Death in the Rockies Ch. 02

The Ranchero was a bull-riding bar, complete with sawdust and peanut shells on the floor and a twangy country and western voice singing a "girl done gone up and left me" song assaulted a raucous crowd of men from the rafters. The basement club was set smack dab in the middle of Manhattan, but you'd never know it was there—unless you were a gay male, cruised, and liked both riding and talking the bull.

It was a place where guys could project themselves out of the canyons of skyscrapers by putting on their jeans and checked shirts, red bandanas, cowboy boots, and ten gallon hats and exchanging their workday martinis for mugs of Coors beer and a slug of chawin' tabbaca. And it was a place where cowpokes could mill around and tease each other about riding, and horse hung, and free ranging and might even wind up hooked up for a personal little rodeo.

Those gathered around the bar and sitting in the straight-backed wooden chairs around the oak barrel-based tables wedged up to the edge of the show platform put up a cheer as a voice announced over the loudspeaker. "Time for the bull." There were cat calls and yodels as the voice continued. "First up is our own Jake—just to show those of you just in off the range for the first time how it's done. Then you can try your own hand at it if you want. $30 a ride, unless you do it with just chaps and a jock, in which case it's $10 and any tips you get." An even louder roar met this announcement. "And, oh by the way, if it's Jake you want to ride rather than the bull, that will be $100." The place went wild.

The house went dim and spots came up on the center platform, on which stood—dominating the entire club room—a mechanical bull.

Cheers were renewed as Jake came out from in back of the club and sauntered toward the mechanical bull. He was wearing just a red thong and reddish-brown chaps, a red bandana, a ten-gallon hat, and spurred boots.

The bull began to rock gently as Jake approached it, and he swung up easily into the saddle. Jake was a sandy-haired lad of no more than eighteen or nineteen. Lithe but hard muscled and smooth skinned. Not an ounce of baby fat and a sheepish "oh gosh" grin that made him look inviting and vulnerable all at the same time.

And could he ride a bull. It wasn't long before the bull was tossing this way and that way, but Jake held the saddle and swung his ten-gallon hat above his head. He put on an awesome show, mesmerizing the guys gathered around him, jaws dropped to chests, as they followed the undulating of Jake's bull-worked muscles and dreamed their little dreams.

Jake looked out over the crowd. Times like this he liked picking out the faces, liked looking for the best-looking guy in the crowd and of what he was thinking as he watched Jake ride the bull. Was Jake turning him on, making him think of how much he wanted to ride Jake? This is what Jake did this for—not for the money—but for the thoughts of turning these guys on, of having a room full of horny, good-looking guys, all wanting to fuck him.

One face out there arrested his attention. Not the youngest or best looking of the faces Jake had focused on during the ride. And not adoring and drooling. More intense, more possessive, harder. Jake shivered and pulled his gaze away from that face, looking for what he really liked. But he found he kept returning to that face, which remained immobile, staring him down, pulling him in from across the crowd.

Jake was done, once more taming the bull, and while the voice over the loudspeaker cajoled someone from the crowd to try riding the mechanical device, Jake moved toward the back of the club through an avenue of fans, which parted for his progress as he walked like he was a victorious fighter returning to the dressing room after a knockout. As Jake walked, men were touching him, and talking to him—some dirty, some with admiration, some calling out phone numbers and related propositions—and several were slipping ones and fives in the waistband of his thong. All Jake could see, though, was that one face in the crowd.

If there was more action for him after a bull ride, Ted would be waiting at the back area door with the john and the c-spot in his hand. Nothing like that tonight, though, so Jake pushed on through the beaded curtain separating the club room from the back area warren of corridors and rooms, some of the rooms outfitted with beds in a bunk room motif.

Jake took in a ragged breath as he was walking past the fuck rooms toward his own dressing room when he saw a figure emerge from the shadows. The face from the crowd. Three fifties in his hand.

There was no need to ask what the man wanted, and no reason to haggle. The three fifties said it all. Jake gave the man a look and a nod and the man fell in behind him as Jake continued walking, not to his dressing room now, but to one of the other rooms.

Jake was down on his knees in front of the guy in one of the bunk rooms, unbuttoning his trousers and pulling out his cock and giving him head, as the guy flicked Jake's shoulders and back with a short riding whip, between bouts of taking Jake's neck in his gloved hands and squeezing his thumbs up into the flesh under Jake's jawbone until he felt dizzy. It was just a flick with just a hint of sting, but Jake knew it would get more involved than this. The look in the face had told him this. The three fifties told him this. But this was the way it was occasionally.

There were plenty of lengths of rope around, carrying out the motif of the cowboy bar, and after the guy with the face produced another fifty, Jake had nothing to say about having his wrists bound together in front of him through the wooden slats at the foot of the bed, and the guy, breathing heavily now, standing behind him and whipping the riding whip around his body—on his chest, across his back and buttocks and the backs of his thighs, while fingering his hole greedily with searching, stretching gloved fingers.

Jake's eyes did go wide, though, when his bandana was stripped off him and roughly forced between his teeth so that the only sounds he could make were muffled grunts and groans as the lash increasingly bit into his tender skin.

He went up on his toes and widened his stance with an internal scream when the guy's dick thrust up inside him, and he writhed about under the combined fury of the whip and the fucking, bucking like the bull he had just ridden, but with as little effect on the strength of the cocking by his rider as he had had with the mechanical bull. A length of rope was whipped around his neck, and he arched his back toward the source of the heavy breathing—not voluntarily or even by instinct, but because the rope was cutting into his flesh, forcing his neck back, wishboning his body. Another length of the rope was whipped over his head and around his neck the rope was being knotted . . . and pulled tight.

The dick inside him was thrusting in deep jabs . . . up into the center of him. Jake was gagging and coming, his eyes were bulging, he couldn't breathe. Jake's legs had gone to rubber; he couldn't support himself. He was held up by the power of the other guy's thighs under his. The guy with the face was panting hard and making guttural noises, and above all else—the pain, the tight straining back of his torso, gagging and lack of breath—Jake felt the guy with the face coming as well—in short, powerful condom-sheathed bursts and jerks deep inside him.

But neither the bucking or the tightening of the rope lessened. Jake couldn't breathe. He just couldn't . . .