoping to take another go at him. And why not?

 

Rich purred like the contented cat he resembled, reaching back with his arm to grasp Tommy’s taut, muscular ass and pull him closer. As he did, Tommy nuzzled his ear and then kissed his way down onto Rich’s face, while Rich slowly turned his neck to meet those kisses, as he relaxed his hole to take Tommy’s erection. Tommy kept exchanging kisses with tongue with his lover as his cock slipped inside Rich’s firm, round ass and sank in right to the bottom.

 

“Mmm, nice and warm and wet – just the way I like it. I love fucking you when you’ve kept my load inside you all night,” Tommy murmured as he slowly began sliding in and out.

 

“Best lube I could ever ask for,” Rich replied.

 

“Damn right,” Tommy replied, slowly picking up the pace of his fucking motions. Sliding in and out of Rich’s ass, he began twisting his tool around like a corkscrew, making sure to stroke every part of the warm hole and especially taking care to bounce the tip off Rich’s man gland frequently, evoking frequent moans of ecstasy as he did so. Rich may not have been hard when he woke up (although Tommy certainly was) but he was rapidly catching up, his rigid cock flexing up and down and leaking precum at a rapid clip.

 

As Rich’s breathing got faster and shallower, Tommy read the signs and knew that he was going to cum soon – and that was fine with him, too. Accelerating the pace of his fuck motions, Tommy spooned Rich harder and harder, both of them expressing their pleasure more vocally with each stroke.

 

Tommy pushed hard with one leg, rolling Rich onto his face and bringing himself up on top. He lay right down across Rich’s broad, muscled back, slamming forcefully down into Rich’s hole and pummelling his prostate. By now, both knew that they were going to cum together and it was going to happen very soon.

 

Rich was now gasping for air as his orgasm mounted up like a wave ready to crash down on the beach at the foot of the hill. “Oh, fuck… Tommy… fuck… I’m gonna… give it to me… I’m cumming!!!”

 

Just as Rich panted out the last words, Tommy rapidly slam-fucked him, driving down hard and fast into Rich’s hole, then shouted out, “Fuck, yeah!” as his load erupted inside his husband, seed streaming in rapid pulses out of his rigid cock to fill Rich’s ass to overflowing. Tommy kept pumping in and out, still in overdrive, as Rich’s muscles grabbed at his tool, milking all the seed out of him as his own juices shot out on the bed underneath his taut abs. At last, Tommy slowed down and then came to a final stop, buried deep inside Rich. Rich turned his head and they kissed again, laughing at the sheer joy of being together again after a week of Rich being away from home on business.

 

“Damn, that was good, Tommy. There’s just no stopping you.”

 

“Sorry, Rich, I just couldn’t help it, seeing you again. I must have been dreaming about you all night because, when I woke, I found that I was up before I was up.”

 

Slowly, Tommy eased his still-hard cock out of Rich’s ass, and then got up and went into the bathroom, returning a moment later with two wet washcloths which they used to mop the sperm off their bodies. Rich got up, too, and walked into the closet, opening a drawer, and returning a moment later wearing a red speedo. Tommy, having ditched the washcloths, followed his example, but his black suit was covered with a flashy pattern of blue, green, and yellow lightning bolts.

 

“You know something, Rich? For a senior citizen, you really wear that damn speedo well.”

 

“Not as well as you, Tommy – Mister Middle-Aged Japan for 2022!”

 

Tommy made a face, and they both laughed. Rich opened the shutter panels and slid back the glass patio doors. The two of them went outside and plunged into the pool, coming up against the glass infinity wall which overlooked the view.

 

Below and around them, the green-mantled hills rose up steeply around three sides of the compact little harbour, and across those hillsides spread the white and pastel-coloured buildings, the flower gardens, the palm trees of the compact city of Portavedra, capital of Alcantara. The rising sun shone down brightly on the city, glinting off the discreet golden cupola on the Assembly building and the freshly coppered spire of the cathedral. Off to the left, they could see the towering, angular cranes, looking like so many giant praying mantises, in the larger outer harbour where the cargo piers, the cruise ship port, and the inter-island ferry terminal were located. Out in the distance, to their right, they could just make out, through the early morning haze on the ocean, the more rugged and mountainous island of Isabella.

 

Ever the historian and linguist, Tommy had always been acutely aware of the significance of the Spanish name, “Alcantara.” It came from the Arabic al qantara for “the bridge” and this island of Alcantara had always been the bridge by which to access the entire cluster of islands, because it possessed the only true and sheltered harbour. No wonder it had been so popular with the pirates of the Caribbean (the real ones) back in the day – and no wonder that the island of Alcantara had lent its name to the entire country when Alcantara diverged from its former Spanish overlords and set out on the path of national independence.

 

The unique history of Alcantara had also led to it having a uniquely mixed and multicultural population, bringing together peoples from the Americas, Europe, Africa, and Asia in a single melting pot of cultural possibilities, with the unusual feature for the region of having English as the single most common language among the wildly diverse population. The government also recognized Spanish and Mayan as official languages.

 

In the old days, people trying to land on the cliff-girt shores of Isabella had to leap ashore onto the rocks during the rare calm moments between waves as there was neither beach nor harbour. Once the mining was ready to begin, the government had to borrow huge sums of money (well, huge by Alcantaran standards), to construct an expensive artificial harbour. The loans were secured against the future output of the diamond mine – but, since the mine had been so spectacularly profitable, the loans had soon been fully paid off.

 

As for the coral atoll of Serafina, with its tiny little sandbar islands scattered on a jewel cushion of brilliant green water inside the reef, the developers of the airport had been forced to do an extreme amount of dredging to build up enough solid land for the runway. Here, too, the diamond mine had covered the costs – and that included the sizable airport terminal. The Alcantara International Airport had a very unusual feature, in that the ferries from the islands of Alcantara and Isabella actually docked inside the security zone. Their passengers had already checked in and cleared outbound security and passport controls at the ferry terminals on the other islands, before boarding the high-speed catamarans that took them to the airport. Only the passengers departing from the over-water bungalow resorts on Serafina itself had to clear security and passport controls at the airport. Serafina wasn’t part of the view from the pool; it was out of sight behind the rugged spine of the island, over their left shoulders.

 

Rich sighed with sheer contentment, looking out across that panorama with Tommy’s arm holding him close against his side as he inhaled the heady perfumes of the tropical flowers around the terrace and pool. They’d been together for over 20 years, married for 12, and Rich still thought himself the luckiest man in the world, with a rewarding career, this beautiful home, an incredible view, the gorgeous pool, and – better than any of those – his wonderful husband, Tommy.

 

Tommy, for his part, was realizing that the view hadn’t really changed in the last 24 hours, even though his first thought was that it had. He’d still been out here every morning for a swim before breakfast for the last week, the usual routine. The whole vista just looked so much more colourful and attractive on this sunny Saturday morning, now that he had his man back beside him again.

 

They spent the next 20 minutes or so swimming and splashing around, with a little groping and grab-ass just for laughs.

 

Rich called time. As he swam over to the ladder, Tommy was right behind him. Rich started up the ladder, then stopped as he felt his trunks sliding down off his ass – immediately followed by the unmistakable sensation of Tommy’s lips caressing his skin. But then Tommy tugged as little too hard on Rich’s speedo, and Rich let go of the ladder, falling back into the pool right on top of him. As they spluttered for air, Rich wagged his finger at Tommy, laughing.

 

“Naughty boy! Have you forgotten why we have to wear swimsuits all the time out here?”

 

“Uh-huh. Old Mrs. What’s-Her-Name over there called the cops on us when we tried skinny dipping the first week we were here.”

 

“That’s right. And she’s still living there, and I bet she still has her binoculars right by her living-room window.”

 

Cooled off, they climbed out of the pool, still laughing, then went inside, and threw on some casual clothes – before heading downstairs to make coffee and breakfast.

 

Twenty minutes later, they were sitting outside again at the table by the pool, enjoying the warm sun and the pleasure of their company. Somehow, Tommy thought, even the brioche, fruit, yogurt, and coffee had tasted better today. With a second round of coffee poured, Tommy was studying the online news from various different websites, while Rich just basked in the sun.

 

Suddenly, Tommy let out a low whistle, saying, “There’s the kind of story you don’t see as much now as you did back in the day.”

 

Rich sat up. “What is it?”

 

Tommy handed Rich his tablet. The headline above a photo on a popular gay news site read: 

 

90s GAY PORN STAR SUCCUMBS TO AIDS

 

To Tommy’s astonishment, the tablet started shaking in Rich’s hand. Tommy took it away quickly, before Rich could drop it, and gently took Rich’s hand.

 

“What is it, Rich?”

 

Rich had to struggle to form the words. At last, he managed to say, “That’s Carlo.”

 

“Who?”

 

“That porn star. ‘Alfonso Torres.’ His real name is… was… Carlo Montini.”

 

“Yes. That detail’s in the story, which you haven’t read yet. How did you know that, Rich?” Tommy wasn’t angry or suspicious, just curious.

 

“Tommy, it’s Carlo. I told you about him. My first partner, the one I was with when I was going to law school in Canada.”

 

“Ohhhh.” Tommy’s voice slid slowly down the scale as Rich’s answer sank in. It was easy for him to see that Rich was reliving old memories, some comfortable and some much less so, and he just set the tablet aside and held back from saying any more.

 

It was ten minutes or so later that Rich surfaced from his deep, dark cave of memories, and found Tommy watching him – not anxiously, certainly not trying to be nosy, just his usual caring, protective self. “Sorry about that, Tommy. It just shook me a bit, seeing that picture. Brought a lot of things back up that I’ve tried hard to put behind me for good.”

 

“You can’t bury your past, Rich. It’ll always be a part of you.”

 

“I can’t bury my past because some historian like you is sure to dig it up again.” He winked; Tommy laughed, loudly. Then Rich went on. “Hey, maybe I should get you to write my official biography.”

 

Tommy chuckled again. “Sorry, I only write about historically important people with hidden, dirty secrets that need to be uncovered.”

 

“Minister of Justice and Deputy Premier for Alcantara – I think that’s pretty important.”

 

“True – at least until the next election, then all bets are off until the voting’s done. But what’s to uncover? You already told me all the dirty bits. There’s nothing left for me to dig up! Waste of my time, you’ll have to do it yourself!”

 

“Riiiight. And what’s that old saying about writing on asbestos paper?”

 

They both laughed, and Tommy poured some more coffee. But then Rich descended into his thoughts once again. He wasn’t thinking specifically about Carlo, now -- more about the entire strange path of his life – the early years in a suburb of Toronto, figuring out that he was gay, the multiple partners, coming out, law school, Carlo, Frank, the move from law into politics, learning the hard way about how much of power politics happened between the sheets, then meeting Tommy and winding up in Alcantara as a political leading figure. So much more to recall along the way.

 

And, with it, there was the uncomfortable truth that he hadn’t in fact told Tommy about all the dirty bits. Some of them danced right around the edges of his confidentiality oath as a member of Cabinet and the government. A few involved the international profile and trustworthiness of Alcantara itself. And, he thought, as a small country with a one-resource economy, being trustworthy was one of the few cards Alcantara had to play in dealing with larger and far more wealthy countries.

 

It irritated the hell out of him that he couldn’t share these things with Tommy, but that was the nature of the beast and it left him no choice. Political life was a beast in a lot of ways, and it was sucking out his integrity and honesty even as he struggled to hang onto that lifelong stock-in-trade.

 

Rich realized that their joking conversation about an official biography had uncovered an important truth. He needed to get in better touch with his true inner self. At the ripe old age of 55, it was high time that he started to figure out who Richard Dunnatore actually was.

 

After a few minutes, Rich suddenly shook himself free from his reverie, stood up, and stretched. “Damn, I’m tired. I think I’ll go back to bed for a while.”

 

“What’s on the schedule today, Rich?”

 

“Less than nothing. I told Lucy I’d hang her out with the laundry if she tried to stick me with any appointments or meetings today. All I wanted was to get home and be with you.”

 

“So that means I have to go back to bed too?”

 

“Only if you want to, Tommy.” Rich was grinning, though, because Tommy was already rubbing the bulge in his shorts and that bulge was already growing. But Rich shook his head. “Uh-uh. If there’s any action going on now, it’s going to be my turn to take charge.”

 

“Well, come on, Mr. Big Shot – what are you waiting for?”

 

In a few more seconds, the glass doors were closed, the shutters pulled across, and the two of them were back in bed together. Or, more precisely, Tommy was lying on the bed with Rich standing over him, seductively pulling his shorts down to reveal his cock standing proud and erect.

 

“If you want to get Mr. Big Shot’s big shot, you’re going to have to give that some attention.”

 

Tommy leaned up and took Rich’s cock into his mouth, bringing an immediate groan of satisfaction from Rich’s throat. As he slowly sucked and licked on the tool, Rich soon found himself aching to return the favour. In another minute they were lying side by side on the bed, each busily engaged in giving pleasure to the rigid cock of the other. Both of them loved doing sixty-nine. They were so completely in tune with each other, after years of practice, that they fell instantly into each other’s rhythm without even consciously thinking of it. One minute, they would speed up the sucking motions, adding intensity to speed until it seemed that they would both explode at any moment, then the next they would slack right off, pulling free and licking the shafts to allow themselves to cool down a bit, before the next round of building up the sensations.

 

Finally, Rich began sucking at a really furious pace, at the same time squeezing Tommy’s ass cheeks and teasing his hole. Tommy got the signal and speeded up his sucking motions on Rich’s cock. Rich’s legs began twitching in muscle spasms as his cock exploded into Tommy’s mouth, and Tommy shot his sperm into Rich’s mouth a moment later. Multiple squirts later, they slowly released each other’s satiated dicks. Rich swung around to lay his head beside Tommy on the pillow, and they kissed passionately, swapping cum loads with each other in a joyous snowball.

 

For some minutes after they’d swallowed their combined loads, they continued kissing deeply, lovingly, gently stroking each other’s bodies and murmuring their love to each other. Rich began dozing off first, and Tommy pulled him in, letting Rich pillow his head on Tommy’s chest. He murmured, “Happy Saturday,” to Rich and let his own eyes shut, his arm cuddling his husband close to him as he drifted off to sleep again.

 

 

[evilqueerpig]

GR8 Start!

[Medwaym]

Beautiful story

[daddybear54]

1 hour ago, evilqueerpig said:

GR8 Start!

@evilqueerpig thanks!

[daddybear54]

10 minutes ago, Medwaym said:

Beautiful story

Thank you, hope you will enjoy the continuation.

[gingerdaddyG]

Looking forward to the ‘history lesson’ 😈

[daddybear54]

Chapter 2  Getting Educated – The Hard Way

 

Later that afternoon, after another swim, Rich was feeling considerably refreshed. He thought again about the conversation that morning over a biography, and about his own inner thoughts. And with that, he realized that this was something he needed to do by himself, for himself, as a way of pulling back up every aspect of his life and seeing what his past had to say about the future he hoped to have.

 

Simple to do, of course – it was just a matter of writing. Right? But Rich found he was immediately faced with the challenge of so many diarists and memoirists: how and where to start. He sat and stared for some minutes at his computer, until the screen timed out and went blank. Shaking his head in annoyance, he swiped the touchpad, reactivated the machine, opened a document file, and began.

 

********************

 

Richard Dunnatore (that’s me) was born in Toronto, Canada, in 1967. My country of birth was 100 years old, by that name, a few weeks after my birthday, although human habitation there extended back by many, many thousands of years earlier.

 

Ricky, as I was known as a child, grew up in a fascinating household -- a rather unusual one for Canada in the 1960s. My dad was descended from two long-standing and very large Scottish families, “pure Scottish” as far back as anyone knew – which, of course, meant that our shared blood doubtless included substantial doses of Briton, Celt, Roman, Norse, and more. My mom was another matter. She was born in the international melting pot of Alcantara, her family background a wild mixture of a dozen or more different nationalities. It was from my father that I inherited his typically Scots stubbornness and an analytical turn of mind, while my mother gave me her wicked little grin, her sense of humour, and an even lighter-toned version of her caramel-coloured skin.

 

From the earliest age I can remember, I was always called “Ricky” by all family and friends. Like most kids, if I ever heard the full, formal, “Richard Anthony Dunnatore,” I knew I was in trouble.

 

How did my parents meet? Then as now, many young people from Alcantara would come to Canada for higher education. Mom and Dad met in a class at university in Toronto and got engaged even before they graduated -- something quite a few Alcantaran students still do.

 

I’m not wasting a lot of time on my school years. They had no real bearing on the man I would become. I progressed through the elementary, junior high, and high school levels of the curriculum with no effort at all. Concepts that many classmates struggled with seemed to click into place in my mind like the tumblers of a lock. That left me plenty of time for out-of-school activities, one of which in particular took up a big chunk of my life as I got older: swimming.

 

Not really surprising. The family (which now included my 3-years-younger sister, Chloe) would go every year at Christmas and spring holiday periods to visit with Mom’s family in Alcantara. That country was not then nearly as heavily developed and loaded down with imported money as it would later become, and Grandma and Grandpa lived in a quite modest house on a small beach, a twenty-minute drive outside the town of Portavedra. My mom told me in after years that she had to keep a really sharp eye on me and get Grandma and Grandpa to do the same – because, as soon as I was old enough to toddle on my own feet, I could be counted on to make a beeline for the ocean on every possible occasion. By age 5 I was already a competent swimmer and, by the time I reached age 8 or 9, I was getting really serious about it.

 

Later on, I would begin to add up the facts and realize that my father came from some serious old money in Canada and had already inherited enough to make our lives more than comfortable. My Alcantaran grandparents weren’t from the same economic circle at all, and that disparity was a source of edginess between them and my dad. They were always polite and pleasant with each other, but that was as far as it went.

 

At any rate, my obvious skill at and love for swimming led my parents to enrol me in a swim club in Toronto at age 9, and my progress leaped forward in great strides. In no time, I was winning age group championships, first in the city, and then provincially. As I moved onwards to high school, I enrolled in an elite training program for potential international competitors.

 

Even before my swimming career got that far, though, I had realized something very important. I couldn’t tell you exactly when it started, but I found that I wanted to spend every spare minute scoping out the bodies of all the other male swimmers, especially the more mature teenaged guys. The fact that we were all wearing tight brief speedos for streamlining in the water gave me plenty to look at, but it also gave me something to hide. I quickly found out that I would get teased within an inch of my life when my fellow swimmers spotted me growing a woody in my suit, so I had to make a conscious effort to think about something else at practice. That included what happened even more from looking at the coaches – Coach Anderson with his massive, hairy chest and Coach Rolphe with his slimmer, classic swimmer build and sizable bulge.

 

Later on, at home, was another matter. I’d stored up all the visuals from practices in my very retentive memory and those mental images fuelled many of my late-night jack-off sessions, too numerous to be counted.

 

By the time I’d gotten into high school, I’d shortened my name to “Rick” (because it sounded, as I thought, more “manly”). By this time, too, there was already a certain amount of “experimenting” going on among the boys on the swim team during road trips. Given my acute awareness of my own feelings, it wasn’t hard for me to figure out which of the guys were “just fooling around” and which were seriously interested in each other.

 

Derikk Maddeson was one guy who seemed to be seriously interested in me, and I certainly was interested in him. On one trip, he managed to arrange things so that I would be rooming with him, and experimentation went a little further. It was cautious, it was furtive, and it was definitely uncomfortable – it hurt like hell, actually -- but that was the night I lost my cherry. On the next trip, he let me return the favour – if you could call it that. I wasn’t a bit more competent at it than he was, and the cheap hotel lotion made a horrible lube.

 

By the time I graduated from high school, top of my class, it was obvious to both me and the coaches that my swimming career had reached its apex, and that my times simply weren’t good enough for the Olympics to be in my future. With that in mind, I explained to my parents that I really wanted to go to a top university in another province. My stated reason was that I wanted to “broaden my mental horizons and life experiences.” While that would assuredly be helpful, what I really wanted, of course, was to be free to do some more detailed exploration of my sexuality without too much parental oversight.

 

So, I chose to pursue a degree in political science at Mainland University in Vancouver. It was a smart choice as that city on the west coast was already well-provided with young men who shared my interests, in school -- and out of it. While I aced all my courses with no trouble, it was the summers that I enjoyed the most. That was when I could lounge on the sand of any of the numerous beaches, working on my tan and swimming in the ocean, or swim laps in the outdoor public pools. Either situation provided ample opportunities to meet other serious swimmers like myself, and ample opportunities to meet men who were like me in other ways.

 

In no time, I found out where the popular bars and other hangouts were and began hooking up with some interesting guys.

 

At the end of my first term, when I went home for a Christmas visit, I stepped up for the hardest task I’d ever faced in my life. I wasn’t at all sure how my parents would react, especially my father, but they had to know, and it was up to me to tell them. The second night home, I sat down with them after dinner, and simply said, “Dad… Mom… I’m gay.”

 

There was a silence of a few seconds. Then my mother laughed. “You thought I hadn’t figured that out for myself years ago?”

 

“How did you guess?”

 

“No guessing. Look, Ricky, it’s just that… mothers just know. We may not talk about it, but we know.”

 

I never did break her of calling me Ricky. All the same, I heaved a massive sigh of relief. My father, though, sat silent, looking rather less happy.

 

“Dad?”

 

At last, he spoke. “I’m sorry, son. I know what you’re hoping I would say, but I’m just not ready to go there yet. Just let me ask you this: are you sure?”

 

I replied quietly. “I’m sure. I wouldn’t tell you this if I weren’t sure, but I’ve known pretty much since the age when I joined the swim club -- and yes, I’m sure.”

 

“And does it make you happy, Rick?”

 

“What will make me happy will be living as myself, openly, truly, not hiding or holding back, or pretending to be someone I’m not. If I meet someone special, and share my life with him, that will be the icing on the cake.”

 

It was unusual to see my dad, the master of snap decision-making, taking his time to ponder his next move. But, finally, he spoke again.

 

“Well, Rick, since you’re sure, and since it will make you happy to live this way, I’ll give you my blessing. I can’t truly say that I understand it yet, but I hope that someday it will all become clearer to me and then I will truly be able to be happy with you, and for you.”

 

“Thank you, Dad. And thank you, too, Mom.”

 

“Ricky, are you planning to tell Chloe?”

 

“Yes, I’ll let her know next time I see her. But, Mom, she’s so much like you that I suspect she will already have guessed too.”

 

Mom gave me a massive hug as I said goodnight. Dad hugged me too, which was unusual for him. It was much more tentative, more “distanced,” but it really moved me that he had already come so far to meet me where I was living my life.

 

Back in Vancouver for the second term, I discovered the existence of a swim club whose members worked out regularly in one of the indoor pools during the winter, and (as they told me) outdoors in the summer. Certainly, not all the guys in the club were gay but the classic swimmer physiques in tight suits made me feel right at home. This was an environment I loved.

 

I loved it so much that I actually went and signed up for a lifeguard certification course, something I’d never done before. Predictably, I aced it and was then able to get a part-time job that helped with living expenses as much as with cruising for sex. Have you ever stopped to figure out how many horny young guys harbour secret lifeguard fantasies? I did some on-the-ground market research in that field, and I got myself several hot dates just by sitting a certain way on the lifeguard stand and casually scratching my inner thigh.

 

After years of practice, I’d learned to turn my gaydar right off when I got into the pool, bringing to my swimming the same fierce level of concentration I always had done. After workouts? Well, that was another matter. Once in a while, someone would get brave and start something in the showers. More often, though, I’d get an invite to “hang out” afterwards. Some of those hangouts were individual, but some were threesomes or more. Sometimes I’d get invited to stay over, but most of these encounters were quickies, intended to “scratch the itch,” but nothing more than that. Actually, the first time I “slept over” was at my first orgy, where I fell asleep somewhere near the bottom of a pile of exhausted male bodies with dripping dicks.

 

It was, in fact, on a sunny day at the pool (in August, before my final year) that I found myself swimming in the lane next to a devastatingly handsome young Italianate guy with a lightly furred chest, dark eyes, and glossy black curly hair. He wasn’t a member of the club, but I had seen him around the pool on occasion. After we’d finished our laps for the day, we went for a coffee, and wound up back in my apartment. I poured Carlo a beer, with another for myself, and then went into the bathroom to hang up my wet swimsuit and towel. As I was stretching up with the towel towards the shower rod, I felt two arms go around my waist and a hard body pressing against my back, with an even harder dick prodding into my crack.

 

Truth be told, I’d been having plenty of sex but all of it was very much at the elementary level – suck it, stick it in, fuck, cum. This was actually the first time I had ever experienced the subtle thrill of feeling another man get intimate with me while we still had our clothes on. Every other time I’d been with a guy, right back to Derikk, we’d just dropped our clothes and gotten right down to it. Since we were both horny, and Carlo was plainly more experienced, it soon graduated into a first lesson in the equivalent thrill of slowly undressing another guy.

 

It was on our second (and first planned) date that he pushed me down on my face on the bed and spread my legs apart. I knew what that meant and began mentally relaxing myself. What happened was not what I expected. I felt something warm and moist on my ass cheek and realized that Carlo was kissing my ass. I sure hadn’t asked him to do it, nor had I told him to “kiss my ass.” I’d heard that saying any number of times, but this was the first time I’d ever experienced it. The sensations that flooded through me were incredible as he made love to my cheeks, then spread them apart and slowly licked his way down to the bottom of my crack.

 

If I’d been startled before, I now flew far past astonished as Carlo slowly, but determinedly, licked and sucked and wiggled his tongue over the tight knot of my hole until – at last – it relaxed enough for him to worm his tongue right inside me. Then, he went right to town, tonguing my hole, sliding in and out, pushing it, and twisting his tongue around to keep working on my muscle. All the while, his fingers were determinedly squeezing and massaging my cheeks as if they were two loaves of bread that he was kneading.

 

Then he took a finger and began to slide it into me, still licking and teasing my anus with his tongue. That finger began doing incredible things inside my tight hole, twisting around and stroking me in every direction. Then, the fingertip found my prostate – and I damn near blew my load right then and there. But Carlo could read the signs to perfection. He quickly eased off and went back to sliding that finger in and out of me.

 

Then a second finger joined the first one. Now those two digits were doing a mating dance of their own inside my hole, twirling around each other, bowing and straightening, pointing to all the degrees of the compass in the most unexpected ways. I’d never felt anything like this before, and it was all I could do to keep from yelling out loud from the ecstatic thrills he was giving me. I didn’t yell, but all the while I kept moaning and sighing and urging him to keep going. He withdrew his tongue and fingers for a minute, and then I felt the cool sensation of lube on my crack, and his lubed-up fingers sliding inside me. At last, he withdrew his fingers. I felt the bare tip of his cock pushing lightly but firmly against my hole – and I froze up.

 

By this time, I was far from being a shrinking virgin. I’d been around the block, as the old saying goes, more than a few times. I’d fucked and been fucked by quite a few guys, but I certainly knew “what was what” when it came to safe sex and always remembered to use condoms – after all, this was 1989, and the Plague had been raging through the world’s gay communities with devastating effect for over a decade.

 

So I told Carlo, bluntly, “No condom, no fuck.” I was actually delighted when he agreed with me, and took up a condom from my bedside table, unwrapping it, and unrolling it down his tool. It was a really great dick he had – seven inches long, nice and thick, and with a slight upturn at the tip that was guaranteed to produce maximum pleasure inside any ass. I rolled on my back, pulled my legs up, and watched, eagerly, as he placed the tip against my hole and began pushing gently into me.

 

One of the things I liked about Carlo was that he never rushed me, never did anything I wasn’t ready to do. But on this occasion, he proved that he could be more demanding. I asked him to stop and hold still, but he insisted that I would be fine if I just breathed deeply and relaxed, letting him all the way into me. I did – and he did – and in another minute his hips were planted firmly right against my butt cheeks and his cock was giving me a fantastic sensation of fullness. It was the first time I could ever remember feeling like a man’s tool belonged inside me, not like it was an alien invader that had to be repelled. That was thanks to Carlo’s careful and thorough preparations. Lesson learned.

 

As he began pumping his cock in and out of my ass, I found myself moving right along with him, and enjoying every minute of the experience. Carlo then gave me another lesson, disguised as a hot fuck. He started showing me, by doing them, all kinds of different positions that a top could use on a bottom. While I was enjoying the sensations of being fucked by a true expert, my busy mind was storing all this information away for future use – such as for me to use on Carlo the next time.

 

But then I stopped my mental filing and started gasping for air as my load began mounting up to my dick. I was going to cum, and very soon. Carlo of course recognized the symptoms and bore down even more, thrusting deep inside me on each stroke until I finally choked out the words, “Gonna cum… gonna cum!

 

And cum I did. My cock, for the first time ever, hadn’t wilted or shrivelled in the pain of penetration and now it began jolting up and down, firing big squirts of man cream up across my body and face – the first shot even hit the headboard above me. The contractions of my ass as I came did Carlo in, too, and he quickly slid out of my hole, yanked the condom off, and began jerking madly. After about 3 seconds of pounding his meat, he groaned and fired his own load across my abs, mixing with mine. He kept right on jerking until the last drops dribbled slowly out. He then collapsed on top of me, letting our combined cum glue us together as we kissed.

 

It was the greatest fuck I’d ever had – up to that point. But it got even better.

 

I studied many more lessons during that first meeting with Carlo, and on the numerous subsequent dates we had during the remainder of my final year. He was experienced, and I do mean experienced. Carlo tutored me through the high school levels and well into the college degree program of man-to-man sex. He taught me everything there was to know about a man’s cock, his balls, his taint, his ass, his anus, his throat, his nipples, his feet, and – well, basically everything a truly well-educated gay guy ought to know. Compared to this man’s expert and polished performance during sex, everyone else I’d fucked with seemed like a clumsy beginner. I know I did, too, before I first hooked up with Carlo, but after a few months of playing with him regularly, I began to feel like I was on my way towards becoming an expert myself.

 

Then there was the night when I’d taken the top role, sucking a first load out of Carlo, then rimming him practically into next week, and then fucking him for close to half an hour before shooting my load onto him. I’d learned that his favourite position as bottom was to lie on his face, with me lying right on top of him, slowly working my dick in and out of his hole. I really enjoyed that close contact as well. What I noticed, as I humped him at a leisurely pace, was that I could feel his heartbeat and it was perfectly synchronized with mine. That, I felt sure, had to mean something.

 

When I finally speeded up my fucking motions, heading for my climax, Carlo was moaning louder and longer than I’d ever heard him before. At last, I pulled my cock out of him, slid off the rubber, and began jerking it as he rolled over onto his back and looked up at me. He was gasping for air as much as I was, and I drove my finger back inside his ass and rubbed his prostate. Instantly, he came, hands-free, just as the first shot came spurting out of my cock -- and there we were, both of us blasting cum like mad all over his furry, muscular chest and abs.

 

After we’d calmed down again, he said, “Damn, Rick, you are getting really, really good at doing me.”

 

I felt like I’d just been handed my diploma, summa cum laude.

 

I began hearing comments from my friends, wondering if I was taken because I never seemed to be hanging out with anyone else. I’m sure they all assumed that Carlo and I were an item because we were spending so much time together. As well as timing our pool workouts so we could swim together most days, we were hooking up several times a week, and meeting at other moments for coffee or lunch. He never seemed to treat our relationship as anything more than fuck buddies, but if I was going to be honest with myself, I would have to admit that I was seriously falling for him.

 

Meanwhile, my year was moving to its conclusion, and it was time to think of next steps. I knew now exactly what it was I wanted to do with my life – I wanted to become a lawyer. My parents had approved of the plan, and I had applied to several law schools. I got acceptances from all of them, but I had already decided to stay right where I was at the Mainland U. school of law. Once I got my degree transcript (top-ranked in all subjects, as usual), I signed a lease on a new and bigger apartment and figured I was all set.

 

All set, that is, except for one thing. I had now accepted that I was seriously in love with Carlo, and he seemed to like me too, judging by the amount of time he spent at my place. I never saw his place because, as he put it, “it’s so small that there are roommates and neighbours practically in your lap at all hours of the day or night.” I knew that I needed to bring the matter to a head.

 

I finally decided to plan a big night with a first-rate dinner, enjoy some really hot sex, and then offer him the spare keys and ask him to move in with me. I told him the evening was to celebrate my graduation.

 

I met him at one of the classiest restaurants in town, and he, like me, had dressed up in a fashion that might be best described as “cutting edge.” Certainly, some heads swivelled when we walked in, and I claimed the reservation from the host stand. We were seated at a beautiful table, right by the window with a view of the sea and the mountains. We enjoyed every minute of a marvellous, leisurely meal that lasted close to two hours.

 

At last, we left, and walked back to my new place, which also had a sea-and-mountains view. We sat down with another glass of wine, facing the windows, and I decided to go off my agenda and just jump straight to the big question.

 

“Carlo, I know I said tonight was a celebration of my diploma, and it was – but there’s something more. Over the last eight months, you’ve really grown into my life in a big way, and I’ve come to depend on you and to love you in a way that I’ve never felt before for anyone. Because I love you, and want to be your boyfriend, it’s time for me to ask you: do you want to move in with me?” And I held out the keys.

 

I don’t know what I expected as a reaction. I was prepared for acceptance, rejection (although that would have hurt), even deferral. What I didn’t expect was to see his face expressing indecision.

 

At last, Carlo spoke. “I’m sorry, Rick, but I didn’t even see that coming. I wasn’t expecting it at all. I knew that you enjoyed spending time with me, as I enjoy spending time with you, but I just didn’t pick up that you were falling in love. And I don’t know what to say.” I’d be lying if I pretended that I wasn’t disappointed. And he knew it. He went on. “I’m sorry I disappointed you. I know I did; I can see it in your face. I wish I didn’t have to do that, but I need to be honest as you’ve been honest with me. I need some time to think about this, to see where my feelings lie and where they want to lead me.”

 

I swallowed my disappointment. “I’m okay with that. I can wait for you.” And then I stood up, and gestured him to come with me, taking a step towards the bedroom.

 

“You still want to? After I just let you down with a thud like that?”

 

“Of course.”

 

We went into the bedroom, and slowly, as usual, undressed each other, caressing each area of skin as it was revealed. I was doing my best to put a world of meaning into each caress, each little pat, each touch and hold and stroke, and I’m sure he could feel it. When we were both naked, standing, holding each other close, our hard cocks pushing against each other, Carlo kissed me, then pressed his lips against my cheek, close to my ear, and whispered to me.

 

“Show me, Rick. Show me your feelings now, all of them. Make love to me, Rick.”

 

Since I had been thinking of doing exactly that, it was an easy request to fulfil. I swept him up in my arms, carried him to the bed, and laid him gently down, then lay down myself next to him.

 

Over the next hour, I did my best to use all the skills I had learned during my time with him, to bring it all back to the source and lavish it all on him. I gave his cock a slow, gentle sucking which teased every one of his nerve endings (and a good many of mine, too). I stroked and caressed every inch of his beautiful, firm, rounded ass, and then covered ever inch of it with my kisses. I tongued and fingered his hole until I had him almost screaming in ecstasy, demanding that I fuck him. Finally, rubbered and lubed up, I slid gently into his hole, lying down along his back and kissing, licking, nibbling at his ear as I slowly moved my cock in and out of him. After pumping him like this for a few minutes, I pulled out, rolled him over, and looked deep into his eyes as I took him again, slowly pushing my cock all the way back into his ass.

 

I then leaned down and began kissing him, slipping him my tongue, letting our mouths and tongues lock together in a mating dance every bit as intense as the one going on down below. As I slowly increased the speed of my fucking, the mouth action became even more intense. Finally, though, I broke free and said, “Are you nearly there, baby? I want to come right with you.”

 

“Yes… yes… fuck me hard, fuck the cum out of me.” I leaned up on my hands and began piledriving his ass, forcing my cock deeper inside him than I’d ever gotten before with anyone. I needed to give him the best fuck I had ever given. As I pounded him, he moaned and said, “Oh, yeah… that’s it… fucking give me that cock… fuck, yes… gonna cum… gonna CUM…!”

 

I kept pounding him, watching, mesmerized, as the first shot leapt out of his cock, landing right across his face. That was all it took. I pulled free of his hole, tore off the rubber, and let mine fly too, as I scrambled up beside him and shot my load across his pecs and his face, until he was thoroughly covered with cum. Then I fell next to him, kissing him, and licking up as much cum as I could get before swapping it with him in more wet kisses. And then we lay there, quietly, arms and legs entwined, slowly regaining our breath.

 

At last, Carlo spoke. “Rick, I’m sorry. I was wrong. It was staring me right in the face the whole time, and I just never knew it. You were right. We do belong together. You’re what I want, what I need. Did you put those keys away again yet?”

 

“No. They’re right here, waiting for you.”

 

“I love you, Rick.”

 

“And I love you, Carlo.”

 

 

[daddybear54]

Chapter 3  Go Big -- and Go Home

 

 

“Whatever it is you’re working on there, you’ve been buried in it for hours. Take a break, already, and let’s go for a swim and have a drink.”

 

Rich shook himself out of his concentrated memory trip to find Tommy dressed (or, more accurately, underdressed) for the pool and holding a cocktail shaker.

 

“What’s in that?” he asked.

 

Tommy gave him a salacious grin. “You have to ask what’s in here?” he asked, as he rubbed his bulge. “Oh, you meant in here,” and he waggled the cocktail shaker. “Extra dry Tanqueray martinis. The glasses are all set to go in the kitchen. Come on, already.”

 

Rich closed the computer, made his way to the closet, and quickly stripped down, switching to a speedo. He then headed for the kitchen, where Tommy was just pouring the martinis.

 

Tommy looked up at him. “Olive or twist?”

 

“No, Tommy, I’m not rewriting Dickens for him.” Tommy made a face at him. “Why ask? You know I always like a twist of lemon.”

 

“It’s just from the super-serious expression on your face, I thought you might need an olive instead, to match your mood.”

 

“Well, to answer your question, the usual, please. And to answer your other question, I sat down and started writing the memoir we talked about this morning. I’m deep into the story of Carlo now, and it’s proving emotionally tough. Especially knowing he’s dead now.”

 

“Then why do it?”

 

“Tommy, it just feels like something I need to do. For me, principally, but for all the other people in my life as well. Family, friends, partners… I need to set my story down and now is the time.

 

“Confessional time?”

 

“Yeah, I guess so. But a pool break sounds like a marvellous idea.”

 

Out the door they went, parked the martini glasses on the edge of the pool, and then slipped into the water down the stairs. The early evening, the setting sun, the cool water, the gentle warm breeze, the ice-cold martini, all worked wonders on Rich’s mood. Sitting on the underwater ledge, nuzzling Tommy’s cheek and neck in between gentle kisses helped, too, at restoring his natural Saturday evening buoyancy.

 

Eventually, with the drinks gone and the sun about to disappear behind the island’s mountainous spine, he plunged under the water, and proceeded to swim a dozen or so laps, more for ironing out the kinks of a day spent hunched over his laptop than for any other reason. Three times a week, Rich and Tommy would head down to the public indoor pool in Portavedra for more serious swim workouts. On other days, in a more recreational mood, either or both of them might go to the public beach north of the city where Rich’s grandparents had lived when he was a boy. Both of them were long gone now, of course, and so was their home, replaced by a luxury boutique hotel. But the beach, like all beaches in Alcantara except the ones along the edges of the airport, remained open to the public at all daylight hours.

 

With the sun gone, and the air getting chilly, they climbed out and towelled off, then headed inside where Tommy got to work on one of his killer dinners. Rich tried to help, but Tommy shooed him out of the kitchen, saying that this was Rich’s welcome-home dinner, and he was not allowed to do any of the work on it. Rich compromised by setting the table, putting out the wine glasses, and uncorking the wine. After a heavenly meal of seared tuna on homemade rice noodles with a Cajun spice and lime glaze, they settled back in the living room with coffee and talked for a while about what Tommy had been up to during Rich’s absence. Predictably, it was the usual round of faculty meetings, preparing and delivering lectures, chairing his two weekly seminar groups, meetings with students, and grading papers. When bedtime rolled around, both of them were content to just snuggle up to each other and sleep the night away.

 

In the morning, after the normal swim and breakfast, Tommy asked, “So, what’s on the agenda today? Any surprise meetings with the premier or the president?”

 

Logical as always, Rich pointed out, “Well, if I knew about them, they wouldn’t be surprises.” Then his face saddened. “Speaking of which, I’m going to have to keep on writing that memoir today. I’m coming up to the surprise that ended my relationship with Carlo, and I have to get it written and out of my system. Then I can relax for the rest of the day.”

 

“I know what you’re like. When you have to do it, you have to do it now. Just promise me that if it gets too upsetting, you’ll knock off and come and find me. I’m going to spend my Sunday puttering around in the kitchen garden – the morning, anyway.”

 

“I promise, Tommy – and thank you.”

 

 

********************

 

 

Over the next week, we made a number of trips with my car, gathering Carlo’s stuff up and getting him moved in with me. As we did, I saw exactly what he meant about his place, the small rooms, the incessant interruptions from his roommates and the three girls next door (one of his roommates had a thing with one of them). At last, the job was done, and we went out for dinner again to celebrate.

 

As we were lying cuddled together in bed after that night’s round of hair-raising sex (Carlo had given me a fuck to remember), he sighed and said, wistfully, “God, I wish we could ditch the rubbers and fuck bare. Skin to skin, all natural. That’d be so awesome.”

 

Practical me came right back at him. “Yeah, sounds great, but we’d need to stop playing with other guys and we’d need to get tested a few times before we could do it.”

 

“Have you been playing with anyone else, Rick?”

 

“Not for months. You use up so much of my energy, I’ve got none left for anyone else! You?”

 

“About six weeks ago, not since. Do you want to do it?”

 

I thought about it for a minute or two, taking my time. It was risky, sure, but if we did everything we could to minimize the risk, then why not?

 

“Yes. Only one problem: I don’t have a doctor out here.”

 

Pain in the neck. You still had to go through a doctor to get access to an HIV test. Some cities had walk-in clinics, but I didn’t know of one in Vancouver.

 

“Let’s use mine.”

 

“Okay, set it up. Let’s do it before school starts again, I’m going to be buried in work.”

 

“You? Work??? I thought you just whistled and those straight As jumped right up into your lap!”

 

“Ha ha. This is law school we’re talking about, that’s not going to be a pushover.”

 

We had to wait a bit for an appointment, but two weeks later, we went together to see Carlo’s doctor. I was only mildly surprised when both Derek, the nurse, and Dr. Brennan himself turned out to be unquestionably gay. After all, Carlo was a couple of years older than me and far more deeply immersed in gay life than I had been when I met him. We had an amusing conversation, jokingly fending off Dr. Brennan’s laughing assertion that we both looked like we needed “a really, really thorough genital and anal examination.” A week later we went back and got the test results, and we were both negative. We waited three more months, then retested. Negative again. We’d told the doctor what we wanted to do, and his response was simple.

 

“Be careful, be exclusive, and come back to get retested every three months. Have fun, boys.”

 

That night, as we lay together in bed, we were both almost hesitant. We’d rushed to the bedroom as soon as we finished eating dinner and cleaning up, and we were both rock-hard before we even began undressing. Not only that but, for once, we undressed ourselves, quickly, as if we couldn’t wait to get to the main event – and we couldn’t. And then, there we were, lying still, looking at each other. It was weird. In a way, it felt just like the first time all over again, a feeling that this was a door in life which, once opened, could never be shut again. At last, Carlo spoke gently as he caressed my face.

 

“Do you want to go first, or do you want me to do the honours?”

 

“You’ve been leading the way all along. I’m glad to follow your lead again.”

 

I lifted my legs, allowing Carlo to do his usual magical relaxation work on my ass. His tongue and fingers moved even more gently than ever, perhaps because he sensed that this was an expression of love. It had to be right; it had to be perfect. Was it just the moment, or was there really an extra degree of intention, of concentration, of communication between us as Carlo slowly probed me with his tongue and his fingers? Even now, so many years later, I can’t say for certain. The one thing I did know was that I loved him even more for doing this in such a special way.

 

At last, it was time, and both of us were ready. With no hesitation and no rushing, Carlo slowly but firmly pushed his cock deeply, all the way inside my hole until his hips were resting against my butt.

 

I could feel the difference. I could feel the warmth of his hard cock, gently rocking inside me. I could feel the sensation of his skin rubbing against mine, there in my hole, where that had never happened before. No one in my life had ever entered me with a raw cock. And no matter how many times it happened in the future, Carlo would always remain the first man who’d ever given me this extraordinary sensation.

 

If it was incredible for me, I know it was no less for him, as I looked up to see his face wreathed in a beatific smile.

 

“Oh, my God, Rick – I had no idea your ass would feel so smooth and silky and warm.”

 

“Your cock feels so amazing inside me too. Naked, warm, skin to skin, it’s so natural.”

 

Carlo laughed. “There’s an awful lot of people out there who don’t think what we’re doing is natural at all.”

 

“To hell with them. Times are changing, and we’re going to be so accepted in another 30 years, like we’ve never been for centuries.”

 

“I can’t wait.”

 

“Neither can I, so pull your mind back to the present and show me what you can really do inside me with no obstacles.”

 

And with that, he began. Slowly, firmly, he worked his cock in and out of my hole while both of us absorbed every detail of these wonderful new sensations. The heightened degree of feeling between our bodies, between our hearts and souls, made this a different kind of sex than I had ever experienced before. We were totally in touch, totally in tune, two bodies become one in our quest.

 

Carlo grabbed me by the shoulders, then rolled onto his back, bringing me up on top. It felt no less amazing to ride him in this position, to be able to vary the angle a bit on every downstroke and truly feel his rigid cock stroking every part of my insides.

 

It was too good to last. With both of us complete novices at bareback sex, we had yet to learn how quickly that direct personal contact could bring on an earth-shattering climax. But we were about to find out. Suddenly Carlo gasped aloud. “Ohmigod, Rick, you’re going to make me shoot!” I grabbed my tool and began frantically stroking, trying to finish with him, but he slapped my hand away. “No, don’t! I want you to give it to me once I finish myself off.”

 

“Shoot it, Carlo! Let that load fly!”

 

“Aren’t you going to pull off?”

 

“Not on your life. You’re going to shoot it deep inside me and fill me up with your cum!”

 

As soon as I said that, Carlo’s face screwed up tight, he let out a roar, and I felt his cock begin pulsating inside me. He was cumming, cumming, gushing out a torrent of his sperm deep into my hole – the first load I’d ever taken inside my body. He roared again, and his cock spasmed into a second round, and more, until finally he was shooting blanks. At last, I fell across his body, bringing my face to his, and we kissed passionately as our breathing slowly wound back down. His cock slowly slipped out of me, followed by another new sensation – the feeling of his wet load oozing out and trickling down over my taint, dropping back onto my balls and then down onto his cock and balls.

 

That galvanized me into action. I reared up onto my knees and said, “Carlo, I’m going to fuck you, using your own cum as lube. Roll onto your face.”

 

He did. I dived down into the crack, eating and slurping at his ass like I’d never done before. While I was doing that, I reached behind myself and scooped the sperm off my butt. I added some spit for good measure, and then I brought my palmful of cum to his ass crack, and spread it onto him, using my finger to push it into his now-wet hole. I then wiped the palm of my hand over my cock and aimed it right at the target. Carlo was absolutely quivering with anticipation as I placed the tip against his hole and began to lean. He wanted it, so badly; his hole opened up and all but sucked me into him. I kept going, slowly, until I was embedded all the way inside him and was lying right down on top of his muscular back.

 

If it had felt wonderful having him bare inside me, I was beyond ecstatic at the thrill of being bare inside him, feeling his tight hole and warm insides surrounding me. “Carlo, I’m not going to last long, I’m just about ready to cum right now because it feels so amazing.”

 

“Well, why wait? Go for it.”

 

With that, I began pumping into him, driving my speed slowly up from first gear into highway overdrive. By the time I was really pounding him, my hips smacking against his firm round ass cheeks, I could feel my orgasm mounting and knew it was going to happen – soon.

 

“Oh, fuck… Carlo… I’m going to shoot… your tight ass is sucking the cum right out of me…”

 

“Do it, Rick… cream me… fill me up with your load… cum inside me!”

 

That did it. I slammed furiously into him, deeper than I’d ever gotten, and let it fly. I counted eight or nine separate shots before I lost count, and still my dick was pulsating like a mad thing inside him. At last, the pulses stopped, my breathing began to slow down, and I lay at ease on top of him, kissing his neck and shoulders – until he turned his head, to let me kiss him properly. At last, he spoke.

 

“Is it just me, or did that feel like we just lost our virginity all over again?”

 

“You are so right, baby. God, I love you!” We rolled onto our sides and fell asleep like that, with my cock still semi-hard inside him.

 

For the next month and a half, I was beyond happy. We swam in the sun, we went on long walks, bike rides, and lazed about in the parks. Both of us were working, but as I remember that summer, it seems that all we had was oceans of spare time. We had the most incredible sex nearly every night, and sometimes in the daytime too. With practice, we soon learned how to prevent ourselves from cumming too quickly, how to vary pace and angle and depth of our strokes to prolong the experience of fucking naked, skin to skin, and finally sharing our loads into each other’s bodies. We sucked, we fucked, we pumped innumerable loads of our seed with each other, and we loved every minute of it.

 

This idyllic existence came to an abrupt halt when school began again. I’d never encountered anything like it in my life. It wasn’t just that I suddenly found myself having to work at school for the first time, bad as that was. First year at law stretched me so badly that I was scrambling, struggling to keep afloat. Since it was a new experience, I didn’t handle it well at all. In my usual thorough way, I tried to keep abreast of dotting every “i” and crossing every “t” in each of the cases we studied. I had never before been forced to master the skill of focusing right in on the key points, and I kept losing sight of the forest because I was trying to memorize every leaf on every tree.

 

All this intense work was taking up more and more hours every day, and it was playing havoc with my social life, tying me to my desk or to a table in the library for longer and longer periods. Even my sacrosanct swimming workouts were becoming less and less frequent.

 

In particular, the seductive siren call of law school was destroying my life with Carlo. Not that I saw it that way at the time, of course. Our sex life was slowly dwindling. I would walk home in a zombie daze late every night, flop into bed and pass out. Sex now happened almost exclusively on the weekends, and it was still wonderful when it happened – or so I felt – but it happened less and less often. Looking back after all these years, it’s easy to see now that our relationship was drifting onto the rocks and was going to crack up. It was the way it finally happened that ripped me apart.

 

One Saturday afternoon in early February, we had Jackie and Tyler over for drinks. Jackie had been one of Carlo’s roommates in his hyper-active former apartment, and Tyler (his new boyfriend) had actually been in high school with me in Toronto for a year or so. They’d gotten back from a Grand Tour of Europe that fall and wanted to share it all with us. And that included a handful of magazines that Tyler tossed on the coffee table in front of me (while Carlo was mixing drinks in the kitchen), urging me to “see what life in Europe is like!” This was in the days when Canada Customs was still fiercely guarding the moral integrity of the nation by impounding and destroying vast amounts of pornography every year. Whatever did get through was usually pretty mild stuff. These mags were something else again.

 

The third one, though, stopped me dead in my tracks. There was something familiar – chillingly familiar – about the body and dick of the cover model (the title of the mag covered his face). I froze. To his credit, Tyler quickly sensed that something was wrong. He began gathering up his magazines again, but I hung onto the one I was holding. I was, oddly enough, very proud of myself that neither my hands nor my voice were shaking. But I didn’t fool Tyler for a second.

 

“No, Tyler, I’m finding this one very interesting.”

 

I flipped through the pages, finding the cover shoot. It featured eight pages of promo stills for an upcoming film starring “the hot new sensation, Alfonso Torres!” The photos concealed nothing. Not the asses. Not the dicks. And not the clearly bare dick of “Alfonso” sliding into the cute little ass of the blond twink under him. Nor the equally bare dick of the big muscle stud pushing into his hole at the same time. It looked like one fucking hot fuck chain.

 

Except, of course, that his real name wasn’t Alfonso. It was Carlo. My Carlo. Barebacking one guy, and getting barebacked by another guy, on camera, for the whole world to see.

 

Then Jackie – dear, obtuse, stupid Jackie – said, “Wow, that must be hot if it grabbed Rick’s attention!” Before Tyler could stop him, he jumped up, came, and looked over my shoulder. And stared. And said, “Oh, fuuuuck.” Just like that. With his voice curving down towards the floor, the single epithet landing with a thud.

 

Tyler stood up, grabbed Jackie, and steered him – none too gently, either – towards the door. He quickly struggled to invent an excuse about having just remembered another engagement or something. And just then, Carlo came back in with the tray.

 

“What? You guys aren’t going? You just got here!”

 

Tyler gave their excuses, leaving Carlo plainly baffled, but they said goodbye quickly, and went.

 

“Rick, what the hell was that all about?” And then, looking at me more closely, “What’s wrong with you? You look like you’ve seen a ghost!”

 

“It’s on the coffee table. Excellent quality photo work.”

 

I couldn’t even look at him as he sat down, picked up the magazine, and flipped through it in a daze. In my head, I was busy lecturing myself.

 

Don’t go all emotional. You’ll just demean yourself. Don’t play the victim, be the judge on the bench. Remember that line from “The Winslow Boy” – “Cold, clear logic, and buckets of it, should be the lawyer’s only equipment.” Just do what you have to do and get it over with as quickly and neatly as possible.

 

Carlo spoke. “Rick, what do you want me to say?”

 

“I want you to answer two questions for me. One: did you guys cum inside each other?”

 

“Yes.” He was honest. I had to give him that.

 

“And two: have there been any others?”

 

“Yes.” I was silent. Then he flared out at me. “Rick, what the hell else would you expect? You’ve been damn near non-existent for the last six months, buried in your legal studies.”

 

“I’d expect you to tell me. I’m not upset about you fooling around with other guys, that’s your business. If you want to play dice with your health, your life, by doing them bareback, that’s your business too. But here, you’re playing fast and loose with my health, with my life, and that’s where it becomes my business. That’s what you should have told me.”

 

“I know. I should have. And I’m sorry.”

 

“Carlo, you’ll need to start looking for another place. And start packing up your things. You can sleep here on the pullout until you’re ready to go.”

 

“You can’t mean that, Rick! What we have is so amazing, so powerful… that love is worth fighting for, to bring it back to life.”

 

“It’s about trust. I trusted you, and you trusted me, and now you’ve shattered that trust. I could forgive you some day, maybe, but could I ever trust you again? I doubt it. I’m going to bed – alone. And in the morning, I’m going to Doctor Brennan to get tested – alone.”

 

I went into the bedroom, shut the door, and flopped onto the bed, crying silently. I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of letting him hear me weeping. Within a week, he’d found a new place and moved out. I couldn’t even bring myself to say goodbye.

 

What I could do – and did, unflinchingly, for years – was to blame myself for being such a selfish, self-centred idiot. Carlo was right about one thing: what we’d had was amazing, it was powerful, and I’d thrown it all away with both hands, without even a second thought, to pursue my own personal ambition. His reaction was unforgivable, yes, but it was just that: a reaction, triggered by my withdrawal, by my inaction. I’d gotten exactly what I deserved. At least, the repeated testing showed that I was still negative.

 

Some years later, I would discover that it was even worse than I’d thought. The film had been shot right there in Vancouver. The producer had wanted to use our apartment, but Carlo had at least had the common sense to veto that plan and they’d gone to a hotel instead. In any case, the film, first in a successful series, was only the last step. He’d been recruited by the producer when the producer had hired him for a hot night together, from an ad in a gay paper. He’d been escorting, fucking clients in our bed, probably bareback, while I was at school. “Have there been any others?” Oh, yes – more than likely, too many to count.

 

 

[daddybear54]

Chapter 4  Reality Check

 

As Rich slowly emerged from his self-imposed return visit to the most miserable time of his entire life, Tommy was right there, waiting for him with a cappuccino. Rich took it, sipped at it gratefully, then pushed his chair back and heaved a massive sigh – of exhaustion, of relief, of emotional overload.

 

“Thank God I made it through that part. Tommy, that time when I broke up with Carlo was the bottom of the hole for me, the black night of my soul.”

 

Tommy gazed at him, his sad eyes laden with profound concern and worry. “Rich, I hate to see you putting yourself through the meat grinder like this – and for what? Is it really that important?”

 

“Tommy, I got on my high horse with Carlo and threw him out for his lack of integrity, his lack of honesty. Now, I look at myself, at what politics is doing to me, and I feel like I’m becoming what I once despised so brutally. If I’m ever going to be able to keep looking at myself in the mirror, I need to be at least honest with myself, if not with the world. That’s what this is really about.”

 

Tommy moved close and folded him in a tight hug. He could feel Rich quivering. “Let it out, Rich. Let it all go, love. I’m right here with you.” And Rich erupted in heart-wrenching sobs. Tommy held him close, stroking him gently, making soothing noises, letting him know he was loved as all the tension, all the anger, all the self-loathing, poured out of him in a torrent of tears.

 

At last, the emotional nerve-storm played itself out, and Rich lifted his head off Tommy’s shoulder, looking rather ashamed of himself. “Thank you, Tommy. Sorry for letting go like that.”

 

“Oh, Rich, that is so Canadian of you -- apologizing for having feelings and emotions! Guess what, it’s not unique to you, either to have them or to bottle them up inside -- but getting it all out is far healthier. How do you feel right now?”

 

“Kind of… I don’t know, sort of cleansed.”

 

“It’s called ‘catharsis.’ What you just had is a cathartic experience. Maybe this memoir idea was a good thing, if you’re carrying that much emotional baggage around and this writing helps you to drop it off and lose it. Hey, change of subject. What do you say we skip eating in tonight and go out for dinner, head downtown and go to Aquarius?”

 

Rich finally smiled. “That sounds great. And I know it seems inadequate but thank you for caring for me and pulling me out of the whirlpool.”

 

Tommy laughed. “And there you go, apologizing again with your ‘it seems inadequate.’ Ye gods above and little fishes! Want to go for a swim before lunch?”

 

Five minutes later they were in the pool, horsing around, ducking and splashing each other, without a care in the world. Tommy’s wise words had impacted Rich enormously, giving him a whole new slant on what he was going through and what it was doing to him and for him. And Rich loved him even more (if that were possible) for helping him through this experience in such a caring way.

 

A lie-in-the-sun, a delicious lunch, a swim, a nap, and another swim – altogether, Rich was feeling like a new man when they got into the car to drive downtown. Tommy took the wheel, not because Rich couldn’t drive, but because his chronically weak left eye was apt to mess up his distance judgement in the narrow, crowded streets of Portavedra – a city which, despite its location in the New World, was thoroughly Old World in appearance, in size, and in its entire ignorance of anything remotely resembling “urban planning.”

 

Aquarius was a popular waterfront restaurant, making up in the quality and quantity of the portions for what it lacked in cachet. Rich and Tommy were a familiar sight there, and an endless source of amusement to the staff who laughed at them for not going to upscale places such as Café Calamari or Hilltop Terrace frequented by all the other politicos, millionaires, and visitors with overstuffed wallets.

 

They got a favourite table by the water’s edge, not because of status but because of Rich’s well-known propensity for tipping generously whenever he ate out. After a bottle of wine and a delightful meal of conch chowder and fresh fish from the reefs of Serafina, they were in a mood to relax and enjoy the view. The sunset colours in the sky were slowly fading, and the first stars were just starting to appear in the twilight.

 

“How are you feeling now, Rich?”

 

“A thousand percent better. Perfect tropical night, perfect meal, but most of all because of you.”

 

“That’s what I like to hear: you, back to your normal, cheery self.”

 

“Just so you know, it won’t last beyond tomorrow at breakfast time. I have a 10:00 am meeting with the Premier and the President.”

 

“What about the memoir?”

 

“I can put it aside for a while, now that I’ve gotten over the really awful part. When it’s time to revisit it and carry on writing, I’ll know.”

 

Half an hour later, they were home and in bed together. As they stroked and kissed each other, Tommy said, “Okay, you’ve been lazy enough now. I’ve been doing most of the work since you got home. Time for you to earn your keep here.” So saying, he grasped Rich’s cock firmly, squeezing it rhythmically until he felt it beginning to fill and swell up. “That’s better. But you’re going to do more. You’re going to get this dick completely hard and then you’re going to give me a no-holds-barred fucking.”

 

“Okay, I guess I can take a hint.”

 

Rich moved down and spread Tommy’s legs apart, licking at his balls and then slowly working his tongue down the taint as Tommy lifted his legs up off the bed, exposing his crack. When Rich began to dig his tongue into the crack, Tommy lifted his legs right into the air over his head, and his ass, crack, and hole were all exposed to his lover’s eyes. Rich plunged his face right in between Tommy’s cheeks, digging his tongue into the crack and licking firmly all around and over the tight little hole. As he did, he felt Tommy’s legs settle onto his shoulders, the slim but strong thighs pressing against either side of his head.

 

Rich pushed more firmly with the tip of his tongue, shaping it into a hard little point like a miniature dick, and pushing harder until the tight hole began to give way and his tongue wormed its way inside Tommy’s ass. At the same time, he brought his hands up to grasp Tommy’s hips, anchoring them firmly while he dug into that sweet, tight hole. The pressure from stabbing his tongue in and out was slowly loosening Tommy’s tight button, and at the same dragging ecstatic moans out of Tommy’s mouth.

 

Time to add a finger. Rich began sliding his index finger inside the tight little ass, bending and twisting as he pushed, until the whole finger slid inside. A little twirling, and he located Tommy’s prostate, quickly stroking it and pulling even more moans out of the gland’s owner. At the same time, he slid his other hand down and began stroking his own cock, making sure it was hard and ready for the work ahead. As soon as he grasped it and stroked it, the precum began leaking out. Rich had always been a prodigious leaker, often letting out precum before he even got any of his clothes off, long before he was ready to shoot.

 

A second finger followed the first, and then a third. Tommy was groaning loudly now, telling Rich to “quit teasing my hole and fuck it already!” And Rick felt that it was time to oblige, to give the man he loved exactly what he was asking for. He slowly slid his fingers out of Tommy’s ass, moved up until he was looking down into Tommy’s beautiful eyes, and then placed the tip of his dick against the hole. He felt the quivering in Tommy’s body, and increased the pressure, until he breached the hole and slowly buried his entire length deep inside Tommy’s ass.

 

Tommy squirmed for a few moments and then settled in place with Rich kneeling up and looking down into his eyes. Rich could feel the hole loosening, and then beginning to squeeze and chew on his dick, and he knew it was time to fuck ass. He was so horny that it took only a dozen strokes or so for him to work all the way up to full pounding speed, while Tommy moaned and cried and repeatedly cried, “Yes! Yes! Fuck me harder! Give me that whole big cock inside me!”

 

Rich leaned over until he had his mouth locked on Tommy’s, his legs straight out behind, going crazy in full push-up mode inside his man’s fuckhole. Tommy had rotated his ass up into the air to meet Rich’s powerful thrusts, and his cries were rapidly becoming inarticulate as he felt his own orgasm mounting. Rich’s skillful pounding was going to fuck his load right out of him, even though he wasn’t touching his own cock. As Rich’s cock moved faster, slamming in harder and harder, the rapid tattoo of his hips slamming against Tommy’s upturned cheeks only brought Tommy’s impending climax on even more quickly.

 

Tommy heaved in an enormous breath and shouted, “Fuck me! Yeah! Make me cum!!!”

 

By now, Rich was running on sheer instinct, eyes glazed over, growling on each breath, feeling nothing but the overwhelming urge to let fly with his seed, to breed, to pump it as far inside his partner’s body as possible. “Yes! Cum for me!” he grunted.

 

Tommy let out a wordless cry as his cock lifted and blew a huge bolt of cum right into his own face. The sudden powerful contraction of his hole pulled Rich over the edge and he came too, pumping a whole string of massive squirts of his seed into Tommy’s sucking hole as Tommy kept on squirting cum over himself. Half a minute later, Rich’s cock was still flexing inside Tommy, even though all his sperm had already been fired into Tommy’s saturated ass.

 

After a powerhouse fucking like that, it took quite a while for both of them to slowly wind down and recover their breath. Rich finally let his cock, still rock-hard, slip out of Tommy’s ass and Tommy immediately roused himself and dived onto it, licking, sucking, and cleaning it in gratitude for the wild ride it had just given him.

 

At last, Rich spoke. “That was incredible. I can’t think when the last time was that you made me cum like that, so much pumping out of me.”

 

Tommy giggled. “Well, it’s been quite a while since you tore me a new one the way you just did. It was amazing, getting worked over that way by the old man of the house.”

 

“Old man! Thanks a lot!”

 

“Hey, I’m not complaining! I asked for it.”

 

“You did.”

 

“Maybe you should go on more of these extended business trips. Breaking up for a week like this has done wonders for our sex life!”

 

They laughed together, wrapping their arms around each other and snuggling close to fall asleep.

 

Monday morning. Rich got up early, with no time for morning sex, and sat down with his first cup of coffee to catch up on the backlog of work-related emails in his government inbox. Lucy would have already gone through all of them, and sifted out the routine matters, to be covered later in her brief daily morning report to her boss. Even so, there was a fair pile of material to sort through.

 

An hour later, Tommy joined him and they went out for their morning swim. Already, it was a hot sticky day as the sun rose and promised to get even hotter as the day progressed. Back inside, they enjoyed breakfast together, and then Rich showered and dressed, kissed Tommy goodbye, and headed down to his office in the government block, across the courtyard from the Assembly building. After calling Lucy in for the morning update, he gathered up his essentials and walked across the courtyard for his 10:00 am meeting with the President and Premier, Desmond Flowers and Benita Caladesa.

 

He arrived outside the President’s office at the same time as Premier Caladesa, who greeted him warmly. Rich returned her greeting as warmly, having an immense respect and admiration for her skills as both party leader and elected head of government, roles she had now filled for over 10 years. Together, they were shown into the inner sanctum by the President’s executive assistant.

 

The prematurely white-haired President Flowers was looking even more benign and patriarchal than usual this morning, a fact which immediately set Rich a bit on edge. He’d known Flowers long enough to be always on the alert for the secret agenda, the concealed motive, the hidden plans behind that apparently honest and respectably open face. The most unsimple truth was that the Presidency, supposedly a head of state position of ceremonial and symbolic importance only, had become an office of considerable influence and power under Flowers’ adroit and consummate political stewardship. Rich had found that it always paid to be wary when dealing with him.

 

The meeting turned out to be simpler and more straightforward than Rich had feared. The President wanted to know about plans for the next election for the Assembly. According to law, as they all knew, it had to be held within 5 years of the last one, and the five-year deadline was coming up in 14 months. Rich mostly sat and observed, implicitly trusting Benita to play it smoothly. And she did. Benita was as thoroughly aware as Rich of the value of caution in dealing with the President.. She assured Flowers that she, the Cabinet, and her staff were all thoroughly aware of the deadline. There were a couple of suitable windows of opportunity over the next year to fit in the campaign without disrupting major holiday seasons, and she would consider her options over the course of a week or two and let him know.

 

The President looked a little put out, a look which suggested that he would rather have had the election at the earliest opportunity -- but that was a decision entirely within the Premier’s purview, and he agreed smoothly, asking Rich if the Minister of Justice also agreed. Of course, Rich affirmed that he did.

 

As they walked back across the courtyard, Benita asked Rich to come to her office for a few minutes. Once there, she got her secretary to hold all calls, and had George, her executive assistant, join them.

 

“Rich, and George, this is strictly confidential. No minutes, no written record.” Both men nodded. “I’ve decided that I’m ready to retire, as Premier and party leader. I’m going to announce this very shortly and will step down as soon as the party selects a new leader. This will leave enough time for the new leader to settle into the role before an election has to be called.” Neither Rich nor George was surprised, as she had told them more than once that this possibility was in her thinking.

 

Rich immediately said what was uppermost in his mind, “Benita, I want to thank you here and now for your inspiring leadership and your steadfast commitment to the well-being of the country as Premier.”

 

George added, “Count me in on that too.”

 

Benita laughed. “Thank you. But the funeral hasn’t come yet and it’s too soon for the eulogy.” That gave them all a chuckle. “That’s all, gentlemen. Rich, I’ll let you know as soon as I decide the timing of the announcement.” She then gave him an unusually intense look. “And I hope you will be a candidate for the position.”

 

Rich nodded. “I expected you to say that. Benita, I will need to think about it carefully before I decide.”

 

That night, at home, Rich was quiet and solemn. Tommy asked if anything was wrong.

 

“Work issues, Tommy.”

 

Tommy smiled and set it aside. They’d worked out that code phrase as soon as Rich was appointed to Cabinet. It meant that the problem was confidential, and he wasn’t free to talk about it.

 

But Tommy had his own news bulletin as well. “Well, there’s some important news on my end. The university president asked me today if I would accept an appointment as Dean of Arts and Science.”

 

“Tommy, that’s wonderful!”

 

“I told him I would have to think about it, that it would depend on what your career path might hold.”

 

Tommy didn’t know, and Rich couldn’t comment, but this was exactly the same spot Rich was in – a possible huge career move, and a need to talk about it. Except for the little problem that Rich couldn’t talk – yet. All he could do was try to defer that conversation until Benita was ready to make her announcement.

 

As it happened, she was ready sooner than even he expected. The very next morning, George called Rich to let him know that the Premier was dropping the word today and would go live to air on Alcantara24 at 1:00 pm. Rich accordingly sent Tommy a text message advising him to tune in on the news site during his lunch break for the Premier’s announcement.

 

During the morning, the Alcantara24 news screen had repeatedly displayed a crawl line stating that the Premier would be making a public statement, so many Alcantarans were watching at one o’clock. Benita began by greeting all who were watching, in her inimitably friendly and personal style. She then stated that she was announcing her retirement from politics, from the Premiership, and from the leadership of the Social Democratic Party. The Party would immediately begin the process to select a new leader, and her retirement would take effect as soon as that leader was chosen. The election would undoubtedly happen within a few months after that date. In closing, she thanked all her supporters, all the dedicated members of her Cabinet (past and present) and wished all the best to the contenders for the Party leadership and to all the people of Alcantara.

 

The affection of the people of the country for her could readily be gauged by the blizzard of thousands of comments which quickly filled the chat window, comments of praise, memories of personal meetings with the Premier, thanks for her years of dedicated service. Reading them all afterwards, Benita was brought repeatedly to tears by the massive outpouring of love and gratitude.

 

In his office, President Flowers sat with an enigmatic smile on his face. He had to admit that he had not foreseen this development. He had fully expected Benita to run for and win another majority term, and then to make her move at about the halfway point of that 5-year period. He’d been prepared to play her long game, but this shorter version suited him even better. All he needed now was for that up-and-coming foreign faggot, Dunnatore, to step up and run for the position -- as he fully expected he would. Then Flowers would be in charge, and no mistake. With the hold he had over the Minister of Justice, he could use Rich’s leadership to push through the constitutional changes he had long desired, and thus fix the ridiculous power imbalance between Premier and President. Then, given his good health, he could reasonably expect at least twenty years of a virtually free hand to reshape the country in a manner more to his liking.

 

Rich was aware that Flowers didn’t really care for him, but that wasn’t factored at all into his thinking as he sat in his office, pondering the situation. What he was really thinking about was his future – and his past. Only the day before, he’d been pondering the way that politics was gradually stripping away his integrity. The mental comparison of the man he was becoming versus the righteous anger with which he had sent Carlo away was not a bit comfortable to him.

 

At last, he contacted Lucy and told her that he was taking the afternoon off. Effective as she undoubtedly was at her position, Lucy could also be very annoying and overbearing at times. But she was nothing if not politically astute, and she asked no questions, knowing that Rich was facing the biggest decision of his political life.

 

 

[daddybear54]

Chapter 5  Hit Self-Destruct and Reset

 

At home, Rich didn’t sit still to do his thinking as many people would; he fired up his laptop and opened the file with the memoir that he had begun on the weekend. The real answer to his quandary lay in the part of his mind that was dredging up and recording his memories, and the way to find it, as with the way to find himself, lay through his writing. Setting up a new chapter heading, he began.

 

********************

 

After Carlo had left and I was alone in the apartment, I had a breakdown. Some people might have yelled or screamed, gotten roaring drunk, or gone nuts on drugs. I went crazy for sex.

 

Within an hour after he’d left, I’d gotten showered and douched, and was dressed and ready to go out and get myself royally fucked. It seemed appropriate, since I’d already fucked myself over, to go and get someone else to finish the job. What if I ran into Carlo? I was half-hoping I would, especially if I’d already connected with someone else. That would show him.

 

What the hell? There was no logic in thinking that way, but I wasn’t thinking. My calm, reasonable side was now totally disconnected and I was running on pure, raw, negative emotional energy. In that state of mind, it didn’t take long for me to find a willing guy. Wearing a super-tight pair of shorts that showed off my ass muscles didn’t do any harm either. Almost as soon as I walked into the club, I got swarmed, and within half an hour I was leaving with a guy named (I think) Andre. He was big, muscular, broad-shouldered, and had a massive bulge in the front of his shorts. Maybe I was subconsciously hoping that a big enough pain in my ass might help to distract me from the horrendous ache in my heart.

 

Well, I got the pain in my ass all right. Andre was not a considerate fucker. He was all alpha top, knew what he wanted, and helped himself right away. He had his whole thick ten inches up inside me in no time flat, despite – or perhaps because of – my cries and screams of pain. I’d have called it rape, except that I was getting exactly what I wanted, what I felt I deserved.

 

One other thing I was getting, though, which I hadn’t banked on – I found out after he’d fucked me hard, cum twice, and then left. That’s when I felt something dripping out of my hole, and worried that it might be blood – he’d sure fucked me hard enough to rip me. But it wasn’t. That big beast had fucked me bareback and shot two loads inside my ass without a rubber, fucking me raw, and after I’d told him to use a condom. I’d been bred like any slut in the streets, just like Carlo in fact, and I couldn’t deny that I’d loved it, and wanted more. My descent into hell was over. All the way down. Now I was just as bad as Carlo was, and a hypocrite to boot for doing exactly what had made me throw him out.

 

I repeated the pattern every night for a well over a week. By day, I was running on autopilot, going through the motions at school, getting all the right answers, but personally disconnected from it all. By night, I was out on the prowl, picking up a different top – or two, or more – each night and getting fucked and bred repeatedly. My ass was sore as hell after the first few nights, and still I kept at it. Looking back, I guess I was punishing myself by getting other men to punish me. I couldn’t tell you how many loads I took during that bleak time. Dozens, probably. It didn’t matter to me who I got with, how dubious they looked, how dangerous they acted, as long as they had a dick and would fuck me raw. It was a miracle that I didn’t get robbed – or worse. Finally, my ass did get ripped, badly, and I had to stop.

 

A couple of Fridays later, just as I was about ready to start playing the open-to-all fuckhole again, my friend Fred ran me down in the library, and asked me to go have a coffee with him. I demurred, but he was so insistent that I finally agreed to go with him, just to shut him up. After we were seated in the café with our cups in front of us, he started in on me. Quietly, so as not to be overheard, but he ripped me a new one verbally just as Andre and all the others had done to me physically.

 

“Rick, what the hell are you doing to yourself?”

 

“What do you mean, Fred?”

 

“Don’t play the innocent, Rick. The guys at the bar were all telling me that you’re now the A-Number-One slut in town, taking multiple loads in your ass, without a rubber, from any and all cummers. Have you gone mad?”

 

“Did you hear what happened to me a few weeks back?”

 

“Yeah, I heard. Your hot Italian boyfriend turned out to be a big stud bareback porn slut and you threw him out. Does that mean you have to follow suit?”

 

And much more along the same lines. The more I tried to explain what I was doing, the more he shot holes right through my every argument. And I knew that I was being a fool. But the urge to punish myself was too strong.

 

That night, as dusk fell and I was preparing to go out hunting for dick again, the phone rang. I answered, and it was my mother. I was about to say that I was just heading out and was late, but something in the sound of her voice restrained me -- thank God.

 

“Ricky, honey, can you come home? I need you here badly.”

 

“Mom, what’s wrong? What’s happened?”

 

I heard a distinct sob, and a couple of sniffles.

 

“I just got a call from your grandmother, in Alcantara. Your grandfather is dead.” Her father. Dead. And I knew that I had to get home, and fast. She’d always supported me, and this was the very least I could do.

 

“Okay, Mom. I just need to throw some things in a bag and then see if I can get a seat on the red-eye tonight.”

 

“Ricky, I need to see my mother, and your father can’t get away before Wednesday. Can you take me?” Back to Alcantara. I didn’t hesitate. Maybe I sensed that Alcantara was where I needed to be myself, to break the cycle of self-hate in which I was trapped.

 

“Of course, Mom. I’ll check, I think there’s a flight on Sunday morning to Puerta Escapada that connects with the ferry over.” Alcantara didn’t have an airport yet and travel depended on the ferry from the mainland.

 

“Thank you, Ricky. I’m so grateful.”

 

“Give me thirty minutes to check with the airline, and then I’ll call you back.”

 

“I’ll be here. I’m not feeling at all sleepy yet. Your dad is sitting up with me.” She sniffled and sobbed again.

 

Friday night was a good night to call for reservations. No one else was planning travel at that hour except people with emergencies. The telephone agent was sympathetic and helpful once I’d explained the situation, and soon had everything reserved. She forwarded the file to the airport office with a note to prepare the tickets, and then I was all set. I called my mother back, told her I would see her in the morning, and to be ready to travel on Sunday, and then started packing. I called and left a message with my academic advisor, telling her what I was doing and that I wouldn’t be back for a week.

 

In my mood, sitting sleepless on a red-eye flight to Toronto wasn’t precisely what the doctor ordered, and yet I could feel myself starting to come out of the black funk that had possessed me ever since I’d thrown Carlo out. Hugging my mother and sitting down to talk with her about my grandfather helped too. So did the long trip to Alcantara, complete with a change of planes in Miami and the tedious and bumpy 4-hour ferry ride from Puerta Escapada across to the islands and the harbour of Portavedra.

 

It was strange, being back in the place that had been so much fun when I was little. I hadn’t been back since my high school days, and it felt a bit like time travel since nothing in Alcantara ever seemed to change. I found that I was so surrounded by happy memories that I simply couldn’t hate myself there. It felt good, too, to be supporting my mother and my grandfather, to feel needed, to be doing something useful for other humans in crisis. I’d never have guessed this when I was a kid, but after even such a short stay, I knew that Alcantara, with all its memories of a simpler time in my life, had become a place of healing and wholeness for me. By the time my father arrived four days later, I had gotten over myself and my crisis and was ready to go back and pick up the pieces – to “get on with it,” as my father said, little suspecting just how big “it” had become.

 

Back in Vancouver, I had to scramble to get back up to speed at school. I also had to explain to Doctor Brennan what I had been doing, get a huge lecture from him about my idiotic behaviour (I deserved that, too), and get tested quickly and repeatedly. Somehow, God knows how, I had gotten lucky and dodged HIV and all the other nasties.  Somehow, too, I managed to get myself caught up enough to complete the first year of law studies successfully and continue to move forward.

 

During the summer, I alternated the lifeguard stand with several days a week of volunteer work in a community legal aid clinic. That was an eye-opening experience, putting me into direct contact with the legal problems and issues that beset people at the bottom of the economic ladder. I learned so much about human nature and about social and economic inequity from that clinic, really too much for my own comfort (given my own comfortable level of personal wealth), and those lessons never left me.  

 

In the fall, it was back to school. I’d now mastered the art of getting down to the key point in every case, every discussion, every legal analysis, and was no longer overwhelmed with work. In fact, I was now much more mature, ready in every way to balance schoolwork with a relationship. Except, no surprise, I no longer wanted a relationship. I had done a complete 180-degree turn from my foolish fling after Carlo’s departure and had become celibate. That whole episode had burned me so badly, on so many levels, that I isolated myself from men. My hand became good enough company when I needed to scratch that itch.

 

Two months after school started, I got another phone call from home. This time my mother was almost in hysterics, and it took a couple of minutes before I got her calmed down enough to tell me that my father had been killed in a car accident. When I got to Toronto this time, I quickly discovered out that my father had appointed me his executor, and that his estate was huge, complex, and a very daunting prospect all around.

 

The first task was to organize the funeral, to be held on the next Saturday, and that was enough of an ordeal on its own. My father being the sort of figure of importance that he was, his business associates far outnumbered family and social friends. To accommodate everyone, the service had to be held in the cathedral, and the reception in a private club that my father had joined the previous year. My right hand felt positively limp and wrung out after shaking hundreds of hands, most of them twice (arriving and leaving), and I wondered how celebrities, actors, and musicians could do this over and over. Once was enough for me.

 

The end of the reception was an ending in another way, as well. I’d had a difficult relationship with my father, and although he had tried to support me in my ambition to live openly as a gay man, he had plainly found it tough to come to terms with my reality. That attitude in turn had erected an invisible barrier between us which neither he nor I had been able, or willing, to break down. While I appreciated all he had done for me throughout my life, it was hard to escape a sense of relief that he was gone. Add to that my pleasure in finding out that Chloe and I each received a quarter of his estate outright (the rest went to my mother), and my equally pleased surprise that he had entrusted me with sole responsibility as executor of his will. It may sound odd, but in some ways this was the first time I had ever felt like a man.

 

As the scale of the work to be done with Dad’s will sank in, I knew that I would have to take a year off from law school. I called the law faculty, talked my way through to the Dean, and explained the whole situation. He willingly agreed to simply take me off the register for the year, refund my fees for the remaining months, and defer me until the following September with no academic penalty. I had to travel back to Vancouver to get more clothes and things for an extended stay in Toronto, and to arrange for a neighbour to keep an eye on my apartment and water my plants. And then I moved back home.

 

After everything I had been through, living in my old room at home was a strange feeling, but my mother did everything she could to make me feel more comfortable. She told me that it was okay with her if I wanted to have friends come and stay overnight, even laughing a bit for the first time as she said that my father wouldn’t necessarily have agreed with her. The laugh was a bit forced, and soon enough she was wiping her eyes again, but it was a start for her.

 

It was also strange, but somehow comforting, to be back in the same swimming pool where I had first learned the basic techniques and strokes, doing my workouts again. That daily routine was something I badly needed to give my life some structure and order in these strange circumstances. One day, I finished and climbed out just as the kids in the swim club were tumbling in for their daily workout and practice. That’s when I noticed that their new coach was unmistakably the same guy I had drooled over when I was a skinny, pimply kid, just beginning to realize I was attracted to guys, and he was the hunky teenaged lifeguard supervising us. I couldn’t deny that he had grown up just as much as I had, and the combination of a big dick and muscled ass in his speedo, and the dusting of salt and pepper in his hair, really turned my crank.

 

The task of sorting out the estate took months and was every bit as tedious and mind-boggling as I had feared, but it also gave me a chance to make valuable contacts in Toronto. One was a young accountant at the firm that handled my father’s financial affairs. This was none other than my first fuck buddy, Derikk Maddeson, who was now a junior employee in the firm. After a couple of business meetings, we went for lunch together one day. We laughed ruefully at the clumsiness of our encounters all those years ago, caught each other up on our respective lives, and generally settled into what became a rewarding friendship – but not friends with benefits. He now had a solid relationship with another swimmer whom he’d met in college. I met his partner, Aaron, a couple of weeks later over some after-work Friday drinks before they went out to a show.

 

Another story altogether came on my third or fourth visit to the lawyer’s offices, when I met a young intern, a Japanese man who was pursuing a degree in international law in Canada. Hiroshi (I never could pronounce his last name and he laughed when I tried) was a classically slim Japanese man with dark hair and eyes, and a solemn look that could dissolve into a glowing smile. He had a way of slipping a little ironic or amusing dig into almost any conversation, no matter how serious. For the first time in nearly a year, I found myself feeling attracted to another man. Hiroshi seemed to return my interest. At last, after a couple more business meetings, I took my courage in hand and asked him for a date on Friday.

 

We had a fascinating time finding out about each other over dinner. One thing that made us both laugh was when he said that he had come from Vancouver to attend law school in Toronto, basically to get out from under his family’s eagle eyes. This, of course, was the exact mirror image of my decision to move west. I quickly learned that, out of the office setting, he had a ready sense of humour, and the banter flowed freely between us. When we finished eating, he invited me back to his place “for one more drink” and things unfolded pretty predictably at that point.

 

Hiroshi was about as experienced as I had been when I first went to Vancouver, so there I was, at the ripe old age of 26, teaching another man everything the well-educated gay guy ought to know. I was bemused at the ironic fact that I was playing the exact role Carlo had earlier played with me. Hiroshi was a fantastic student, though, picking everything up really quickly from his slightly-older mentor.

 

To start with, I showed him the pleasure that could be experienced by slowly undressing your partner while he undresses you, in between rounds of kissing and stroking and touching and caressing. I then slowly kissed my way down his chest, paying due attention to both nipples (which he loved), and teasing him by bypassing his cock and going for his balls first. After giving both of those the full treatment, I came back up to his shaft and licked slowly up towards the head. The precum was already oozing out as I skinned back the foreskin, releasing the head. Before long, I had licked it all up, and then just went for it and plunged my head down on his dick.

 

Hiroshi cried out as I sucked him down. Despite being out of practice for months, it took me only a few strokes to get all the way down, sucking his whole long tool into my mouth and throat. The inarticulate cries coming from above me and the way his thighs were trembling and quivering made it plain that his fuse had been lit and he was about to explode. I sucked harder, and got my reward when his cock exploded, blowing a massive wad of cum into my mouth. I pulled back a bit, wanting to keep it up front.

 

When the trembling and convulsions abated, I stood and began kissing him, pushing his mouth open as I did so I could share his cum load with him. We kept kissing, pushing the cum back and forth between us, until finally we had swallowed it all. At last I let up, stepped back a bit, and looked at him.

 

“My god, Rick, that was amazing. I’m sorry I came so fast, but no one’s ever made me cum like that before!”

 

“Oh, that was just Act One. This is going to get a whole lot hotter before we’re done.” How little I knew. I let him take my hand and lead me to the bed, and we lay down there together.

 

Act Two began with my making love to Hiroshi’s ass with my mouth and tongue and fingers, prying his tight cheeks apart and working my way slowly inward. I wanted him to feel everything I could do to him and hoped he would remember it all to use on me later (as it turned out, he was bottom only, which was a pity, but I could live with it). In time, I got his hole as loosened up as his vocal cords, the one quivering and flexing, the other moaning and sighing and regularly uttering “oh, fuck!”

 

It was time. I pushed my cock into the crack and slowly began pressing against his hole. He was ready, and his hole practically sucked me into him. As I slid deeper, he moaned louder and his body twisted around on the bed like a snake. Eventually I hit the bottom, with my hips pressed tightly against his slender ass, and my entire body lying along his back, from our intertwined legs to my arms which I wrapped around his slim shoulders. And then I began moving.

 

Slowly and carefully, I rose up and pushed back down, lifting my cock out of his ass and then pushing back down into him. I repeated this five or six more times while he moaned and sighed under me, and then he said it.

 

“Harder, Rick!” I began speeding up. “Come on, Rick, give it to me!” I speeded up some more. “Is that all you’ve got? Fucking POUND ME!!!”

 

I pounded him. Much to my surprise, the normally quiet and reserved Hiroshi turned out to be a totally insatiable wild man in bed – what today would certainly be called a “power bottom.” I began pounding him with all I had, my trained and toned swimmer’s body straining every muscle and sinew to drive as deep and hard as I could into his tight little butt, and still he kept telling me to “hit me harder, dammit! Come on, stud, drive that thing into me like you mean it. FUCK MEEEE!!!!” I did my best to give him the ride of a lifetime, and still he kept urging me on to give him more, more.

 

Suddenly, I felt something give, the pressure on my cockhead reduced, and I knew the condom had broken.

 

“Dammit, the rubber just broke.”

 

“Fuck that, just keep pounding me. I want that dick and I want you to cum in me. Fill me up, stud!”

 

That did it. The combination of the sudden liberated feeling, the intimate stroking of my dick by his guts, the powerful driving force of my fucking, and his slutty voice egging me on, it was more than I could take and my cock suddenly convulsed and erupted inside his ass as he clamped down on me again and again.

 

“Holy shit, that was awesome!” Tired out from my exertion, I was about to pull out, but Hiroshi had other ideas.

 

“No, don’t stop. Keep fucking me with that big stud dick and give me another shot!”

 

Wow. This guy really was insatiable. But I pulled out anyway, tossing away the useless wreck of the condom as I did. I needed a change of position. I lay down on my back with my rigid dick pointing up into the air, and barked, “Get on there and ride me!”

 

He was just as crazy a cowgirl as he was a supine fucktoy. He sat right down on my dick, all the way, and then began heaving up and down on my shaft like a see-saw gone insane. Somehow, he was managing to flex his hole on each stroke, opening it as he plunged down, and then compressing to suck on my meat as he pulled back up. I was quickly learning that these Asian men might be slender but they had muscles made out of piano wire and endurance that made me look like a lazy slug by comparison. Hiroshi fucked himself halfway to heaven on my big hard cock, slamming himself onto it harder and harder until he finally sucked a second load out of me, filling his guts to overflowing, and yanking a huge load out of himself as he came at the same time. It was the first time I’d fucked anyone bareback since Carlo and was absolutely the wildest sex I’d ever had in my life.

 

When I finally recovered my breath, I asked him the foremost question in my mind. “Do you let all the boys cum inside you?”

 

His laconic reply startled me again. “No. And don’t worry, I just got my latest test results and I’m clear.”

 

“Then why…?”

 

“Because you already told me you were cleared after your messy breakup, and that you hadn’t been with anyone since. I wanted to know how it felt.”

 

“And…?”

 

“Amazing. Incredible. One hundred and ten percent. You’re the first man I’ve ever let cum inside me.”

 

Hiroshi and I dated long enough for my mother to notice, even amid her sadness and preoccupation, that I was spending more evenings and nights out than at home. She even asked when she was going to meet my boyfriend, but I just laughed and shook my head. I definitely liked him, but something held me back. It wasn’t just the lingering residue and sour taste from Carlo, either – although I had told Hiroshi all about that. But Hiroshi kept laying so much stress on his strongly traditional family back west, and I smelled trouble. I was right.

 

After we’d been dating for three or four months, he called me one day when I’d barely gotten home from seeing him at the office about an hour earlier. Right away, I could tell he was in distress, and I threw my mother an apology and headed right back out.

 

When I got to his place, he was sitting on the sofa, in a state of shock, holding a tear-stained and half-crumpled letter. He thrust it at me to read, but it was all in Japanese characters. I held him through another burst of tears and then calmed him down enough to read it and translate it for me.

 

In the letter, his father stated that he was suffering from cancer of the bowel, had only a few months to live, and asked Hiroshi to return to Vancouver to look after his mother and younger sister. The letter also asked him to marry “to keep the family name strong.” Once again, I was struck by the parallel, the ways in which his situation looked so much like mine seen in reverse, but now with an extra twist – that his looked like life viewed through the wrong end of a telescope, diminished, distant, like something out of a historic novel. And I knew he would do as his father had asked. The traditional respect for elders ran strong in him.

 

I finally persuaded him to eat something and heated up some soup from his fridge. Then we went to bed, but not for sex. I held him and comforted him as best I could, until he fell asleep.

 

In the morning, we both awoke early. He looked me in the eyes and said, “I’m going to pack tonight, reserve a flight, and leave  for Vancouver tomorrow morning. Before I go, Rick, please make love to me. It’s how I want to remember you. Nobody has ever made me feel the way you do. I love you, and I will always love you.”

 

I wanted to cry myself,  but I didn’t. That was pointless. I could read the determination etched in his face to do the right thing by his parents and family, and nothing I could say or do would sway him. So, instead, I did as he asked, and for one last time I used my fingers and tongue to make love to every inch of his body -- before I slid inside his beautiful ass and did everything I could to give him the farewell gift he’d asked for, riding him like a maniac one last time and then slurping my cum back out of his ass to share with him in a last round of snowball kisses. I knew in those final moments that I loved him, too, but I couldn’t say it, couldn’t make a cheap attempt to hold him back. If there was one thing that the whole horror show with Carlo had taught me, it was that there were times when I had to put the man I loved ahead of myself in my priorities.

 

After I fucked the cum out of him, and came myself moments later, after I’d shared all that cum with him, I held him close, nuzzling and kissing him as the tears ran down both our faces. Our time together had been short, it had been sweet, and now it was over. I got up, showered, dressed, and left with one final, lingering goodbye kiss.

 

I never saw him again.

 

********************

 

Rich closed his computer with a monumental sigh. What was this memoir teaching him about himself? The big lesson was that he could look in the mirror without flinching. He’d made mistakes, as everyone does, but he had learned to make himself live as a fundamentally decent person. If there was anything troubling him about the way his life had unfolded in Alcantara for the last decade, and about his relationship with Tommy, it was the conflict between his actions and his ethics. It was the actions that needed amending. His ethical roots were strong.

 

He looked at the clock. It was too soon for Tommy to be home, but he wanted a drink. Into the kitchen he went, mixing himself a gin and tonic with lime, and then came back to his desk and sipped it, still musing over the life had had lived and what it all meant.

 

As he pondered this, his confidential work phone rang. He picked up. “Hi, Rich, it’s me. I have to make this fast before someone hears me. Listen, we’re in trouble. He’s onto us. Someone ratted. You’d better get a really good cover-your-ass story ready before you see him again.” Then the click as the phone disconnected.

 

 

[daddybear54]

Chapter 6  Love and Blackmail

 

Tommy came home later than usual on Tuesday, and found Rich sitting in the twilight, no lights on, nothing done about dinner, nothing but an empty glass by his side on the table. He was asleep. Tommy sighed, picked up the glass, and headed for the kitchen to pull together an easy and quick dinner for them. He was no fool. He could tell that the “work issues” that were besetting Rich were big, complex, and troubling for him. He also guessed, rightly as it turned out, that the retirement of Benita Caladesa had triggered this latest round of unrest. Tommy wished he could do something to help Rich sort it all out, but he knew that Rich had to resolve his own demons and was struggling with them through his writing. He also knew, and acknowledged with sadness, that whatever was troubling Rich was something he would likely never know about, unless it somehow got leaked to the press.

 

When he had the food ready, he gently woke Rich up. Rich looked around, baffled at first, then quickly remembered his last chapter of his memoir and the unnerving phone call. He pulled himself up, went to wash his hands, and sat down to eat.

 

Tommy did make an effort to probe gently. He wasn’t at all surprised at the answer. “I’m sorry, Tommy – work issues. I can tell you, though, I’m trying to figure out how to clear it up quickly and painlessly so you can give an answer to the University about the Dean’s position. Two more days, maximum. I don’t want to hang you out to dry with the offer, but that’s the best I can do.”

 

“Thanks for this. At least, I can give them a timeline, let them know when my answer is coming. You know, they won’t find it any harder than I do to guess that Benita’s announcement is at the root of the problem.”

 

Rich smiled. “Deep in, but not right at the root. And it’s terrible trying to figure this one out, because it’s only the second time in my life that I’ve been completely at a loss about my next move. I’m sorry, that’s all I can say.”

 

Tommy nodded, smiled, and put it aside while they finished their meal. After dinner, Rich returned to his computer. He sat there and pondered. The second time, he’d said to Tommy. What was the first time? He opened a new chapter file and began.

 

********************

 

Fortunately, I didn’t have a lot of time to brood over Hiroshi’s departure because my mother had decided that she wanted to sell the house and downsize into a condominium. I didn’t blame her one bit, but it added another onerous task to the will itself. On the other hand, having the cash in hand for the house would make resolving the estate a bit simpler.

 

Chloe came down from her home in Ottawa where she was now attending university. With both of us there to speed the process, my mother went through the house reasonably quickly, picking out the things she wanted to save. These were mostly small items, keepsakes, and other treasures. The furniture mostly dated from when I was two or three years old, and thus could reasonably be disposed of for possible refurbishment and resale by other hands. Chloe and I also picked out such things as we wished to keep, mostly paintings from the walls.

 

While all this was going on, I began to realize another truth. I had to move back to Toronto. My mother was left with no other family close at hand, and I certainly owed her my support after the way she had backed me at the time I had come out. I was pretty sure I owed my generous treatment in the will to her efforts at bringing my father to understand why I had become the man I had.

 

All the same, I surprised her a bit when we set out to do some condo shopping, and I told her we were shopping for a building where we could find two good units – one for her, and one for me. She was, however, both happy and grateful that I had decided to come back to Toronto. In the end, we found two good units in one of the new buildings that were starting to spring up along the waterfront, overlooking the lake. She took one lower down, on the eighth floor, but I went all the way up to the twenty-third floor, loving the view out over the lake, the harbour, and the islands. Her only comment, unusually tart for her was, “Be sure you keep one or two chairs well away from the windows at that height, for me when I come to visit.”

 

The rest of the business went smoothly – arranging to transfer my credits from Mainland U. in Vancouver to one of the leading law schools in Toronto, clearing out and giving sixty days’ notice on my apartment in Vancouver, and saying goodbye to my numerous friends there. One night, a few of us were out pubbing together. As we sat, talking and drinking, the door opened and a distinguished gentleman whose face I knew from the business pages walked in, with a younger man following him. As they sat down, the younger guy was facing me, and I recognized him. Carlo. His face went a bit white as he saw and recognized me too.

 

I said to my friend Chris, who was sitting across the corner of the table from me, “I’m going to get up and go to the john. When I do, I want you to slide over and take my seat, then talk to Zane. When I come back, I’ll just sit in your chair.”

 

“What the…?”

 

“Be a good guy, and just do it.”

 

That way, at least I wasn’t facing Carlo when I sat down again. After one drink, Carlo and the man I was quite sure was a client got up and left. I never saw him again.

 

I have to be honest with myself. It wasn’t the memory of his casual abuse of my trust that upset me. It was the way the sight of him reminded me of how, in some very uncomfortable ways, I wasn’t at all different from him. And I wanted to be someone different, better, more trustworthy.

 

Back in Toronto, I quickly settled into new routines, making use of regularly scheduled daily open swimming times at the university’s beautiful 50-metre pool, and resuming my workouts until I was better than eighty percent of the way back to the kind of lap times I’d enjoyed in my club days. I also had a couple of hot dates with guys I met at the pool, and guys I met at bars. Nothing more secure, though. I’d given my mother a quick, condensed version of my experience with Hiroshi and she, sensing that the way it ended had been very unhappy for me, asked no more.

 

Fast forward. I finally completed law school, a year late, but with my usual top grades. With those numbers, I had no trouble lining up a law firm at which to complete my articling and prepare for the bar exam. My mentor was a distinguished senior lawyer, a partner in the firm, and (a warning sign of future trouble?) later disbarred for various shady dealings. Another student, Franklin “Frank” Abernathy, was articling with another senior partner who later also got disbarred as part of the same scandal. We became friends quite easily, having so much in common (he’d also lost his father). We also shared common convictions along the lines of making life more equitable for more people in society, an attitude which put us at polar odds with many of our co-professionals.

 

As our articling time came to an end, and we both successfully passed the bar exams, Frank had an interesting proposition to make. We were both highly successful students, we’d both had some intriguing hands-on life experiences, and we both came from well-to-do, mixed-marriage families involving what we now call “persons of colour.” Why didn’t we set up shop in our own office, becoming founding partners of the firm? I was the one who contributed the idea that we place ourselves in one of the under-serviced neighbourhoods full of recent immigrants.

 

Long story short: within less than a year, we’d gotten ourselves organized and “Dunnatore and Abernathy, Law Office” was in business with a staff of two lawyers, one clerk, and one secretary, all in a walk-up office above a family drugstore in the city’s northwest quadrant.

 

The choice of location above a drugstore was inspired. People quickly got to see and know where our office was. And we made a point of being seen and being approachable, out and about in the neighbourhood. We ate lunch in different neighbourhood spots every day, and we met all kinds of local residents that way. I wasn’t at all surprised that my skin colour made many people feel more comfortable approaching me, at first anyway – but they quickly found out that both of us were approachable and trustworthy. We quickly learned how to turn a request for free advice in a café into a request for an appointment in the office.

 

Before long, we had a good slate of clients, and found ourselves doing just what we would have done in a small town – a little of everything. We had real estate files, wills to prepare, traffic charges, divorce and custody cases to handle, along with a smattering of minor criminal matters and the odd civil lawsuit. We quickly developed a track record of success in court, and the word spread that we were both dependable and successful at getting results. In time, we had become so successful that we also had to rent the office next to ours, and then we each had our own office, with two secretaries and two clerks – and all six of us were busy as bees, day in and day out.

 

Somewhere along the way, I can’t recall exactly how or when, I gradually clued into the reality that Frank was also gay. We were both so immersed in our professional lives that our relationship had proceeded entirely on work lines, and was all about our lives as lawyers, not our lives after hours. I’d been open about being gay from the start, but Frank had not. It was less a case of his being nervous or shy, and more a case in which, while he may have preferred men, he was too busy to want or care about sex. His profession was all-consuming for him.

 

None of that reality stopped me from admiring him more and more, and finally from coming to love him, but as a friend. It seemed that, in law, there was nothing he couldn’t do, and I was continually awed by his ability to sense and dig out of his clients the key points that I might very well never have found. But, as always in my life, I was learning quickly by absorbing what I saw, heard, and read.

 

My own sex life was at a standstill. This was largely due to the fact that I was keeping longer hours again, added to the commute time from my condo downtown to the office. At least, as Frank pointed out to me, I was running against the main flow of traffic. This was before Toronto had grown to the point where rush hour became a 16-hour-long, all-directions-at-once madhouse.

 

Running our own office was exhilarating, rewarding, and exhausting all at once. I savoured the excitement of it all, but let the tiredness pass me by. After all, I was keeping up my workouts in the decent-sized pool of the condo building, even though I was having to do some of my swimming at rather odd times (I had asked for and, more surprisingly, received permission to use the pool for my workouts outside of normal hours as long as I didn’t admit anyone else). That gave me the energy to keep myself running at top speed during working hours.

 

I did notice that the fatigue was getting to Frank, though. Once or twice, I urged him to lighten up a bit, but he just laughed it off.

 

I was thirty-one years old, a success in my profession by my own slightly eccentric standards, and looking forward to more of the same, when my life took another one of those wild swerves. I came into the office one morning in 1998 to be greeted by Madge, Frank’s secretary, who asked to speak to me privately. I could tell she was crying. She said she had gotten a call from the hospital. Frank had been admitted in the early hours, and they were seeking his next of kin to contact. She had said she would ask me.

 

I called the hospital, identified myself as Frank’s business partner, explained that we had no information of any next-of-kin, and asked to speak to him. The receptionist on the phone asked me to come in and speak with the doctor in person, and I smelled trouble right away. I told Madge, and Lily, my secretary, to cancel all appointments for the day. I made my way to the hospital, a drive of several rush-hour miles. Asking my way through to Doctor Idris, I learned that Frank had died at 3:45 am of a massive heart attack. He was the same age as me.

 

I don’t need to go through all the shock waves that followed, the need to take charge of his estate until a trustee could be appointed, since no next of kin could be located at all, and the unpleasant yet morbidly amusing discovery that Frank, the consummate lawyer, had become the butt of the worst law school jokes by dying without a will. That meant that I had to dismantle our entire office, with all the complications that this entailed, in order to pay the share of his half-ownership to the estate, which would then revert to the government. What a mess. Paying off our loyal staff and saying goodbye to them on the last day was painful. They had all worked just as hard as we had to make our office function efficiently and were true friends as well as exemplary supporters. Add to that the fresh dose of pain at the loss of a valued colleague and personal friend, a man who had more in common with me than any other lawyer I had ever met -- or would ever meet in the years to come.

 

It took me a couple of years to untangle myself from all of that, and to find, interview for, and secure, a position as partner in a larger law firm. I’d enjoyed my time as a self-employed legal entrepreneur, but I was ready to get into a less tiring, less unpredictable position.

 

It worked out well. Indeed, it did more than that, for one of my first clients was the government of Alcantara, of all places, which required representation in a legal case before the Canadian courts involving the large, Canadian-owned (at that time) diamond mine which was wildly transforming the rural tropical paradise that I remembered. And that was how I first met Benita Caladesa.

 

She was a staff lawyer for the Alcantaran government, in the Ministry of Resources and Environment, and she immediately impressed me as resourceful, committed, and more than competent. They’d engaged our firm because they would save endless hours of hassle by having a lawyer expert in Canadian law and procedures to advise them as well as to officially represent the country in court. It was pure chance that they approached a firm which happened to have a half-Alcantaran lawyer on the staff, but that turned out to be a huge benefit because I was so familiar with the country already and knew so many things about Alcantara that any of my colleagues would have needed to have tediously explained to them.

 

Benita and I worked tirelessly together on preparing the case, and we succeeded in arguing rings around the mining company when the case came to trial. We also won the inevitable appeal, two years later. The upshot of the whole experience was that, quite naturally, she and I became lifetime friends. But there was more to it. She informed me of a recent change to the citizenship laws and urged me to apply for Alcantaran citizenship, as my mother had retained hers. Since Alcantara was on the very short list of countries whose citizenship was recognized by Canada for dual nationality, I leaped at the chance and within a couple of months got my first Alcantaran passport. I’ve never regretted it.

 

After the final appeal verdict was handed down, in April 2000, Benita invited me to come to a celebration cocktail party at the Alcantaran Embassy in Ottawa the following night, and I extended my stay in the capital one more day. At the party, I met the ambassador and his wife, the embassy staff, and a number of other guests. Aside from the court victory, the event was also a chance to find out more about Alcantara for a number of academics who were shortlisted for positions at the new University of Alcantara, opening that year in Portavedra. One of these candidates was a young Asian man who was considering accepting a term appointment to teach first-year courses in history and international relations. I had to ask him his to pronounce his name very slowly so that I could get it. He smiled, obviously used to this request by now, and carefully sounded it out.

 

“Tomoyoshi Takahashi.”

 

I tried -- and stumbled over the syllables while he laughed delightedly. After I asked him a second, and then a third, time to pronounce it again, he just chuckled and said, “Call me Tommy. Everyone does anyway.” I noted his cultivated and entirely idiomatic English, and my eyebrows must have arched a trifle – the typical lawyerly response which I had absorbed from my articling mentor. He laughed again. “I was born and raised in Canada, as were my parents. Just the traditional ancestral name, everything else about me is thoroughly westernized.”

 

It was the ready and joyous laugh that won me over – you might even say it captivated me. Besides Hiroshi, I had met a number of East Asian men, and one and all had been relatively quiet and solemn fellows until called upon to speak. Tommy was a totally different character right from the get-go.

 

We chatted for a couple of minutes longer, and I wished him luck on his upcoming appointment to the new university in Portavedra, which he had decided to accept. “I may even bump into you the next time I am down there,” I said in closing.

 

“I certainly hope so,” Tommy responded heartily, with a smile and a wink – and suddenly I was seeing our entire conversation in a different light.

 

As life continued in Toronto, as I built my reputation in the profession, as I worked through a steadily increasing line of high-profile cases with successful results, the memory of that conversation at the cocktail party would crop back up at odd moments. Funny how something as simple as a smile and a wink can ingrain itself into your mind.

 

The following December, I took my mother for a winter visit to my grandmother in Alcantara. Grandmother had sold the beach property, where the old family home had stood, to a developer, and was living in a new apartment building in the booming hillside neighbourhoods of Portavedra. The whole country’s appearance was dramatically changing due to the massive developments coming in the wake of the successful diamond mine on the island of Isabella. Most telling change of all was the opening of the airport. We were able to fly in on a nonstop flight, four hours from Toronto versus the former all-day trip of two flights and a ferry. Our fellow passengers were nearly all tourists, bound for the new and hugely popular resorts on Serafina, and one or two looked askance when I told them we were spending our holidays right in Portavedra.

 

My mother opted to stay for a couple of months, while I flew home again after a two-week vacation. That beach break did me a world of good, though, after all the activity of the last months.

 

The next year, I flew down with her again, and this time she decided she wanted to sell her condo in Toronto and live in Alcantara, full time. I agreed to handle the sale for her and said that I could pack up anything she wanted me to send down. She gave me a list of things, and then arranged herself an apartment in the same building as her mother.

 

One day in early December, during that trip, I was lounging on the beach, thinking my thoughts while working on my tan in my usual speedo. A voice cut across my reverie. “Excuse me. Haven’t we met before?”

 

I couldn’t see his face very well because of the hat and sunglasses. “I’m not sure, I can’t see your face.”

 

“Well, then, you take your sunglasses off too.” This was followed by a musical laugh – and I knew right away who it was. As soon as I pulled off my sunglasses, he laughed again. “Ah, yes, the man who can’t pronounce my perfectly straightforward Japanese name.”

 

I laughed myself, and said, “Well, feel free to pull up a chunk of sand and sit down.”

 

Passing lightly over the conversation that followed, it’s enough to say that the day progressed from there via swimming in the ocean – he was every bit as competent a swimmer as I was – to drinks in my hotel, then to a spectacular dinner in the hotel restaurant, and from there to a nightcap in my room. Somewhere along the line, Tommy had given me a new name.

 

“I can’t call you Rick, or Ricky. I can’t and I won’t. Too teenage boyish. And I won’t call you Richard, that’s for formal business meetings and embassy receptions. You’re Rich.”

 

“Well, yes, I am, but what does that have to do with it?”

 

He silenced me with a playful little slap, actually more than half a caress, across my hand. “I’m calling you Rich. It suits you perfectly, because you’re rich in so many things, not just money.”

 

Okay, I’m Rich – and that became my preferred name with him and with friends from then on. I not only couldn’t argue with Tommy, I didn’t want to.

 

Everything about Tommy captivated me, not just the laugh. A fascinating conversationalist, a light-hearted jokester who brought the same out in me (legal practice had a way of suppressing that part of my personality), a balancing serious and thoughtful side, a kind and caring heart, a gourmet cook, a wine and whisky aficionado, and a taut, lean body which cut through the water like a knife, with a noticeable bulge in the front of his speedo – I mean, really, what’s not to like?

 

It was easy to follow his example when he put down his glass, turned, and began to kiss me deeply as we sat together on the sofa in my hotel room. Things moved on from there, about as you might expect. Before long we were undressing each other, and his expert fingers were doing things to my body that no one before had ever managed, finding new touch points all over me to wake me up and make my erection bigger and harder with each passing second.

 

I realized he was having similar thoughts about me when he pulled down my briefs and said, “Wow! All this and well-hung too!” With that he dropped to his knees and swallowed my meat all the way down. If I’d thought his fingers were magical, then the sensations his talented mouth and throat were giving me were beyond miraculous. I was struggling to hold on, not wanting to cum too soon, because I wanted to get a really thorough look in at that firm, slim Asian ass.

 

At last, I urged him up and off, then stood, took his hand, and walked him over to the bed, turning down the covers before he lay down and urged me to join him. And that’s when he asked the Big Question that now preceded pretty much any and every trip to the bedroom. “Status?”

 

“Negative. Tested regularly.”

 

“Same here. Rubbers?”

 

“Only if you want to.”

 

He laughed and shook his head. I moved fast then, grabbing his legs and rolling him over, so that his muscled back tapered down temptingly towards that perfect ass. I had my face buried between those cheeks almost before he knew what hit him, judging by the surprised gasp and moans of joy. I ate his butt for a good fifteen minutes until I had my own cock rock-hard and dripping, and he had become a quivering mass of ecstatic jelly.

 

It was time. I placed my cockhead against his hole and felt it already beginning to open up, needing it, wanting it, avid to be fucked. As I began to slide into him, Tommy moaned “Yeaaahhhh,” in a long, sustained purr. His ass opened right up and ate my cock, all the way down, until it was completely hidden from view. Then I lay down, full length, on top of him, wrapping my arms around his neck, and kissing his cheek repeatedly. As I did that, I slowly squirmed around, making my tool stir his guts into a froth of excitement. He turned his head to the side and thrust his tongue deep into my mouth.

 

That was my signal to start humping. Moving slowly at first, I gradually accelerated, shifting gears until I was going at full highway speed, in overdrive, hips smacking out a rapid tattoo against his tight butt cheeks. As I did, I slowly lifted up off his body until I was leaning over him at an angle, driving and thrusting into him like a mad thing. At that speed, I couldn’t hold off long, and he knew it as well as I did.

 

He heard my harsh, irregular breathing, almost gasping for air, and started squeezing down as hard as he could with his ass muscles. I was seconds away from cumming, and he growled, in a sexy animal voice, “Come on stud, cum inside me! Fill me up with your seed!”

 

And I did. I exploded deep inside him, my cock pouring out a tidal wave of sperm into his body. As the intense spasms died down, my arms lost their strength and I collapsed on top of him again, once more exchanging tongue kisses as our breathing returned slowly to normal.

 

At last I asked him, “Did you cum?”

 

“No. I saved it for you.”

 

With that, Tommy suddenly reared up, throwing me clear off his body and over onto my back beside him. In the time it took me to think how can such a slim beanpole of a guy be so damn strong? he had my legs in the air and was prodding his rigid cock at my hole. I felt a momentary panic.

 

“Wait! I haven’t been fucked for years and you’re going to need some lube.”

 

“This will do.” He reached back, swiped his hand up his ass crack and came up with a palmful of my cum which apparently was pouring out of him. He slapped some on my hole, wiped the rest on his crack, and said, “There! Self-lubed!” Then he proceeded to push into my hole.

 

I let out a cry of protest, but Tommy muffled it by planting his mouth firmly on mine and kissing me passionately. To my amazement, it worked. Between the passion and the impromptu lube, and what I later recognized was a strong desire to be fucked again, my hole opened up and let him in.

 

Somehow, I’ve never forgotten my astonishment on that first night that such a slim man, inches shorter than me, could somehow swell his decent-sized but not giant cock large enough to fill and stretch me all the way. But that magical trick was what he did and then, pushing my legs back over my head, he proceeded to fuck me.

 

And boy, did he ever fuck me! I’d never had such a ride in my life, combining all the strength of some of the huge tops of my past like Andre with all the subtlety that only an artist of sex could bring to it. Tommy was an artist of sex, in no uncertain terms, and he gave me such a spectacularly varied ride that I felt ashamed of myself for my own relatively poor showing.  

 

He also lasted a lot longer than I did, changing positions, and fucking me six ways from Sunday at every angle you could think of. Every time he changed it up, he would grab my body and flip me into the new position as if I were a rag doll or his stuffed bear. At last, though, he returned to missionary and proceeded to pound me fast and straight and hard until his load erupted volcanically inside me. As he did, my cock, now hard again, started screaming for release. I grabbed it, jerked it violently seven or eight times, and blew another load across my chest and abs while he was still pumping his into me.

 

Afterwards, as we calmed down again, we fell back onto the bed side by side, and slowly rolled together. Arms around each other, we kissed until we got sleepy and then we let ourselves go, sleeping deeply and peacefully in our lovers’ embrace. The next night saw a tremendously varied return engagement, so to speak.

 

My mother and grandmother certainly noticed that they were suddenly not seeing as much of me. When they did see me, it was my mother who asked why. I invited them to guess, and my grandmother hit the nail right on the head. “Ricky’s met somebody, and he’s fallen in love, that’s why.”

 

I smiled sheepishly. My mother pounced on that right away. “When a man smiles like a sheep, you know he’s been shot through the heart by Cupid. Is it serious, Ricky?”

 

“I think so.”

 

For the rest of the week, we spent hours together every day, whenever Tommy’s schedule allowed. We sunned on the beach and swam in the ocean. We talked for hours about our lives, our pasts, our hopes, our dreams. We got around to a good selection of the new restaurants popping up in Portavedra, including a memorable dinner of local fish at Aquarius, which undoubtedly became – and remains – our go-to favourite. As I look back on that week, I realize now that we were laying the groundwork for a lifetime spent together, not that I quite saw it that way at the time.

 

On the last night before I was to fly home, I went to Tommy’s apartment. He’d cooked up a wonderful dinner of fresh local shellfish with a spicy fruit salsa, far better than any of the restaurants in town could offer. The wine was an impressive vintage from a small Austrian winery. The coffee was just as delicious.

 

After dinner, we sat and chatted for a few minutes, but then Tommy stood up decisively, reached out for my hand to draw me to my feet, and said, “We have so little time, and we’re wasting it.”

 

In the bedroom, though, we really took our sweet time making out, kissing and swapping tongues, and slowly, seductively undressing each other. He had such sensitive hands and fingers and could give me the shivers by stroking any part of my body with his gentle, magical touch. But I also loved the way his arms would slide slowly around my torso and then suddenly tighten, crushing my body against his as he roughened up his kisses, forcing his hot, demanding mouth hard against mine.

 

Eventually, we got right down to our briefs, and it was my turn to peel his off first. I had to pull his waistband a long way out to clear his cock which was already tenting the material, but eventually I got it clear and began to carefully tongue his tool. Before long he was holding the sides of my head and forcefully fucking my face, driving his hard meat down into my throat over and over. But then he started to pull back, saying, “I’ve got to stop before you make me cum.”

 

“Like hell you’re stopping. I’m going to drink your load right now.” I plunged back down, sucking harder than ever, and in moments his cock quivered, contracted, and expelled his sperm forcefully into my throat. I pulled back a bit to get it all in my mouth. Then I stood up and kissed him again, swapping his cum with him in an ecstatic snowball. My own cock was now dripping wet and ready for action, but I held off to let him recover. Instead of attacking him instantly, I swept him up in my arms, and strode to the bed while Tommy giggled joyfully like any blushing bride in a 1950s romantic comedy.

 

After I dropped him on the bed, I climbed on top and lay down full length. Over the next hour I fucked two loads of cum into his ass, and in between he returned the favour by loading me up again too.

 

Afterwards, as we lay curled up together, cuddling and caressing, I knew that this was it. I just knew. This was love – no, more than that, this was the great love of my life. This man was my perfect partner and counterweight, and I wanted to spend my life with him and no one else. And just as I was thinking that, Tommy spoke.

 

“I wish you didn’t have to leave tomorrow.”

 

“So do I, Tommy.”

 

“Rich, maybe this is crazy, and it’s certainly too soon, but I can’t help myself. Because when you know, you know. Rich, I love you.”

 

“It’s not crazy, and it’s not too soon. I love you, Tommy. I love you and I want to be with you forever.”

 

That was it – the moment we committed to each other for life. We never questioned, never doubted, never turned aside from that purpose, from that night on.

 

He sighed, a sigh full of bliss and contentment and, laying his head down on my chest, he fell asleep. I followed right after him into dreamland. I dreamed of being with him, of living together in a beautiful house, high up on the hills, overlooking Portavedra. When I thought about those dreams afterwards, on my flight back to Canada, that’s when I realized what I should have known all along, that Alcantara was really my natural home and the place where I belonged – but it was because Tommy was there.

 

When I awoke in the morning, he was propped up on one elbow beside me, kissing me awake. He then backed off and looked at me with a twinkle in his eye. “Welcome back to real life, Sleeping Beauty.”

 

I reached for him, pulled him down into my arms, and began kissing him intensely and deeply. But he pushed me away again, shaking his head in mock disapproval. “Uh-uh. You need to get down to the airport ferry terminal and check in for your flight before the ten o’clock ferry to the airport, and I have to clean up the mess you’ve left here before my one o’clock lecture. Up and at ‘em, lover boy!” What else could I do but laugh with him? But I got up, showered, dressed, and downed a delicious cup of coffee and two homemade hot croissants before it was time to say goodbye. I’d already said goodbye to my mother and grandmother the afternoon before, telling them that I would go directly to the airport in the morning. I’d also checked out of the hotel a day early. And I didn’t want to go. But I knew it was only for a short while, just long enough to finish off my cases in Toronto and clear out my condominium and my mother’s condominium for resale.

 

However, the senior partners of the firm had different ideas. When they got wind of my plans to leave the firm and move out, they called me in to offer me a different approach. Thanks to the case for the Alcantaran government, we’d gotten several other requests for representation from Alcantara. The partners were aware of, and entirely sympathetic to, my desire to be with the man I loved. They had also done their research and determined that there was a dire shortage of general law offices in the country. Their idea was that we would expand our reach by opening an office in Portavedra, using several lawyers and extending service across the entire country. And they would add me to the senior partners of the firm, putting me in sole charge of the new office. I was up for that challenge.

 

Within a month, I had completed the task of wrapping up my life in Toronto and had moved in with Tommy in Portavedra. His apartment was all right for one but a bit crowded for two, and it would soon be time to go shopping for something bigger and better.

 

At the same time, I was going through the bureaucratic procedures involved in recertifying myself to practise law in Alcantara. This was less of an ordeal than I had feared, since Alcantara (like most of Canada) used a legal system based on the British common law tradition, which had been adopted wholesale after independence in the 1820s. Within a few months, I was cleared to go to work, and proceeded to establish my firm’s office in a bright new building downtown, near the waterfront, as well as hiring two young local lawyers to work for us.

 

One of the first people I connected with upon settling in Alcantara was Benita. I promptly invited her for dinner and Tommy just as promptly charmed her with his easy-going welcome to our home. She, and her husband Grigor, became frequent and welcome guests. We also invited my mother and grandmother to visit with us, and they too succumbed quickly to Tommy’s polite deference and kindness as much as to his bubbling good humour.

 

At the time, gay life in Alcantara was rather thin on the ground, but I saw no reason to conceal myself after having lived openly for so many years. When we held a reception to celebrate the opening of the office, I introduced Tommy to all and sundry as my life partner. By this time, too, I had finally – finally – mastered the trick of pronouncing his name. That made it easy for him to add on the usual, “but just call me Tommy” every time I introduced him.

 

The event was written up in the local media and, just like that, Tommy and I became the Number One gay power couple and flag bearers in Alcantara (the term “power couple” hadn’t become common currency yet, but that’s definitely who and what we were). He took it in his stride, as he did most things that came his way. I was the one who found all the publicity a bit hard to get used to.

 

Once the office was up and running, it was time to go house-hunting. I don’t know much about the various theories of prevision, but I know that we went to visit one house high up on the west side of the harbour, and as soon as we walked in I recognized it as the house I’d seen in my dream the year before. We bought it the next day. We then set to work on renovations, of which the largest was the major expansion of the relatively small deck and tiny little plunge pool out the back. That simply wasn’t good enough for two dedicated swimmers, and within a year we had a huge, paved terrace, partly covered by a projecting roof, a generously-sized pool, and an eight-person hot tub that together made outdoor living in all seasons a pleasure. Of course, being tropical, Alcantara had only two seasons: Wet and Dry. But even the wet season wasn’t bad at all, since the rain usually came on later in the afternoon and we were both born early risers.

 

Within a couple of years, we had become fixtures on the local scene. People waved and called out greetings on the streets, which was not actually that uncommon in Alcantara, but it still surprised me how many people knew exactly who we were. Tommy had been offered a permanent position on the tenure track, which he would not likely have gotten at any established school at such a young age. The University of Alcantara, being brand-new, was anxious to build up a competent faculty.

 

The condition was that he had to finish his PhD before he could be tenured. We had a long talk about that, and the long and the short of it was that he would have to return to his school in Toronto for a while, finish off some additional research, complete the writing of his thesis, and then defend the thesis. He was likely going to be away for half a year at least.

 

Neither of us were very happy about that, but it was a job that had to be done. Before he left, we had a long talk about what we would do while we were apart, and especially about what we would do if we had the opportunity to have sex with other guys while we were separated. We finally agreed that it was likely to happen, and that we should go ahead with no guilt feelings – but that using condoms was an absolute must in each case.

 

We parted reluctantly, with some of the longest kisses on record as we said goodbye, and then he was off and on his way to the airport, and I was returning home to – yet again – a depressingly empty house. We talked on the phone several times weekly, and I was still hoping to be able to get away for a few days to go up and visit – but the office was so damned busy that trying to escape seemed harder than ever.

 

And then, one night at around the three-month mark of Tommy’s absence, it happened. A handsome young guy with a mass of curly blond hair perched on a bar stool near me at Aquarius and struck up a conversation. His name was Mikael, and he was here for a job interview with the government. He didn’t specify what job he was being interviewed for but hinted that it could make his career. He was a nice guy, with a friendly manner and (as I could see through his clothes) a good body, and I was enjoying the company.

 

At last, though, I called for his bill and mine, and paid them both off. As we walked out together, he thanked me, and then asked, in a sultry voice, if there was anything he could do to make it up to me. From there, it was only a minute before I had agreed to go to his hotel room.

 

Mikael was a total bottom, and that suited my mood. We made out for some time, undressing each other with a little haste, and then I went to work on his pretty, round ass with tongue and fingers. Before long, I mounted him from behind, pressing my way inside his ass and fucking him with a good deal of energy. My itch needed to be scratched in the worst way. It wasn’t until after I’d given him a deep, vigorous pounding and cum inside him that I withdrew – and found that the condom had burst so that I’d filled him up without meaning or wanting to do so.

 

It was two months later that I met him again, and then in a very unexpected way. As part of another case I was working on for the government, I was called to a meeting with the then Premier and the Minister of Transportation and Communications at the office of the newly-elected President, Desmond Flowers. I gave my name to the receptionist when I arrived, and she said, “The President’s Executive Assistant will be here in a minute to take you back.” When the assistant arrived, it was Mikael. I recovered from the surprise quickly and greeted him conventionally and we walked down the hall, through the suite of offices to the President’s conference room.

 

After the meeting, when the receptionist was out of earshot, he quietly invited me to meet him at his apartment and slipped me a card with his address. I agreed to go that night at 8:00 pm. Before we did anything else, I told him that this would be the last time I would meet him as my partner would be returning in a week. I also told him what Tommy and I had agreed on, so he would know it was all above board.

 

Once again, I gave him a really thorough fucking. This time, though, when I felt the condom pop, I pulled out at once and finished off by hand, squirting across his back. That was when I realized that Mikael had probably tampered with the condoms in some way. No question about one thing, though. He was a good fuck, a good bottom, with a nice body and a good tight hole – but the magic which I always felt without fail with Tommy just wasn’t there at all. I didn’t need to tell Mikael that and maybe hurt his feelings. It’s just a pity that I hadn’t been a bit more observant in his bedroom.

 

Tommy and I had a joyous reunion. He flew in on Friday afternoon, arriving at the house at 7:00 pm to find that I had a dinner all prepared, in the crock pot. I had every intention of having my way with him as soon as possible. I’d gone to the doctor for a test, “just in case,” after the first time I’d fucked Mikael, and it was all clear. I had repeated the test before Tommy came home, and again all was well.

 

Best of all, Tommy had eaten on the flight and was perfectly agreeable to having our dinner later than usual. We got through half a glass of wine each before we locked mouths, moved sideways into the bedroom, still kissing, and proceeded to undress ourselves without bothering to stop kissing. The first wild round of sex saw each of us blowing a load inside the other’s ass, and it happened far faster than usual. We were so turned on to be together again that we got through two fucks and two enormous cum loads in barely twenty minutes. I don’t think I’d ever been that fast, even as a horny-beyond-belief teenager.

 

By that time it was all but full dark outside, so we dashed out and leaped into the pool with nothing on, frolicking happily in the water, splashing each other, kissing each other, and quite a bit of groping each other. Both of us were still fully erect – at least, until the flashlight played over us and a voice with the full Majestic Authority of the Law demanded, “All right, what’s going on here?”

 

I gave him my name, and explained that my life partner, Tommy, had just come home after a prolonged absence, and we were making up for lost time. He chuckled, and said, “We had a phone call of complaint from a neighbour down the road. How they could see anything this time of night, I don’t know. Probably got  one of those infrared scopes. Just cover yourselves when you get out, and don’t try it again without suits on.” I thanked him, he withdrew, and Tommy and I scrambled out, holding a hand each over our now-shrunken cocks as we dashed into the house. As we went I glanced to the left and saw Mrs. Ironwood, three houses away, looking at us disgustedly. Inside, I told Tommy what I’d seen and we dissolved into helpless laughter.

 

We then threw on some clothes and poured some more wine before finally sitting down to the Caribbean hotpot which I had cooked up. After all that energetic activity, it definitely hit the spot. Once we’d cleaned up from dinner, we headed right back to bed, making love less energetically but no less passionately until nearly midnight, when we drifted off to sleep, safely in each other’s arms once again.

 

With Tommy back home, officially placing the letters “PhD” after his name, and taking up his full-time tenured position, we both felt completely established. One other step was needed, and that came when Tommy announced that, like me, he wished to acquire Alcantaran citizenship. On the strength of his relationship with me, he was granted an unusual exemption to be allowed to retain his Canadian citizenship as well. We had definitely put down roots in our new homeland.

 

About six months after Tommy’s citizenship ceremony, I got a call from Benita asking to speak to both of us on a business matter. We invited her for dinner, and Grigor too, but she came without him, which surprised me. After we’d savoured Tommy’s lightly spiced chicken a la king (in homemade puff pastry shells, no less), she came to the point of the visit.

 

“I’ve decided that I’m going to run for the Assembly, for the Social Democrats. My work has given me a unique perspective on the challenges that Alcantara faces with all this massive growth going on. I think I can bring some much-needed wisdom to the table, especially as we will certainly have to re-arrange the seat distribution in the Assembly soon, and then create a number of new seats to make it all work. Rich, I wanted to ask you if you would take on the management of my campaign. And Tommy, I needed to make sure you were also on board if he chooses to do so.”

 

My instinctive reaction was that I would like nothing better than to help Benita realize her ambition, but I knew that I couldn’t do it. I knew she would have to resign her government job to run. My firm had just taken on two big cases for the government, and I couldn’t help her on the election without creating a massive conflict of interest.

 

“I’m sorry, Benita. I’d really love to help you, but I can’t.” I explained the situation to her, and she nodded her understanding. I was truly sorry to let her down and said so. Benita, though, never remained down for long. It was her style to always keep moving forward, through all the twists and turns in the road, and my inability to help certainly would cause no harm to our friendship.

 

I wasn’t at all surprised, but truly delighted when she won her seat by a landslide, winning more votes than her three opponents together (Progressive Labour, People’s Party, and Conservadores). She was one of a group of four new, younger members who were elected by the Social Democrats, and experts all felt it was a forecast of the larger results at the next election, since the incumbent Progressive Labour government was getting too cozy in the seats of power.

 

As it turned out, things didn’t quite pan out that way. The next election came unexpectedly quickly, after less than two years, when a major financial scandal caused a mass exodus from the Progressive Labour caucus, the defeat of the government, and the resignation of the Premier. However, the governing party managed to nominate new candidates in all seats, select a new leader, and eked out another slim majority win at the polls. The demoralized leader of the Social Democrats, now a 3-time loser, resigned in his concession speech on election night. And Benita came calling again.

 

This time, she’d decided to run for the party leadership. I might still have government cases on my docket, but this was a job I could do. I plunged wholeheartedly into organizing her campaign, and Tommy (somewhat to my surprise) contributed hours of his time as well. We lined up a small but tight staff group, produced position papers and speech outlines (just outlines, heaven help the backroom boy who tried to give the supremely articulate Benita a pre-written speech!), and lobbied endlessly and intensively. When the leadership votes were counted, Benita won a decisive victory on the first ballot, shocking the old-line party greybeards.

 

Through the next four years in opposition, Benita made a habit of running rings around the leader and members of the governing party, repeatedly skewering the weaknesses in their policies as decisively as she had speared the corporate arguments in that case in Canada when I first met her. Tommy said to me once, as we watched her in action on the news, “You know she’s going to be the next Premier.” I nodded. “And when she runs again, she’s going to ask you to run as well so she can put you into her Cabinet.”

 

“You think?” I replied ironically. But Tommy, for once, was dead serious.

 

“Yes. She is. And you’ll do it. And I’ll have to be a politician’s wife.”

 

We both laughed at that, but by now I had a healthy respect for Tommy’s ability to read me. And sure enough, it all panned out exactly as he had predicted.

 

During her years in opposition, the government had undertaken the necessary changes to the composition of the Assembly. The legwork of actually doing it had been handed to a non-partisan commission, with professional statisticians and surveyors to make sure it was done properly and clearly.

 

When the time came for the election, I successfully secured the party’s nomination for the Greenhills seat, one of six new seats created on the island of Alcantara. It included the street where we lived. Two new seats were added on Serafina, and two on Isabella, reflecting the larger permanent populations on those islands.

 

Tommy became my campaign manager. I had taken a year’s leave of absence from my job to avoid any suspicion of conflict of interest. When asked in an all-candidates meeting, I immediately declared that if I won the seat, I would instantly resign outright from the law firm. I had very clear ideas about the importance of well-planned development, especially in the semi-rurals area outside the centre of Portavedra, and about the need for clearer legislation on a number of the social issues which development brought in its wake. When the votes were counted on election night, 2009, I won my seat by a clear majority, while the Social Democrats under Benita swept the board, winning all but 4 of the 31 assembly seats.

 

My partners at law, and the staff in Alcantara, accepted my resignation with genuine regret.

 

And, exactly as Tommy predicted, Benita called me the next day. After I had offered her my congratulations, she immediately said, “Now, Rich, congratulations right back at you. Not just for winning Greenhills. I would like to invite you to serve in my Cabinet as Minister of Justice.”

 

“I would be honoured.”

 

“Hey, Rich, let me finish, will you?” Benita was never one to stand overlong on her dignity. “As I was going to say when somebody interrupted me, Minister of Justice -- and Deputy Premier.”

 

“Thank you, Benita. As I said, I would be honoured. But, and I’m sure you’ll understand, I need to talk to Tommy before I can give you a decision.”

 

“Of course, Rich. Can you let me know by, let’s say, Thursday?”

 

It was Tuesday. “Of course, I’ll talk about it with him tonight.”

 

Tommy didn’t waste any time beating around the bush. When he walked in the door from work, his first words (in a very arch tone) were, “Get any interesting calls from any lady friends today?”

 

Of course I laughed. And then I filled him in on the situation. His reply was absolutely typical.

 

“Rich, I know this is what you want to do. And I knew it would happen when I agreed to run your campaign. No need for you to worry, I’m behind you 110% of the way.” I took some time out to kiss him happily, to run through the day’s events over dinner, and to enjoy a relaxing evening in bed, watching a movie on TV. Okay, we didn’t spend much time actually watching the movie, because the live action there in the bedroom was so much more interesting than a synthetic love scene between a couple of disinterested actors mouthing formulaic lines.

 

The new Premier and Cabinet were sworn in by President Flowers the next Monday morning, followed by the traditional formal photograph and luncheon at the official Presidential mansion. The President was at his benign, patriarchal best that day. He’d been a leading figure in Alcantaran electoral politics for two decades, rising to become a successful premier for two terms. After he’d retired from the legislative sphere, he had won election as the President, the ceremonial figurehead of government. Since that time, his party – the Conservadores – had been steadily dropping in popularity, but his own personal popularity as an elder statesman ensured that he had continued to win re-election to this dignified post.

 

Two days after the swearing-in, I got a call from his secretary to set an appointment for the Friday morning. At that meeting, he was a different man altogether. The gloves were off.

 

“Sit down, Mr. Dunnatore. I have something here which I think will be of interest to you.”

 

He switched off the lights and powered up the TV and the DVD player. What appeared on the screen was a hot gay fuck scene. At least, it was hot until I heard the voices and realized it was a clear-as-day video of me fucking Mikael. Faces, voices, everything about it was totally exposed to the all-seeing eyes of the universe.

 

My instant reaction was fury at that goof Mikael for filming us without telling me. Then I went through equal anger at myself for not being alert to the presence of a camera, and – as a side thought – wondering what Carlo would say if he saw this. Of course, Flowers was watching me closely and saw all those emotions playing across my face. There was no point in denying the validity of the recording. I had confessed as clearly as if I had said the words aloud.

 

He switched off the TV and turned the lights back on. “I’ll spare you any further embarrassment – for now. The question is, what are you going to do about it? I’m sure you wouldn’t want your boyfriend (he spat the word out) to have to see this.”

 

“He might enjoy it. I already told him all about me and Mikael.”

 

Flowers drummed his fingers on the desk. “That’s not my major concern, and it shouldn’t be yours either. He might not care, but a large percentage of voters probably would. Not having lived in this country as long as I have, you might not realize entirely just how many of the votes the Social Dems received were what might be classified as ‘protest votes’ – in other words, votes that you can’t necessarily count on winning again. Also, there’s the question of how many old-time Alcantarans might find your lifestyle, ah, objectionable.”

 

He was wrong. I was aware of these fine distinctions. Unlike him, I had campaigned extensively door to door.

 

“Now, Mr. Dunnatore, if you are a wise man, and I think you are, here is what you are going to do. With some help from you and Mikael, we are going to set up a new interviewing process. I have several retirements coming up in my staff over the next few years, and those vacancies are mine to fill. I’ve already spoken to Mikael about his role in this process.

 

“Mikael’s role is to conduct preliminary screening interviews with all candidates. He will then take selected candidates through a further interview process, similar to the one you just saw on the screen. If they pass his approval, they will then be referred to you. You will likewise interview them, and in exactly the same manner as you did with Mikael. Once you have interviewed and approved them, they will be sent on to me for my final approval, and then appointed to specific positions on my staff with certain, ah, added responsibilities. All interviews are to take place in your office, and on scheduled office time.”

 

I was almost in shock at his audacity. But I quickly rallied – or tried to.

 

“And if I refuse to participate in this flagrantly illegal scheme?”

 

He smiled benignly. “I think you would shortly get a call from the Premier, demanding your resignation after she’d seen a certain video recording making the rounds on the internet – with names.”

 

I knew that I was trapped. “I’ll have to think about this.”

 

“Don’t take too long to think. Mikael will be conducting his first interviews next week. He already knows exactly what the expectations are, and what will happen to him if he doesn’t proceed according to plan. I’ll expect your answer no later than Monday morning.”

 

He stood up and nodded in dismissal.

 

 

 

[Guest]

What can I say, that's wonderful. 1st the writing is spectacular, I think it's your job, or it should be. It's so evocative, I could really see and feel what was going on! And the story, this should be a movie! I wonder what's autobiographical and what's invented, it all sounds so real. Love it love it love it, bravo!!

[daddybear54]

3 hours ago, ChaserKubby said:

What can I say, that's wonderful. 1st the writing is spectacular, I think it's your job, or it should be. It's so evocative, I could really see and feel what was going on! And the story, this should be a movie! I wonder what's autobiographical and what's invented, it all sounds so real. Love it love it love it, bravo!!

@ChaserKubby Wow, thank you so much for the compliments. Writing's not my job, although I've done a great deal of writing all my life. I just enjoy and love writing! Like most of my creative stories, this one has little bits of autobiographical or real-life material woven into it, but always mixed up with more invented things, or else I create characters made up of bits and pieces of many people I've known (Rich, Tommy, and Benita all fit that formula). Thank you again!

[daddybear54]

Chapter 7  Capital Confidential

 

Rich sat in the dark, remembering the boiling wave of resentment and impotent fury that had overwhelmed him as he walked out of the President’s office that day, nine years ago. He’d flung a dagger look from the eyes at Mikael as he stormed by and caught a quick glimpse of Mikael cringing as he shot out the door.

 

Even now, he could remember all too clearly the moment as he’d walked out of the building when he realized that the real trap he had been caught in – and which still held him securely to this day – was entirely of his own making. He wasn’t trapped by the President’s machinations, but by his own love of political power. Only a few days since he’d been elected, but the lust for power already held him securely in its claws. All these years later, that hold was as tenacious as ever. And of course, he’d gone along with the President’s sickening plan.

 

Now, the lure of the party leadership and the Premier’s office, both effectively his for the taking if he wanted them, was a siren song, luring him even further into his self-made prison. He might just as well hold a press conference and announce publicly, “I’ve just taken the last of my honesty and integrity and flung it away with both hands.”

 

Rich had never been so trapped in his endless cycle of self-loathing since the night he’d driven Carlo away. He looked at his hands -- and realized that they were shaking and he couldn’t control them. He desperately needed to break free from his mental treadmill.

 

He stood up and went into the bedroom. Tommy was lying there, reading before going to sleep. He took one look at Rich’s face and leaped up.

 

“My God, Rich, what on earth is wrong with you? You look like you just faced Death itself.”

 

“Help me. Help me, Tommy. I can’t do it. I can’t do it any longer. I can’t.”

 

“Come here, Rich.” He folded Rich in his arms and stood there, hugging him tightly while his whole body shook and trembled. “Rich, I’m right here, with you and for you, forever. But I can’t help you because I have no idea of what’s eating you. And it’s a work issue so you can’t tell me. Come here, lie down and cover up. You’re going to make yourself sick. I’ll go warm up a glass of milk, that should help you relax and sleep.”

 

After Rich had drunk the warm milk – and it did help – Tommy got into bed with him and wrapped his arms securely around him. Rich was clinging to Tommy like a drowning man, but eventually the strength of his hold grew less frantic as he drifted into sleep. Tommy continued to hold him close, and they fell asleep together.

 

In the morning, Rich at least looked better rested, but he still had those dark shadows under his eyes. Tommy knew that his husband was at the point of crashing into a wall from stress, and all he could do for Rich was to be there, ready to pick him up and help him recover once it all came out in the wash. A swim and breakfast helped as always, and so did Rich’s decision to take another day off work. He spent half an hour on the phone with Lucy, going over a few critical issues, and then had her cancel a scheduled meeting with the
Court Administrator. He needed to finish the homestretch of this memoir, hoping desperately that he would then understand what to do about his dilemma. After Tommy had left for the University, he sat down once again at his laptop.

 

********************

 

During the days after that hideous meeting with Flowers, I had a couple of phone conversations with Mikael to work out the details of how we were going to run this scheme and what code phrases we’d use to disguise it from our respective staffs and associates. He was just as upset as I was about it, but it simply wasn’t safe for us to talk about our personal feelings. I was willing to bet that Flowers had illegally tapped into our phone lines.

 

By this time, I really did feel sorry for Mikael, even though he had gotten me trapped in this mess. He had a far worse time of it that I did, having to try to proposition every single applicant, no matter how unappealing they might be to him personally. He was really trapped between a rock and a hard place, especially because he could easily go to jail for weeding out all the female applicants and older men before the interviews – a flagrant violation of the anti-discrimination laws. His instructions had been clear: young, male, in good shape.

 

Bruno was the first one to get sent to me. I saw him one afternoon at three o’clock when most of my staff were out. I gave Miriam, my secretary, and Lucy, my executive assistant, strict instructions to hold all calls and not to disturb me. A “DND” notation on my calendar reminded them both.

 

Bruno was actually a very good-looking young man, tall, lean, blond, and dressed in a neatly tailored suit that showed his figure to perfection. I made small talk of a work-related kind while I sat on the edge of my desk in front of him, periodically “adjusting” my cock and balls in my suit trousers. I’d deliberately freeballed for the afternoon.

 

I was doing my best to give a really good performance because I was sure there was a camera hidden somewhere in my office, although I hadn’t spotted it yet. Mikael had told me that the blackmail Flowers had used on us would be repeated, with variations, on each of the interviewees.

 

After about five minutes, I could see that Bruno was staring at the bulge that was slowly growing in my crotch.

 

I asked, “Do you normally stare like that at business meetings?”

 

“Uhh… no. No. It’s just….” He fumbled anxiously for something to say, to cover himself.

 

“It’s okay, Bruno. We’re men. It’s normal. I’m enjoying the view too.” With that, I let my eyes run slowly down his shapely body and rested them on his trousers, which were definitely swelling. “Come here.” I beckoned him and he stood up. “It’s okay, Bruno, the door is locked.” I took his hand and rested it on my bulge. “Want a look?”

 

He did. He slid my zipper down and my cock jumped right out like a striking snake. He had his hand around it and began stroking me. “Bruno, get down there and suck it.”

 

His mouth was talented. He got right down to work on me, and soon had me moaning. After about five minutes, I was rock-hard and my precum was leaking out. That’s when I told him, “Okay, stand up.” He did. “Turn around and lean on the desk.” Then I reached around him, unfastened his belt, and undid his trousers. As they dropped, I grasped his briefs and slid them down, popping them over his cock which sprang loose. I grabbed a small bottle of lube out of my pocket, squeezed some out, and proceeded to grease up my cock, and then to start fingering his hole and spreading the lube around and into him.

 

He groaned, turned his head, and said, “I’ve never been…. I mean, I’m always the top.”

 

“I’ll bet you enjoyed Mikael, then. He loves a big boy like you with a big, long cock like yours.”

 

“Yeah. I did.”

 

“And I love a nice boy with a firm round ass, especially one that’s never been fucked. Are you a virgin?” Bruno nodded. “I’ll be gentle. I want you to enjoy this.” I was practically purring into his ear, but all the time I was watching my own actions from another point of my mind and despising myself for every second of my awful fake-pornstar performance.

 

It took about fifteen minutes and a lot of lube, but eventually I got my cock all the way up inside Bruno’s tight, tight hole. Definitely a virgin.

 

“God, that feels awesome, Bruno. I’ve never had a virgin ass before. So tight and hot. Are you ready for more?”

 

He nodded hesitantly, and I began to slide slowly out and then back in. He moaned and sighed as I slowly worked my cock in his ass. Over the course of a few minutes, he relaxed his hole’s death grip on my tool and I speeded it up until I was driving into him at a good fierce speed, and his moans were becoming cries of passion. I was thankful that the thick stone walls of the building and heavy doors provided adequate soundproofing.

 

It was time. Time to relax, to forget about prying eyes, to forget about everything except the feeling of cock in ass, the feeling of a tight hole stroking me, the sensation of ecstasy rising slowly, higher and higher up my rod. And then it happened. I blew my load deep into his sweet virgin ass, filling his hole right up with five generous spurts of my seed. As I bred him, his cock was busily shooting another big load onto the floor. I’d have to clean that up fast so it wouldn’t leave a stain. As my orgasm died away, I pulled out, then knelt down and went to work on his ass, sucking and slurping my cum back out of him so I could swallow it. I was damned if I was going to do any kissing under threat of blackmail, and I was pretty sure that I had given Flowers what he wanted anyway.

 

As Bruno got dressed, I thanked him for a most interesting interview and said, “Mikael will be in touch with you about your final appointment. I’ll walk you out.”

 

After he’d gone, I sat there for a while, struggling with my conscience – or what was left of it. The only other thought in my mind was a devout, “Thank God for PreP.”

 

Each of the others that I got to see followed a similar pattern. After a while, I simply became numb to the whole process. They came in, I seduced them, I fucked them, I dumped my cum in them, and they left. It wasn’t exactly a continuous parade, but I typically saw four or five every year. Having the older and less fit-and-toned Flowers working them over was something that I imagine a lot of them couldn’t stomach, while the ones who did would be looking for other work soon enough. Something told me that Flowers wouldn’t be satisfied with just one interview per guy once they were hired.

 

Throughout my years in Cabinet, it went on. They came, we fucked, and they went. The one thing I was more and more sure of after each interview was that I despised myself, and even more, that I loathed President Desmond Flowers. That carefully-crafted public image of a benign patriarch who made lovely speeches about home and country, motherhood and family and mango pie, was all a sham. In reality, the man was a horny old goat, pretending to hate “faggots” while secretly fucking around with boys less than half his age left, right, and centre. All this, mind you, while his wife was slowly dying of a relentless and incurable cancer that didn’t have the decency to finish her off quickly. His behaviour was sickening beyond belief. And I still had no idea what his ulterior motive, his hidden agenda in the matter might be. I was certain, though, that he wasn’t going to all this trouble just to get a steady stream of hot young meat in his bed. That was his fringe benefit.

 

I was living a weird triple life. At work, I was the business-like cabinet minister at meetings, running his department, introducing legislation and steering it through the Assembly, and attending all kinds of ceremonial public functions. At night, I was the relaxed, funny, happy husband, loving every minute with his lifelong love. And at odd hours in between, I was a criminal – a pimp, procuring for the purposes of prostitution to all intents and purposes, even though I most certainly wasn’t living off the proceeds.

 

All that time, it was Tommy and my home life that saved my sanity. God knows what I might have done if I didn’t have that unswerving love to safely lift my release valve and let the stress escape.

 

There were sad times and happy times, of course. My grandmother lived long enough to be given a front-row seat of honour at my swearing-in ceremony and preened herself like a peacock as her grandson took his place for the formal Cabinet photograph. She died just a couple of weeks later, but at the ripe old age of 87 she had certainly had a good innings – and she passed gently, in her sleep. My mother was more distressed than I was, but even she wasn’t nearly as upset as she had been at the death of her father, years earlier.

 

At work, I had first of all steered through the Assembly a bill amending the Constitution to create a Supreme Court for Alcantara, a necessary feature due to the more frequent and more complex cases coming before the courts now that the country had such a booming population and economy. The old informal system of referring final appeals to a sub-committee of Cabinet couldn’t cope. Although there were some objections leading to minor amendments, the bill eventually passed unanimously. I stood proudly beside the Premier and the President as the President signed the amendment decree, although I thought he had a bit of a sour expression as he did so.

 

Shortly afterwards, I introduced a second bill which passed with very minimal debate, and again unanimously: a bill creating a small claims court, to take the numerous minor civil issues out of the regular court stream into a more informal adjudication process. This was modelled on the systems I had observed in Canada during my legal training and worked just as well for us in practice.

 

 For me, though, the personal highlight of my first term began when I requested a meeting with the Premier and showed her the draft of a bill creating the institution of civil marriage for any two consenting adults. The bill carefully avoided sexist language, but it filled an important gap by allowing Alcantarans to marry civilly, in front of a judge or registrar, without being forced (as until that date) to go to a church. This, of course, meant (although I didn’t promote that aspect of it) that same-sex couples would be able to marry too.

 

This one ran into rough waters in the Assembly. Because of my personal stake in the matter, I asked the Premier (and was permitted) to withdraw it as a government bill and reintroduce it as a private member’s bill. When the churches objected to possibly being forced to perform marriages against their beliefs, I pointed out patiently, again and again, that this bill defined civil marriages only, and that churches were still free under the Constitution to perform their marriages as they wished, without interference from the government or the courts.

 

Benita made a fire-eating speech in favour of the bill, in which she praised me to the skies as a perfect example of a fine man, a leading statesman, an exemplary lawyer, and a truly loving partner who happened to be gay. She finished, “And if this bill passes, I hope that Richard and Tomoyoshi will invite me to their wedding!” She sat down amid cheers from the government benches, while the lone member of the Conservadores scowled. In the public gallery, Tommy smiled happily at her perfect pronunciation of his proper name.

 

Before the final vote, Benita announced that it was a free vote to be held by secret ballot, so that all members were free to vote as they saw fit, according to conscience or the views of their constituents. The bill passed by a vote of 30 to 1, and it wasn’t hard to guess who the lone dissenter had been. At the signing ceremony, I stood proudly beside Desmond Flowers as he signed the bill, looking for all the world like he’d just been forced to drink poison. I’m sure no one there, except me and Mikael, was aware of just how fraudulent his performance was.

 

That night, gay citizens and residents poured into Portavedra from all three islands for a huge party in the community recreation centre. The organizers, thorough in every detail, had even thought to ask the ferry authority to run a few late boats to each of Isabella and Serafina so everyone could get home afterwards. I wasn’t aware that this party was in the works until a call came for me at 6:00, telling me that a car would be there to pick up Tommy and myself at 7:30. We’d actually been planning a slightly more private victory celebration, but we figured that this night was an important one to wave the flag in public, both figuratively and literally.

 

The party was an immense blowout, and it was attended by many straight allies as well as pretty much every LGBTQ person in the country. Benita was asked to introduce me, and she gave the shortest speech I could ever remember hearing from her. “Folks, you’re not here to listen to me. So welcome the hero of the hour, the Honourable Richard Dunnatore!”

 

I was astounded by the reaction. People stamped, yelled, chanted “Rich! Rich! Rich!” over and over, waving rainbow flags and Alcantaran flags. I stepped up to the podium and prepared to speak, but then the chanting began again, this time changing to “Tom-my! Tom-my! Tom-my!” They kept it up until he finally stepped up to my side. We kissed, and then stood with arms around each other for photos with smiles as wide and bright as the sun while the crowd cheered themselves hoarse. I can’t even remember what I said when I finally did speak, but I think I kept it short (it’s well known that a lawyer’s idea of a “short speech” can seem like half an eternity to non-lawyers!).

 

Then the band began to play, and everyone cut loose on the dance floor. At the first set break, the band leader shouted into his microphone: “All right, everyone! Rich’s bill passed, we’re all legal now, who’s applying for the first marriage licence?”

 

I was actually startled when a dead silence fell. Then someone (I think it was Mikael) started chanting again: “Rich and Tom-my, Rich and Tom-my, Rich and Tom-my,” and the whole crowd took it up.

 

I stepped up, took the microphone from the band leader, and waved for quiet. “Thank you so much, everyone, but I’d really prefer that we not be first because it will make it look like I did it just for myself and Tommy. Somebody else should go first because I did it for all of us, and for all those who come after us, not just for we two.”

 

After more chanting, though, Benita spoke again and convinced me that I both could and should accept the honour being offered to us by the community. “And you will,” she added.

 

At first, I wasn’t sure what she meant, but just then the Registrar-General, who was attending with his daughter and her partner, came forward. He’d made a quick dash down the street to his office and returned with some licence forms and the official seal. Tommy and I signed the papers right then and there, to uproarious cheers, and the Registrar signed and sealed the licence, then had me sign the next form to grant a licence to Sheila (his daughter) and Mary, amid more cheers as I signed and imprinted the seal. I had the legal authority to do it, as the Minister of Justice was also automatically the Attorney-General.

 

We were married on a Saturday three weeks later. Since we did want to invite a number of guests, the Registrar-General gladly agreed to come and perform the ceremony at our home. Our invitation went out informally, by email, and specified “swimsuits and coverups – after the ceremony it’s a pool party!” The guests included my mother, who proudly stood right by us as we pledged our lives to each other, exchanged rings, and signed papers. Tommy’s father Masayoshi, who’d jetted in from Calgary (his mother had died before I met him) stood on the other side. Benita and Grigor sat in the front row, and across from them sat Sheila and Mary. Behind them were an assorted group of political colleagues, Tommy’s university colleagues, Chloe and her husband Allan who’d flown down from Canada for the week, Tommy’s younger brother Mitsuru, and more. My mother, Benita, Sheila, Mary, and Chloe all fulfilled tradition by crying. Mitsuru gave a really clever and cutting best-man type of speech, and Masayoshi played the benign patriarch on behalf of himself and my late father. My mother gave a mother-of-the-bride speech for herself and Tommy’s late mother, Reiko. They both did it far better than Desmond Flowers would have. The wedding pictures, when we got them, displayed a gloriously mismatched rainbow of different coloured beach coverups, garish shorts, slogan tees, and even a couple of ghastly Hawaiian shirts.

 

The party was a raging success, with the pool filled for hours, excited conversations everywhere as everyone seemingly met everyone else, enough drinks to float the Titanic and enough food to sink that legendary ship all over again. We made sure that everyone understood the importance of staying at least till sunset, and we got a real beauty that night, with spectacular cloud colours in the west and a shower over the hills behind us even adding a rainbow in the light from the setting sun.

 

When I looked briefly down the row of houses to the left, there was Mrs. Ironwood, quickly lowering her binoculars, with a poison-pill expression on her face and its tightly-pursed mouth. I waved gleefully and she fled inside. No doubt, she’d seen that the Premier and half the Cabinet were at the party.

 

I was still riding the wave of energy from the success of the Civil Marriage Act when the time came around for the next general election. Buoyed by all that energy, Tommy ran an even more vigorous campaign for me and I scooped over 75% of all votes cast in Greenhills. Overall, our majority was reduced slightly as two more seats shifted, one to the People’s Party, and one to the Conservadores, but we still had solid control.

 

The second term gave no particular high-profile opportunities such as I’d had before, just a steady succession of legal consultations with colleagues about the contents of their bills, or about parliamentary procedure. A couple of times, I had to actively shoulder the Acting Premier responsibility when Benita went out of the country on official visits. It also happened twice when she went on holiday. Everything flowed smoothly while she was absent. When she came home on the last occasion and received my verbal report, she just smiled and said, “You’re ready.” That was when I first realized that she was contemplating retirement.

 

I couldn’t blame her. She was several years older than me, and it would be great for her to enjoy some peace and quiet with Grigor after all her years of hard work for Alcantara and its people. She loved travelling, and certainly deserved a chance to do it more – and to pursue her favourite pastime (also Grigor’s favourite) of golf.

 

I’d been idly thinking of the same thing, but it was still just idle speculation. There’s no question that the idea of following Benita into the Premier’s office appealed to me and my love of political power. I had no idea of what Tommy would think of that, and certainly needed to find out. He’d been more than patient in supporting me up to this time, and I didn’t want to force him into further collaboration. I knew that the role of what he himself had called a “politician’s wife” is a strenuous one, in ways which few outsiders can appreciate.

 

In the last year before elections would have to be held, I had the responsibility of preparing a slate of potential candidates for several new judgeship positions in different parts of the court system. I chaired a series of panel interviews (no, not that kind of interview) which considered a dozen or so candidates, with questions coming from senior lawyers, retiring judges, and a couple of university professors recommended by Tommy for their expertise in areas related to constitutional and civil law. The shortlist went to Benita, and she in turn passed it to a smaller panel of three to make the appointments. I was pleased with the quality of all the judges appointed, and they have often proved their worth in some rather complex and difficult judgements.

 

Finally, though, the election year was looming. The despicable “interviews” for Flowers and his candidates had continued, but not as frequently. I was beginning to hope that the end of this nightmare was in sight. Naïve, yes, but hope is sometimes the only thing that keeps us going.

 

He called me in for another meeting, and this time he laid out for me his grand plan to rewrite the constitution wholesale, granting significant new powers to the President and reducing the Premier and Assembly to mere yes-yes functionaries. I was truly appalled, not only by his effrontery in suggesting such a thing (tantamount to a dictatorship) but in thinking that I, a lifelong lawyer, would support and promote it. But he knew better. He now had a collection of thirty or more videos of my “interviews”, and as many more of Mikael, and I knew that he wouldn’t hesitate to use them. Once I was in the Premier’s office, I would either knuckle under to his mad scheme or be disgraced and driven out. 

 

I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t do it. But I wanted the Premiership. I wanted it so badly. What the hell was I going to do?

 

And it was at that point that inspiration came to me. All I had to do was to remove the source of my problem. And what, you might ask, was the source of my problem?

 

One thing I had to do for sure. I had to tell Tommy. Cabinet secrecy be damned, I was going to rip myself apart if I kept holding it all inside me. I had to admit everything, including the “interviews,” and risk what his reaction might be. I was in such a desperate state of self-hatred that I was even prepared to lose Tommy, if only I could get a bit of my integrity and honesty back.

 

That’s when I picked up my burner phone and called another burner phone. Mikael’s. He sounded worried when I explained to him what Flowers had in mind.

 

“Did you know about that?”

 

“No, he never tells me anything I don’t need to know. But it’s pretty obvious now that you’ve been his target all along. He just used me to get to you. Anyway, we might have a bigger problem. Ironwood is sniffing around for something. He’s been asking questions. I think one of the candidates leaked to him.”

 

Now I understood. The “he” of Mikael’s earlier panicky call hadn’t been a reference to Flowers, but to Ironwood.

 

Jonathan Ironwood was the leader of the Conservadores, elected to that position five years earlier, although he had yet to acquire a seat in the Assembly. My nosy neighbour of the same name was his aunt. It was a fine old Alcantaran name, dating back to a 17th century pirate who got the name due to a folk tale which claimed that a black magic spell protected the hull of his ship from cannonballs.

 

“Well, we can worry about Ironwood later. Right now, Flowers is the real threat. Now, Mikael, here’s what I want you to do….”

 

 

[daddybear54]

Chapter 8  Revelation and Recuperation

 

 

As soon as he woke up on Thursday morning, Rich knew that it was crunch time. He was going to have to decide -- and decide fast. What was he going to say to Flowers? What was he going to tell Tommy? What was he going to do about the party leadership? And most important of all, who did he really intend to become going forward? That last one was actually the Big Number One which he had been trying to confront ever since he had started working on his memoir – was it really just four days ago? It felt more like half a lifetime – because, of course, that was exactly what he had been recalling and setting down.

 

The real crunch, though, was that he had promised Tommy an answer today, so that Tommy could in turn make his decision about the Dean of Arts and Sciences position at the University. Rich owed him that. He knew that he actually owed Tommy so much more, but that was the time-critical element that mattered right now.

 

What had finally become clear to Rich was that he was going down exactly the same path as Carlo had done all those years ago: sliding deeper and deeper into dishonesty and self-deceit, while concealing his actions from the man he claimed to love. And it didn’t have to be this way; he, Rich, could make a different choice, a tougher yet more truthful choice than Carlo had made. He didn’t have to become another Carlo.

 

Thinking along these lines, Rich got up, headed into the kitchen, and got the coffee brewing. Just as it was ready to pour, Tommy walked in, rubbing his eyes. Rich poured him a coffee, poured one for himself, and said, “Come here and sit down. I have something really important to tell you and I need to do it now.”

 

Tommy held up his hand. “Before you start, Rich, you’d better take a look at the news on your phone. All bets are off about your agenda for today.”

 

Rich picked up his phone, opened the Alcantara24 news app, and saw only a black screen. Across it slowly scrolled the words:

 

THE RIGHT HONOURABLE DESMOND FLOWERS, PRESIDENT OF ALCANTARA,

HAS DIED OF NATURAL CAUSES AT HIS HOME AT THE AGE OF 67.

FUNERAL DETAILS ARE TO BE ANNOUNCED LATER TODAY.

 

For a moment, the news screen completely derailed Rich’s train of thought. But he quickly recovered and began mentally editing on the fly what he had planned to say to Tommy.

 

“Wow, that’s the end of an era, in no uncertain terms. We’ll have to expect a whole raft of calls and messages related to this over the next two or three days.”

 

“Indeed. You’d better get some serious breakfast inside you, it could be a hectic day. How are you feeling this morning, Rich? You really scared me last night, I’ve never seen you in such a state before.”

 

“Tommy, I was in a state because I couldn’t make up my mind what to do. But it finally all came clear to me this morning when I woke up. Now, I hope you’re still thinking of accepting the offer from the University because I’d really like to try my hand at being the Dean’s wife.”

 

Tommy chuckled at that. But he quickly turned serious again. “But… what about your future?”

 

“Tommy, I’ve made my decision. I’m retiring from politics. I’m not running for Benita’s job and I’m not standing for re-election either.”

 

Now Tommy looked positively shocked. “Rich, are you running a fever or something? That’s the last thing I expected to hear you say.”

 

“That’s what writing my memoir has brought me to – the realization that I can’t go on as I have been. Politics is rapidly turning me into somebody I don’t like at all. It’s time to call a halt, to say that I don’t want to be that person and I will not let myself become that person.”

 

“If that’s truly how you feel, Rich, then it’s your best choice. But what will you do now?”

 

“I haven’t had time to think that far ahead. One choice at a time. Just this one decision has lifted an enormous weight off my shoulders. But I still have some more weights to go.”

 

Tommy studied him for a minute. He was a shrewd man, and he could guess that the death of Flowers had something to do with Rich’s newly buoyant mood this morning – although he couldn’t really imagine why that should be the case.

 

“Look, Rich, let’s get in our usual morning swim, and then we can get some breakfast into us and get ready for a busy day.”

 

In her bedroom on the second floor of Hillward Hall, the official presidential mansion, Madelaine Flowers was lying in bed. She was feeling slightly more energetic right now than on many mornings these days. Before long, she would get up for a bit of a walk around, but not until her day nurse came to help her.

 

Desmond’s executive assistant, Mikael, had come to her earlier to give her the news. It didn’t affect her that much at all. Any emotional tie between her and her husband had disappeared long ago, and they hadn’t slept in the same bed for over two decades. When the doctor came to see her and told her that Desmond had died of a heart attack, she immediately jumped to the conclusion that he must have been fucking one of his young side pieces.

 

Madelaine Flowers, née Brazeau, was no fool; she’d seen the parade of good-looking young men coming on board in the Presidential staff and coming over to the mansion for evening additional work -- and she could figure out for herself exactly what was going on.

 

One thing, though, she was absolutely determined to do. She would not let anyone spread any malicious stories about Desmond as long as she was alive. She’d stopped loving him years ago, but he was the man that her younger self had loved and she had still respected him as a national leader. If she had to throw a big show and cry heartbrokenly into her handkerchief to stop any public stories going around about his private behaviour, so be it.

 

At the main entrance of the mansion, Mikael greeted the funeral director and his assistants and led them upstairs to the late President’s bedroom. He then went down the hall to see Madelaine Flowers, asking if she needed anything or if she would like to see the body. She declined graciously, with a shake of the head and thanks. Her day nurse arrived to sit with her, and Mikael left.

 

He went back downstairs to the door and stood at attention there, respectfully watching as the funeral director and his staff walked slowly down the steps and loaded the casket into the hearse. After they drove down the driveway and out onto Hillward Street, he went into the President’s home office, a cozy, oak-panelled study with gilded wall sconces and tall windows, framed by deep green velvet drapes, facing the gardens along the south side of the house. It didn’t take long. He’d made a shrewd guess about where Desmond Flowers was keeping his private files, and he soon found that he had guessed correctly.

 

Mikael then proceeded to the official Presidential offices in the Assembly building, and made the first phone call of the day, to Benita Caladesa. She had already been briefed by her executive assistant, and the conversation didn’t take long. It would be a state funeral, tentatively scheduled for Tuesday, and that would be a national day of mourning. The exact date and time would be confirmed within hours and then she would make the public announcement.

 

Mikael next called Rich, but the call went to voice mail. This might have had something to do with the fact that Tommy and Rich were frolicking around in the pool, apparently without a care in the world, and making enough noise to cause Mrs. Ironwood to shake her head, lips pursed in disapproval  at the antics of “those faggots,” as she always thought of them.

 

Before they sat down to breakfast, Rich gave his phone a quick check and saw the message from Mikael. “Sorry, Tommy, work issues.”

 

As he disappeared into his study to return the call, Tommy yelled after him, “I’m going to be hearing that a lot for the next few days.”

 

Rich grinned to himself. Tommy was absolutely right but he had no idea what he was going to hear from Rich even sooner. Rich hit the callback button, and Mikael answered right away.

 

“Rich.”

 

“Well?”

 

“I found them. The whole works. It might not be the only copy, but we’ve got enough for you to blow the lid off the whole mess if  you have to. That silly idiot, Flowers, even filmed a couple of his own private moments with Bruno and – what was his name, Travis? You know, the big guy with flaming red hair, built like a linebacker. Hard for me to believe, but those two guys looked like they were actually enjoying doing it with him.”

 

Rich chuckled. “Did you have trouble cracking his password?”

 

Mikael laughed outright. “Not a bit. It was his and Madelaine’s wedding anniversary – my first guess, and it worked like a charm. The irony. I’ve got all the videos saved onto an external hard drive. I’ll get another one and make you a copy.”

 

“Thanks, Mikael. You’ve taken such a load off my mind.”

 

“I’ll bet I did. Talk to you later.”

 

Rich went back to have breakfast, and even managed to enjoy the whole meal with Tommy, the two of them regularly stroking each other’s hands across the corner of the table between mouthfuls of cinnamon-raisin brioche and fresh-cut tropical fruit salad.

 

And then, just as they finished, Rich’s phone rang again. Rich picked up right away. “Good morning, Benita.”

 

Tommy groaned in mock dismay. “Oh, God. Why did you have to go into politics, anyway?”

 

“You’re a bit late for that, Tommy,” Rich replied, laughing, as he disappeared into the study again. The Premier wanted to have a quick word with him about the funeral arrangements, so he could pass the word down to the regimental headquarters, putting the Alcantaran Guards on notice to prepare for gun carriage drill.

 

But then, Rich said, “Benita, I have something important to tell you. I’ve decided that I’m also going to retire from politics and step down before the election.”

 

She sighed. “Oh, Rich… I was hoping you’d pick up and carry on for me.” Her voice sounded sad.

 

“I know, Benita. Trust me, I feel bad for letting you down like this. It’s just… I feel all used up inside, and it would be really bad news to go ahead and do it anyway when my heart is screaming at me to get out while I still can.”

 

She sighed again and when she spoke, it was in a wistful tone of voice. “It’s a pity. It would have been so great to have you become the first openly LGBTQ head of government elected in the Americas. I understand, though. When are you going to announce it?”

 

“It will keep until a few days after the funeral, say, a week from tomorrow. That will still give ample time for other hopefuls to throw their hats into the ring before the closing date for nominations for the leadership – and for the Greenhills party committee to nominate a new candidate.”

 

Rich walked back out into the big free-flowing space that included living room, dining room, and kitchen all in one. He had Tommy pour some more coffee, and then got him to come and sit down. As Tommy brought the coffee over, Rich turned his phone right off so he wouldn’t be distracted if he heard it buzzing.

 

Tommy sat down. Rich took a deep breath and began. Looking back at the moment later, he was surprised at how easy it was for him to get through the whole mea culpa, to tell Tommy all about the dozens of guys he’d been screwing in his office, about the interview process, about the secret HIV tests and prescriptions for PreP, about how much he’d come to hate the whole business, and to hate himself. Tommy just sat and listened with no change of expression. He might normally be full of joyful good humour, but he had a full measure of his ancestors’ ability to be stoic and enigmatic at need. When Rich finally finished laying bare all of his multitude of sins, Tommy asked one question – one single word.

 

“Why?”

 

“I was forced to do it. I was being blackmailed.” That word cracked Tommy’s assumed calm, causing his eyebrows to merge momentarily with his carefully-styled hair. But Rich had one more big surprise for him. “By Desmond Flowers.”

 

By this time, Tommy’s eyes had widened to the dimensions of dinner plates – but he still said nothing. Rich waited – but at last, the silence got to be too much for him. “Tommy… please… say something. Anything.” The answer Rich got was the last thing he expected.

 

“Well, Rich, you had a better reason than I did.”

 

“Say what???” Rich’s shock caused his normal firm bass voice to come out in a high-pitched cartoon squeal.

 

“Oh, Rich, you dear, wonderful, kind-hearted, morally upright, stupid man. Did you really think you were the only one in this marriage playing around on the side? Let’s just say that I wasn’t offered the position of Dean of Arts and Sciences purely on the strength of my academic qualifications.”

 

Rich’s jaw was hanging somewhere between his pecs and his navel.

 

“Rich, we need to be realistic. We love each other so much, and neither of us would ever want to spend our lives with anyone else, but damn it, we’re both gay, we’re both still young – well, young-ish in your case,” and Rich glared at him in mock anger, “and when you get right down to it, we’re as horny as a pair of buck rabbits in mating season. We might as well be honest about that reality. And for starters, I’d like to meet your friend, Mikael. I saw him in a photo on the news page the other day and he looks damned hot.”

 

Rich finally took it in, and he began to laugh. Once Tommy started too, they had a hard time stopping. But finally he calmed down enough to respond.

 

“Mikael? Oh, yeah, he’s a hottie all right. Pure bottom boy, but if that’s what turns your crank…”

 

“You want to see what turns my crank?”

 

“I’d love to – but not now. I’m not retired yet, and duty calls.”

 

“Okay, Rich, you go right ahead and run away – as usual. But I’m still going to be waiting for you when you get home, and there’ll be no dinner for you tonight until I get what I want first.”

 

“Deal.”

 

And, giving Tommy a big, sloppy, wet, smacking kiss, he headed out, with both of them still laughing.

 

At the office, Rich’s first task was to call in Lucy and Miriam, so he could inform them of his decision to retire from politics. “But this is strictly confidential for now. I’d like to make the formal announcement on Friday of next week. Miriam, can you check the calendar and clear any commitments I have that morning? Unless I hear any rumbles to the contrary from the media, I’ll hold the press conference at 11:00 AM.”

 

Both of them nodded. All three knew that this was the time of day that fitted in best with the broadcast, print, and internet media schedules for all the national outlets.

 

“And when is your actual stop date?” Lucy asked.

 

“To be determined, but as soon as the new Premier is chosen.”

 

He then sat down to work through the day’s paperwork, putting aside any letters requesting future appointments, public appearances, and the like. He would have Miriam prepare apology letters in reply to those, to go out at the same time that he was holding the press conference next week.

 

Next, he answered an urgent message from Benita. Rather than write an email, he called. Her question was an important one, since it bridged the written constitution and previous court precedents. Rich confirmed for her that the Assembly needed to vote in  an Interim President to replace Flowers. There had to be a person holding the office of President to accept the new Premier’s resignation, and officially announce the election date for the Assembly. After the election, the President was equally necessary to invite the leader of the winning party to form a government as Premier. The newly-elected Assembly could then set a date for a required Presidential election, ideally about a year later.

 

“And a bit of advice, Benita, based on precedent in at least one other country using this interim-President stopgap: make sure that the Assembly vote is a free vote, and done by secret ballot. It makes sense, as the President’s function is strictly non-partisan even though the individual occupant of the office may not be.”

 

Rich went through the remaining business of the day, mostly phone calls, with a strange feeling of duality. As he signed official letters of appointment to several newly-chosen government prosecutors, as he wrote some review notes on a draft appeal court speech from a staff lawyer making his first appearance in the appeal courts, he was feeling rather like an imposter – as if he had no right to do this, now that he had set his retirement. But of course, he still had the right, and the duty. He was, after all, obligated to keep working right up until his official resignation took effect.

 

At the end of the day, he made his way home and, as predicted, Tommy was right there, waiting for him – and ready for the pool. “Hurry it along, Rich, I’ve made a new improvement outside and I want you to be the first to see it.” Rich hustled into the walk-in closet, doffed his suit and tie, pulled on his favourite red speedo, and headed towards the glass doors with Tommy. He stepped outside and stopped short. The northeast side of the pool terrace was closed in by a new 3-metre tall windscreen of solid fibreglass, painted in a dappled green pattern to resemble the lush tropical vegetation. A windscreen, yes -- but also a guard against the incessant prying eyes of a certain nosy neighbour with a deep-rooted disdain for “faggots.” Rich looked for about 3 seconds, figured it out, then burst out laughing. The other end of the terrace gave privacy too, thanks to a tall hedge planted by the neighbour on that side.

 

Tommy chuckled, rather smugly. “There! Now we can skinny-dip to our heart’s content, just not in full daylight. Everyone down in town can still see us through the infinity window in the pool.”

 

“Come here, Mr. Clever!” Rich began kissing Tommy, plunging his tongue into his man’s mouth, all the while stroking and squeezing his ass through his suit. Then he swept Tommy up in his arms, took three big strides to the edge of the pool and leaped in. They came up after a couple of seconds, and locked mouths together again. “Now, tell me, Tommy: is this what you wanted?”

 

“Well… I guess it will do. For starters.”

 

After about twenty minutes of horsing around, splashing and ducking each other, spouting water at each other out of their mouths, and generally wrestling in the pool, Rich called time and climbed out, with Tommy right behind him.

 

Tommy whistled. “Wow, that suit is all stretched out of shape in the front. Better try to do something about that.”

 

“Yours is looking pretty lumpy too. They’re supposed to be a snugger fit. I’ll have to see if I can iron that swelling out of it.”

 

Inside, Rich headed directly for the bedroom, but Tommy stopped him. “No, Mister Big Shot, you are not going to drop a wet speedo on that beautiful carpet in the bedroom. Bathroom first.”

 

Rich patted Tommy’s prominent bulge. “Bathroom as in hang our suits up, or bathroom as in get in the shower to really clean these tools off thoroughly.”

 

Tommy laughed. Moments later, they were in the shower together, kissing passionately while their rigid cocks duelled together between their abs. Tommy got his hand around Rich’s muscular ass and into his crack, pushing his finger into Rich’s hole. “That’s it! I win first place! Turn to the wall and bend over.”

 

Rich made a show of grumbling, but he complied quickly all the same. Tommy dropped to his knees and pushed his face into Rich’s ass crack, giving a real virtuoso demonstration of how to make beautiful music on a man’s ass. Fingers, tongue, lips, all worked at driving Rich into a frenzy until he couldn’t take any more and was begging Tommy to fuck him.

 

“By rights, I should either fuck you and cum in you once for each guy you fucked in the office or spank you ten times for each one.”

 

“Fair’s fair, Tommy – you have to subtract the number of times you fucked someone on the side without telling me.”

 

“So that adds up to – oh, hell, I didn’t come here to do math. I’m here for this.” So saying, he pushed his painfully erect cock deep inside Rich’s welcoming ass, burying it all the way until he could feel those firm, rounded, muscular cheeks pushing against his hip bones.

 

“How about, one stroke from your cock for each time?”

 

“How about, I couldn’t last that long.”

 

“Okay. So who says you only have to cum in me once?”

 

At once, Tommy began pounding Rich’s hole, hard and fast. In barely a minute, he began whimpering that he was going to cum.

 

“Yes! Cum inside me! Pound that hole, Tommy!”

 

Tommy groaned and slammed all the way in as his dick convulsed, flexing madly at each spurt of his big load. As soon as he’d finished cumming, he began pumping again. He was incredibly turned on from picturing Rich fucking all those young guys in his office, not to mention all the encounters he himself had enjoyed with the University President’s executive assistant, a real hot versatile stud. In no time, he could feel another orgasm beginning to climb its way up and out.

 

“Oh, fuck, I’m going to cum again.”

 

“Yeah, do it, Tommy, keep fucking me and breed me again. I want it all, your whole load, all the way inside my ass. Cum for me!”

 

In another minute, Tommy yelled aloud and jammed his cock as far inside Rich as he could, firing bolts of cum until he was shooting blanks – and still his cock kept contracting and flexing inside his husband’s hole. At last, the tension broke and he collapsed against Rich’s back, desperately gasping for air while his cock slowly softened and then popped out. Tommy lifted his head to look, seeing a whole river of cum gushing out of Rich’s ass and flowing down his leg.

 

He said, accusingly, “Someone fucked you at the office today. There’s no way that all came from me.”

 

“No, Tommy, it’s all yours – solemn word of honour. Holy shit, I can still feel it pouring out of me.”

 

“What can I say? Sometimes it’s fun to play with other guys, but nobody turns me on as much as the man I love.”

 

“Second the motion. After dinner, I’ll show you that I feel the same way about you.”

 

Eventually they calmed down, dried off, and went to look at what was available in the kitchen. It didn’t look too promising, consisting mainly of leftovers. “Fuck cooking tonight,” Tommy said. “Let’s just head down to Aquarius.”

 

Before long, they were seated at their favourite waterside table, a bottle of wine in front of them and a shrimp ceviche appetizer for two on the way. Every time either one of them said something, the other began giggling. The staff at Aquarius all wondered what was making their two favourite customers so jovial, never having seen them in such a hilarious mood before. They kept laughing all the way through the shrimp, and the beautifully seared rare tenderloin steaks which followed, with a side of gorgonzola sauce and duchesse potatoes. After they’d eaten, they headed back home and got into bed, cuddling and fondling each other until Rich’s cock became erect. Then it was time for him to return the favour to Tommy, but he suddenly realized that there was something else he wanted to do even more.

 

“Skinny dip!” Rich yelled, jumping out of bed and racing into the living room, then dashing outside and leaping into the pool, with Tommy hot on his heels, the two of them bounding into the water like a pair of teenagers.