Galician Guitar

When I did come, spouting off on his throat and chest, and was then in a moment of weakness and vulnerability, he quickly moved off me, reversed his body again, and turned me belly to bed. Slipping his arms under my arm pits, he put me in a full Nelson, arched my torso off the surface of the bed, and, as I screamed bloody loud in surprise and initial pain, he skewered me to great with his long, thin, hard cock, and pumped me hard and fast to his own ejaculation. Only as he came, did I realize he wasn't sheathed. I had been fucked before but not for some time—and certainly bareback. He wasn't thick, but he was long and a total surprise—not only that he'd do it but also that he'd do it with such cruel, powerful thrusts. Shocking as it was, it totally aroused me, and I came again before he did.

Without a word, he rolled off me, turned out the light on the nightstand, and was snoring within minutes. I took that as a signal that we were to sleep then. It might have been a signal for me to leave him and go home, but I found I didn't want to. He was such a change for me, had such an arousing body, gave me something I hadn't had for some time—excitement, surprise, and variety.

He also had fucked me; I had forgotten that I once could be satisfactorily completed with a man inside me. And what a man he was.

I was disconcerted and slightly unfulfilled by his complete noninterest in kissing or exploring each other's bodies with hands and tongues. I never quite reached satisfactory intimacy with him either that night or later. But it occurred to me that this was part of the heightened arousal with him—continually wanting more—and that perhaps what took me to higher levels of arousal and prolonged the mystery of having sex with him rather than Sean, who was all touchy feely, was the raw lust he evoked, stripped of any attempts at affection.

I was awakened by the sound of the telephone ringing on the nightstand next to Xavier. Drapes were pulled over the window, but the sunlight that was fighting to get into the room at the edges of the window and at the slit where the drapes were pulled together told me that it was way past dawn. Still early for me. Since I'd retired, I'd gotten up when I woke up—which was usually a lot closer to noon than to dawn.

Xavier was laying beside me, on his back, propped up against the headboard, and smoking another cigarette. He picked up the phone and then handed it over to me. "It's for you," he said.

"For me?" Who the fuck knew I was here, in Xavier's hotel room? I hadn't even known I'd be here this morning. It was Ralph Peters.

"Paul," I heard him say. "I trust you had an interesting night."

"You could say so," I answered. "How the fuck did you—?"

"I hope Xavier was satisfactory."

"One hell of a surprise," I answered. "But how the fuck did—?"

"Listen, I'm in a bind, and you're retired. And if you are hitting it off with Xavier and all, I was wondering . . . and you have been saying that you were antsy in retirement and were looking for a little excitement. Well, I was wondering. Xavier's on a three-week tour. Chicago from here and then San Francisco and L.A. Back to Austin and then Atlanta before going back to Spain. I'm really swamped here. I'm wondering if you'll travel with him. Be his handler for State. I know I can get it approved. All expenses paid."

"Me, travel around the country with Xavier? I don't know how I can . . . or if he'd want to . . ."

I had to take a breath. Xavier had smiled and wagged his head to signal he was happy with that and then had leaned over my body and taken my cock in his mouth to seal his approval.

"You don't have that many responsibilities here," Ralph said. "We both know that. And I know you're writing gay novels now, but you can do that anywhere—and I think that Xavier could give you a plotline to purse anyway. Besides, it's been a hard winter here in D.C. and you've made it harder by continuously complaining of the cold and the snow. Granted Chicago will be colder, but the rest of the trip will be in warmer climes, and it will almost be spring by the time you return to D.C."

I couldn't argue with that. And so I didn't, arranging to visit him in State later in the afternoon to start the process of taking over from him as Xavier's handler on this tour.

Handler. Which was rather funny, because Xavier was working on giving me a blow job and was handling my ass with a finger stroking my prostate when I placed the receiver back on the telephone.

"I'm glad you will be my guide," Xavier said, with a deep growl in his voice. "Now I want to fuck. But who takes who first?" I opted to side-split him languidly for starters and I ended up with my shoulders bearing my weight on the hotel room carpet next to the bed and him standing and holding my legs spread wide in the air as he jack hammered down into my ass.

There was more of the same as we traveled around the States. As he practiced in the afternoons, I wrote to a novel draft inspired by our arrangement. The novel was finished and snarfed up by my publisher before we reached Atlanta. I would accompany him to his concerts in the evenings, doing all of the managerial work, and then we'd flip-flop fuck much of the night away in hotel rooms—leaving a swath of first-class hotels with burn marks on the corners of the nightstands all across the country. Most of the mornings were for sleeping to recover from exhaustion and more sex to recover a modicum of exhaustion.

By the time we reached Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport in Atlanta and I was waving him toward the departure ramp, I was smitten, totally adjusted to an exciting new life that I knew now would be cut off in an instant, and was ruminating over what I could do to keep the wet dream from ending.

The stake of this was driven through my heart and I was spurred to unthinking action when I arrived back in Washington, D.C., to find that Sean had cleared out of my apartment in the Watergate and was now living with Ralph Peters, displacing the last man he had in his bed, Randy, apparently. It was like musical beds in Ralph's place.

I didn't discover they were now a pair until I went to the next practice of the gay men's chorus and found them wrapped up in each other. It took Howard to explain the obvious to me. Ralph had used the time that I was floating around the States doing his job to take Sean from me. It didn't matter that before I left I was trying to think of ways to pry Sean out of my bed. I certainly didn't want it to be a matter of someone taking him away from me.

My ego bruised, and seeing myself as a laughingstock, I skipped the next men's chorus practice, not wanting to come face to face with the pair. The day after I'd done that, I realized that there really wasn't anything keeping me tied to my current location and life at all. And I was finding myself dreaming of Xavier and missing his shocking and surprising ways.

Focused, off kilter, and completely frustrated, I went on the Internet and began researching houses in the Lugo region of Spain's Galicia—where Xavier was from. Xavier hadn't given me his address—in truth he hadn't given me any means of contacting him, although, as I now remembered it, I'd tried to get that from him—until I realized he didn't have to tell me. All of his contact information in Spain was in the paperwork I held as we traveled around the States on his cultural tour.

He came from a village called Guntin to the southwest of the larger town of Lugo. Within forty-eight hours of looking, I'd contracted and sent a deposit on a partially renovated nineteenth-century stone country villa outside of the village of Friol, twenty-two kilometers northwest of Lugo.

I had tasted the surprise and variety of Xavier—and of the flip-flop, which I'd had no idea would send me so far up into the clouds of arousal and completion. There was nothing to hold me in Washington, D.C.—or in the States, for that matter. I was going off for an adventure in retirement and for rejuvenation in rural Spain.