Close-Up

I fucked him like this longer than I needed too—I kept edging off when I could have come—because I wanted him to be able to open to something this big and I wanted to work him until he was putty in my arms. I kept it hard by substituting Mr. Wonderful for him in my mind. My concept of Mr. Wonderful would be a fuck that went on forever.

We spoke only in monosyllables and surface comments as we showered separately and I took him out to the car and to Ruth’s Charis Steak House and fed him a T-bone. I took him back to the motel and T-boned him again myself, doing him in a missionary and making him open up completely to me in short order and giving it all to him. He was fine that time, although he did a lot of belabored groaning and came across as a sacrificial lamb. I was having none of that; I fucked him good.

Afterward I whispered. “You can register that as a seven and a half.”

“What do you mean?” he asked. I was still on top of him, still inside him, and we were both focused on me going flaccid—but still filling him.

“I was a rent-boy once too. When you talk among yourself about johns, you’ll refer to a date like this in terms of how many inches you took. We mingled pubic hairs this time, so you can tell the guys this was a seven-and-a-half-inch date. You haven’t done it for pay like this before, have you?”

“No. This was my first time with a stranger—for pay,” he admitted in a small voice, turning his cheek to the sheet and not looking at me.

I pulled off him, stood up, and said, “You can use the shower first. Then I’ll take you back to your college.”

“Was it . . . did I . . .?”

“I’ll send you a message when I get home,” was all I said. I wouldn’t have been surprised if I’d said more that he would have sworn off doing this ever again with anyone and pulled the plug on his hookup site listing.

At the college, we kissed before he got out of the car. “Did I . . . ?” he started to say again before getting out of the car, but I shushed him and told him I’d be in contact with him by e-mail. He gave me a worried look and exited the car.

When I got back to Beaufort, I sent him an e-mail. “You’re a sweet lay, Ethan. I wouldn’t have sprung for a T-bone if you weren’t. If you’re willing, I’d like to see you again—maybe pick you up at Dudley’s again next Tuesday at 4:30. I’d bring you to Beaufort this time and take you through enough paces that you’ll become a top earner. I will teach you but I will take full pleasure from you. Your rates will continue to apply. Confirm if you’re interested and if you want seven and a half each time.”

I had waited to pose this offer until we were at a distance from each other and there would be no pressure for him to sign on for anything he didn’t want to do. I wanted it to be clear that if we had another date, he would be worked hard.

He confirmed within the hour.

* * * *

I was standing, knees bent slightly to balance his body, as Ethan was arched off from me. His shoulder blades were pressed to the surface of the mattress at the foot of the bed, his arms stretched out straight from his body, his fingers digging at the edge of the mattress on either side, moaning deeply and looking into my eyes with an expression of pain, pleasure, and passion. His legs were hooked on my hips, and I was supporting his body with one hand palming the small of his back. I held a small video camera in my other hand and was recording close-ups that went from his expressive facial reactions to the root of my cock and the mingling of my black pubic curlies with the hair of his reddish-blond bush as I stroked him with all seven-and-a-half inches. I felt like it was more—that’s what the sexy young man did for me.

It was the second time I’d brought Ethan home to the bungalow at Fiddler’s Cove in Beaufort and worked him over, teaching him how better to take cock and the nuances of giving pleasure to his partner. He’d even improved his sucking technique and had become completely open in taking big cock.

One of his hands went to his own cock and I photographed him masturbating himself to completion. I continued stroking him deep until he’d shot off onto the lens of the camera in a close shot and then I dropped my load too and went down on the bed, dragging him with me to where we were fully on the bed and I was stretched behind him and holding him close.

“Did you get some good close-ups?” he asked in a whisper.

“I’m sure I did. And video too. We’ll have a great portfolio for you in no time.” I’d volunteered to do a photo portfolio up for him to share with clients and prospects. It would up his rates considerably, I thought. Until now, though, he admitted that he’d only gone with me for pay. I still hadn’t gotten him to admit that I’d been the first one to fuck his ass, but it was fine with me just to think that I probably was.

“I don’t want to go with anyone else for pay until you’ve shown me more,” he whispered. “I’m so embarrassed I didn’t do well the first time.”

“You did great the first time,” I said. “There’s a whole line of men who want to feel they are taking a virgin. If you get the idea you’re with one who does, remember how you were that first time with me. Embellish a bit on that in innocence and reluctance and they’ll pay you anything you want. And you’re ready to go more public now. I’m going to up your rates for me myself. You’re a great lay.”

“Please. I’m learning so much from you,” he murmured. “I’m not going to charge you anything. And I don’t know if I even want anyone else to—”

“No, don’t say that,” I said. “You can’t fall for the first john you pick up and give it to him for free. Or don’t you need the money?”

“Yes, I need the money. My father foots my college bill and expenses, but I want a car too. And I want nice clothes. And, to tell the truth, there’s an extra kick of taking it from someone who will pay me for it.”

“Paying you for it is arousing for me too. And I know what you mean about the rest. I did my time as a rent-boy. I valued the stuff I bought from the money I earned on my back more than I did the stuff anyone gave me—anyone other than sugar daddies, of course. What they gave me was what I was earning on my back too.”

“Speaking of earning on my back,” Ethan whispered. “You were going to show me the position you called the ‘rent-boy missionary.’”

I crouched between his legs, Ethan on his back, his back arched and me with one hand buried in the hair on the back of his head and arching his head back. I held the cleaned small video camera in the other hand, taking close-ups. I was elevated a bit on my knees between his bent legs and holding steady, as, his pelvis rolled up with a pillow under the small of his back, he moved his pelvis, fucking his passage from his own stroking motion on my held-steady cock.

I had told him that a successful rent-boy had to know how to gauge his john. Some wanted to control and make the moves. Others wanted the same kind of fuck, but they wanted the rent-boy to do the work. In this missionary position, the rent-boy was doing the work. Ethan was doing it well, but I was of the type who liked to control, if it was my cock being used in the fuck, which was another aspect of this. A successful rent-boy was versatile. To get the maximum money he had to be prepared to both take and give cock. I’d done that. There still were men I looked at and could think of both giving and taking with or just taking. My thoughts went to Mr. Wonderful. He was the sort of man I’d let make all of the decisions, including which of us was going to take cock.

Needing to control when I ejaculated, I turned him on his belly, with the pillow under his belly and his buttocks raised a bit with him on his knees, slid inside him and covered him close from above, my hands grasping his wrists, raising his arms above his head, and my face buried in the hollow of his neck. I fucked him in long, slow, deep strokes. This was another lesson in being a rent-boy that he was catching on to swiftly—to go with whatever the john wanted.

Later, I was sitting in a chair facing the side of the bed, watching him, and clicking off close-up photos. He lay there, exhausted—whether actually or not, I didn’t know. I’d told him that johns liked to think they’d worn out the rent-boy and he should cultivate the look of being totally spent. He had the look down perfectly now. He lay there on his belly, an arm draped over the side of the bed, his knuckles scraping the floor beside the bed. He had a beatific, well-fucked expression on his face. I was sure the photos would be great.

“After you’ve rested, I’ll take you over to the Beaufort waterfront and feed you dinner. Then I’ll drive you back to Charleston.”

“Bring me back here and fuck me again before driving me back to college,” he begged.

“We’ll see. I’d like to walk you around Beaufort and show the place to you. It’s quite an atmospheric place. They make movies here.”

“I know all about Beaufort,” he answered. “I’ve lived here.”

“You have?” I asked, in surprise. I asked him more about that, but he said he didn’t want to talk about it. He wanted dinner and another fuck before he was driven back to Charleston.

“I want you to drive it in me before we go back. You say some guys will want to be rough and drive hard. I want you to drive me hard after dinner.”

Sounded good to me, so that’s what we did.

When I returned to Beaufort from Charleston that evening, I went immediately to the darkroom and processed the still shots from that third day with Ethan and hung them up to dry. I took the photos from the second session and looked them over. The progress he was making toward being comfortable and proficient as a rent-boy were evident. He wasn’t as good the second day as he’d been earlier today. But the second-day photos were sexy too. I took them out to the sunroom and posted them in an array behind the computer monitor.

I already had switched from the teen novel I had been struggling with. For the past two days, my Muse had wanted me to write a “training of a young rent-boy” novel. Ethan, of course, was who was in my mind while I wrote this. I sat down at the computer, opened a new chapter, and the vision of Ethan and of my own training to be a rent-boy nearly two decades earlier merged in my mind. I closed my mind to all other matters and let my finger race on the keypad.

* * * *

I couldn’t turn Kate Hamilton down. I hadn’t been going to the Beaufort Christian Academy pool for a morning swim for over a week, but I had gone and intended to go again regularly when this infatuation with training Ethan settled down, so I owed her for arranging for my use of the school’s pool. When we’d agreed to the arrangement I had promised to visit the English classes at the academy to discuss my Christian coming-of-age novels. She had a class that now had read one of the novels and was primed to discuss it with me. I was invited to the class. And, so, naturally I went—after, of course, I reviewed the book they were talking about. I wrote enough that, after a while, they all seemed to run together. I knew I’d embarrass myself some day when I was in a book discussion like this and started talking about a young guy getting fucked, mixing up what I’d written for the young Christian market and what I’d written for the dirty old man market.

I went and became petrified immediately. I have no idea how I made it through the class or even what I said to the students. I dearly hope we discussed one of my Christian teen novels and not one of my coming-out-gay novels. Kate was all smiles at the end of the class, so I guess I didn’t get that muddled.

I felt I was completely tongue-tied, though. When she brought me into the classroom and started the introductions of the faculty members sitting in before starting the discussion, I almost went catatonic.

“First, I’d like you to meet our headmaster, Nathan Sheldon,” Kate said. “He’s read several of your books and said he wouldn’t miss your visit for the world.” As she said that, the head master, who was sitting directly in front of me in the first row in the classroom, stood up and flashed a brilliant smile. Mr. Wonderful put his hand out to shake mine, and I limply let him hold my hand for several seconds longer than necessary. It wasn’t really discovering that Mr. Wonderful, the man I’d salivated over at the academy swimming pool was Nathan Sheldon, the school headmaster. That was logical enough—that the headmaster also would take in a swim in the mornings before school started to keep in the marvelous shape he was in.

I already had gone catatonic, because after introducing Mr. Wonderful to me, Kate said, “And this is his son, visiting from Charleston College, Ethan.”

And it was Ethan. It was my Ethan. He looked as shocked as I was, but he seemed to be hiding it better than I did. He may even have gotten an inkling of who Christopher Collins was in his world before I had come in. Now that I saw the two, I understood why I kept thinking of Ethan as a younger Mr. Wonderful—and why I was attracted to Ethan in the first place when I was in heat for Nathan. What I hadn’t caught, though, was that Nathan Sheldon was in an even better state of preservation than I originally had thought. He had to be more like forty than thirty-five to be Ethan’s father.

Now I understood what Ethan had meant when he said that he knew Beaufort—that he had lived here. He had lived with his father. And presumably there was a mother and siblings as well. My visions of Mr. Wonderful evaporated. He was Nathan Sheldon, a man with a family, a man who was the headmaster of a Christian school.

A man who was the father of the young man I was fucking and training to be a first-rate rent-boy.

Somehow I got through the class. But when it was done, Ethan had disappeared. I had every reason to believe he had now disappeared from my life altogether.

It wasn’t until now that I realized how much Ethan meant to me—that the relationship, in my emotions, had gone beyond fucking or training—or considering—him as a rent-boy. I was dominating him and he had been melding himself to me. He had been completely compliant and submissive. His body melted into mine, and now when we fucked, we fucked as one, coordinated movement of need, desire, cooperative give and take—affectionate, emotionally unified. Could I say it? Perhaps now, when I felt I had lost him, I could think of it more than just as like and desire. I could possibly consider that I had been on my way toward a deeper bond.

I dragged home. I punished myself by taking the processed photos of my third session with Ethan out of the darkroom and pinning them up on the board behind my computer. What I had thought was true. The melding had been quickly progressive. We were as one in the photos of the third session. He was mine. I was his.

I tried to work on the rent-boy training novel I had started. Ethan did run through my mind, just as he had when I’d been so productive, so sure of what to write, previously. But now I couldn’t see an end to the novel. I didn’t want it to be a bitter one—or even realistic. It needed to be a happy one. My publisher would have said that it needed to be a happy ending to sell and receive good reviews—not that gay male erotica got reviewed much, even though it sold well. But I knew it was more than that. This novel had to have a happy ending, or my own life would be destroyed. I couldn’t face life without a happy ending with Ethan.

But Ethan had left the classroom before I had finished. He had walked out. I was terrified that he had walked out of my life.

The horror that suddenly hit me was that the photos of him in coitus and afterward that I had pinned up around the room and was collecting for a portfolio for him weren’t the only photos I had pinned up in here. Before Ethan, I had other photos I had taken—photos that I surreptitiously had taken of Mr. Wonderful—Nathan Sheldon—Ethan’s father. They had included head shots. Ethan couldn’t have missed seeing them when he was looking at the photos I took of him. They must have still been pinned to the boards here. I looked around the room. They weren’t here now.

I was mortified. I tried to convince myself that I had taken them down before Ethan had come here, but it was a hard sell—and, although I looked, I couldn’t find where I might have put them. I knew I hadn’t thrown them out. I had been obsessed with Mr. Wonderful—so obsessed that I had gravitated immediately to the son who was the spitting image of him at nineteen.

Thoroughly depressed, I turned out the lights, went to the bedroom, took a long shower, and climbed under the sheets of the bed. I reached for my cock to provide me solace. But I was so upset, churning inside, that I couldn’t get it up to give myself relief.

Later in the night, though, I felt the sheets being lifted, and Ethan slipped into bed with me. I had no trouble getting it up then. He put all that I taught him a rent-boy need do to conquer a reticent john to full use, moving down my body, making love to me from mouth to cock and balls with his kisses and tonguing and sucking. When I was about to explode, he saddled himself on my cock, hugging my bent knees, holding, fully skewered until I was calming, and then starting to ride me, slowly, sensually.

I could only take that so long before I encircled his lithe torso in my arms, arched his shoulder blades back into my chest, laced my arms under his pits and locked my fists behind his neck, putting him into a full nelson. I laced my legs between his spread thighs, placed my feet on the surface of the bed for leverage, and, with him completely incapacitated, I took over the stroking, thrusting hard, long, and deep up into him, as he moaned, groaned, and sighed.

He gave himself entirely to me. I moved him into various positions that demanded flexibility and total submission and he denied me nothing. I brought him to release and beyond repeatedly. He took it all with no more than a groan and a moan. I exhausted him. We slept. I woke and woke him up fucking him again. We dozed off. I fucked him again when we woke up.

The next morning, with the sun up, he lay, totally spent on the bed, his eyes glazed over, a small smile on his face, drool running out of his mouth, and I moved around the bed, taking close-up shots of his beautiful, bruised, totally used body.

At breakfast, I said, “I’ll drive you back to Charleston this morning.”

“No need,” he answered. “That’s why I had come back to Beaufort yesterday. My father bought me a car. I have my own wheels now.”

The dominator in me sounded an alarm. It was nonsense, of course, but what was ringing in my head now was the knowledge that Ethan had independence now that he hadn’t had before. I had taken on the notion that the money I was giving him for use of his tail was going to what he’d said he wanted—a car. As long as he didn’t have enough from our fucking to buy a car, he was dependent on me, in my mind. I was dominant; he was completely submissive.

I became panicked, idiotically so, I know—but panicked nonetheless. I remained outwardly calm as I stood at my door and watched him pat the hood of a small, but sporty Subaru, all shiny and new, get in, and drive off. In my mind I was the one buying him a car. His father, Mr. Wonderful—Nathan Sheldon—had beat me to the punch.

And now, if Ethan carried through on his plans to be a rent-boy, it was because he enjoyed being fucked by men—multiple men—and not just by me. He no longer was all mine. And I hardly could consider myself his master now—I hadn’t managed to muster up the courage to ask him about the photos I had of his father.

* * * *

“4:00 p.m. Tuesday, as I know you don’t have a class then. Not at Dudley’s. New location, closer for you. North from the corner of Montagu and Rutledge, north on Rutledge. Two doors up from the corner. The brick carriage house with the arches in front.”