The Second Oldest Profession

"I thought we should meet," he said, "to see if we were each what the other wanted. So I'm going to suggest something controversial. You're exactly as I imagined you'd be, much hotter, actually," he scissored his legs, almost unconsciously. "Everything about you's just the way I like it." He leaned forward, rested his elbows on his knees and fixed me with a searching look. Those vibrant, cobaltblue eyes intoxicated me. He made me feel more demure than he probably needed me to be. The notion that I was a sort of mail-order bride under review excited me. It's all about freedom, isn't it? Right and wrong depends entirely on whether someone is submitting freely to an act or is being coerced. All our laws and values honor this fundamental concept of free will and yet people surrender their freedom every day—to religion, peer pressure, faddishness, technology, and social habit. "I want to fuck you right now," he said, "but I'll only do it if I'm something of a disappointment to you. If you like what you see as much as I like what I see, let's talk some more, and postpone anything sexual till a later date."

It was certainly an odd suggestion, as if mediocre sexual arousal deserved to be summarily dispatched with a quickie; sent to bed without lingering dessert, and a splash of espresso, for failing to honor the nutritional rigors of a well-balanced seduction. Aside from the archaic roles of male and female he wanted to see honored in his house, his sexual morés, if the notions that had characterized his last offer were pervasive enough to classify as such, seemed almost quaint. He was measuring the quality of our future in degrees of sexual arousal, baffling the facile distinction between permissiveness and restraint. He wanted me to be a lady, to see if I could respond like one and refuse his quick-flaring scent its instant, masculine kill.

"What do you say?"

"I think we should wait. I would certainly like to."

He knew I was blushing, despite the darkness of my skin, which, in itself, was clearly something that appealed to him and ranked high on his list of sexual preferences.

He leaned back in his chair. Mounded prominently between his lean, powerful legs, his package seemed even bigger than before, if that was possible. His crooked smile—which could be both museful and leering, ruminant and sexy—was frankly appreciative, satisfied.

We spent the rest of the evening asking each other pointed questions, exploring likes and dislikes, of which, on the surface, we seemed to have little in common. He stressed that some relationships succeeded because the partners completed one another and others because they complemented one another; he suggested that ours would at least begin as the former, until he learned to like a few arias and Russian string quartets and I learned to appreciate soccer—for the skill of the game not the legs of the players—dirt-bike racing, and boxing. He found my ladylike aversion to boxing exciting and offered to take it off the list. He said he had both boxed and played soccer like a fiend in London.

He came over, crouched near my chair, and tilted his head to the light to show me an old boxing scar along his left jaw. He lifted my hand and, with my fingers, traced the white line of puckered skin and hieroglyphic stitches. I was trembling. He replaced my hand carefully in my lap, as if he were folding up a priceless napkin after a light but eminently satisfying meal. His palms were rough; from both work and working out, I surmised. He ran a hand over the thick feline muscles of his thighs as they formed long prominent arches between his narrow hips and his knees, through the slick denim of his jeans, telling me he owed all of that quadricipital heft to his early obsession with soccer.

"I guess it could've been ballet, too," he stood up, so he was standing over me, hands on his hips, his crotch projecting outward like a sudden bulge of rock under which I wanted to shelter my aimless, young life. "Would you've liked that better?"

I laughed. He stroked my face and pinched my cheek, "I love the way your laugh lights you up."

"Does it light you up, too?"

"O, yeah. All of you lights me up. Would you like another glass of wine?"

"No," I said; though I would've relished a let-up in the sexual tension that was hampering the good impression I'd intended to make as both a well-bred, well-read boy and a decorous, house-proud girl who would wash and cook for her man. "I have to drive home."

He moved away, his trim muscular ass and solid, shapely calves filling out his jeans just as persuasively as his package and thighs did.

How long did he want us to wait? Did he mean he was going to train me to be his wife, while numerous others, in the interim, would continue to be his whores? How could such a stud keep his hands off me for even a day, let alone for the weeks of molding I envisioned?

"Would you like me to follow you to your house, to make sure you arrive safe?"

"I'd like that," I said, while the revelatory expression on my face—and the answering one on his—told us both I was drawn to the prospect's romantic rather than pragmatic properties.

He lifted and finished his beer and remained standing, the bottle in his hand. I more or less bathed in the sight of those brush-like thickets of straight, sandyblond hair thrusting out of his muscular armpits. I imagined the flavors they must retain after a day of his working construction, while my cock had definitely begun leaking precum.

I didn't want him to see where I lived, because he'd probably assumed I was just your average middleclass kid from Lesterville, and his discovering I lived in The Cedars may've put a kibosh on the whole deal.

"I live pretty far," I said.

"New York?"

I laughed again, a little giddy from him and the wine.

"Wait a sec," he said. "Let me get another beer. I'm not used to keeping my hands off beautiful, plump tarts for more than fifteen minutes."

I was below the legal age for alcohol. I could drive, vote, and consent to sex; I just couldn't contaminate any of those delightful options with alcohol until I'd acquired enough cynicism, presumably through a breakdown in the wild adolescent dreams that routinely invest our sacred birthrights with a glow of freedom and romance. By twentyone, I would be cynical enough to drink, not so I could enjoy life more, but so I could hurt less.

Perhaps it was because he was thirtyeight, and few things fazed or frightened him anymore, if they ever had, more than fleetingly—because men as naturally self-confident, dominant, and masculine as he went forth to encounter the world as if it were a tumultuous sea to be tamed and sailed, regardless of whether or not society or individual circumstances had any exotic islands or piratical hauls left to offer them—but he wasn't awkward or defensive, insecure in front of a stranger, and this only helped me relax much more easily. Then again, as an Englishman, he probably had a far older soul than mine, while I was the novice, on several levels, who still had a lot to prove. In creating an empire on which the sun had presumably never set, the English—that greatest of all maritime peoples in the modern world—had engendered the twilight of all imperialism. And here I sat, a rich American boy, in the low-income house of a vigorously but quietly virile English stud, on my own soil, offering him virgin land he could colonize, master, and command.

He came back with his beer, asking if I'd given any thought to dinner, before setting out, and if I minded if we ordered a pizza. Eventhough I was sure he would take me to the local pub without blushing, deploy his bruiser's pinktoned white fists to defend his choice and my honor against any smalltown bigots—there were still, surely, one or two left, despite the historic efforts of Rosie, Ellen, and Will & Grace—I could tell he wanted us to confab without tackling the social verdict.

"Hawaiian," I said.

Standing with his legs squared, quaffing his beer, "Faggot," he said, flexing his knees, and giving me a crooked, lusty, strangely indulgent halfsmile.

"And what," I femmed it up a tad, "would a real man order, Mr Greenwood?"

"Sausage and mushroom," the halfsmile became a drippingly-seductive leer, as he flexed his knees again, then gave a deep, throaty chuckle, and broke his commanding stance, to bend his head in almost bashful laughter. "You better learn these things, if you're going to be a good housegirl."

"Are you looking for a maid?"

"I was." He put his beer down and resumed his seat, sitting on the edge of it. "Then you walked in here, all luscious and womanly, and I never for a moment thought wit could come with a package like that, and suddenly I'm looking for someone who can cook, and clean, and explain Shakespeare to me, and drain my big, low-hanging bollocks every night and three times a day on weekends. Hey," he said into his cell, "I'd like to order a large pizza. 1404 Birkelund Lane. Yeah, this is Nigel. How's it going, mate?" Mounded up bigger like that, as he held his cell, his left biceps made its big, tubular vein pump up bigger and bluer against his pale, babypink skin. A faint velvety haze of tiny, silverblond hairs shimmered along its potent, elastic surface and vanished into its shadow against the lean muscle undulating over the outside of his upperarm, under the tattoo of the dark blue wolf.

As my eyes flickered away from his ink-embellished male loveliness, he captured my wandering gaze, perhaps ignorant of where it had been resting, in reverent rapture, only moments before, and said into the phone, "Yes, mate, I'm still here. Hawaiian. Buffalo wings. Twelve pieces. I'm sure I can put them away, even if my girl won't touch em," this entirely for my benefit, because why would the guy at the pizza place care? "Thanks, mate." He clicked his cheap cellphone off, and reclined again, spreading his knees wide, mutely challenging me to have a seat—where he probably sensed I most wanted to—and surf the deeply-cresting denim wave of his package, "It'll be here in twenty minutes. Is that okay, or will it take you past your bedtime?"

Questions, words, and phrases that may've acquired a pejorative or downright offensive character spoken by someone else, regardless of the person's accent or national origin, emerged in his deep, husky voice as playful and always indulgent.

I reminded myself that his reasonable, intelligent wife had left him—he never tried to repress or sugarcoat his history in his emails—because he was a lout and a boor, who expected her to clean up after him, cater his soccer games and poker nights, and give him head in the kitchen everytime he asked. Well, I'm exaggerating and embellishing a little, but I'm not blind to the source and general character of her eventual disaffection. Of course, she probably wanted kids, and she finally had to accept, as many women who've fallen for sexually appealing, emotionally-immature men have often had to, that she could never bring a child into a home where the father, however studly, was still a boy. Maternal expectations, after initially breasting the matrimonial surge with bravery and resilience, often ran aground on the secret, self-absorbed complexity of the eternal stud. Fortunately for him, Nigel was bisexual enough to find his satisfactions with the likes of me. It's cruel and unusual, the level of maturity women keep demanding from straight men, who have no alternative to this empyrean standard but to remain single; hire a maid, if they can afford one; and either play the singles scene or make do with hookers. Once upon a time men remained boys all through their conquests of the world, their hunting parties, clubs, mistresses, poetry, science, and wars; and the only reason contemporary women demand that men leave their boyhood behind is because women want to make sure they remain the center of a man's attention. Fidelity is often lionized as a mark of maturity, but it is also fodder for female vanity. How can I tell him that's not the sort of woman I aspire to be for him? Do the undeniably rapturous transits of my gaze across the muscular landscape of his ultra-masculine body render such assurances superfluous?

"What was that about explaining Shakespeare to you?"

"Do you read Shakespeare?"

"I adore Shakespeare," I confessed. "I've read all his plays and most of his poetry."

He shook his head, smiling, "I know he's a major British export, but I never did get what the whole song-and-dance was about. Sure you don't want to spread your legs right now?" He grabbed and squeezed his crotch for the first time.

"I'm prepared," with a kind of aristocratic delicacy other Black people may consider White, "to wait."

"God, you're hot," with a crooked, blatantly lascivious grin—and no vulgar gestures.

When, despite an undeniably pretty face, you were persecuted for your pudge through all of elementary and most of highschool, an ejaculation like that—albeit a verbal one—from a body like his can do wonders for a girl's ego.

I had no doubt that many of his dates, at least from that website on which we met, would've been slobbering all over him my now. I was equally certain I was not the only one he'd favored with the romantic approach. But I couldn't figure out what exactly, beyond the simple dichotomy inherent in his opening gambit, fueled and sustained his choices.

"Okay, fine," he said, "you don't know whether I'm a chubby-chaser, a jiggle-jockey, or whatever other colorful terms you American fags have come up with to objectify one another, but you don't have to pretend you're the norm with me. Just be yourself. I love a girl who's just naturally beautiful, like you, and can be herself. Now, if you're going to be self-conscious, that ruins it. I'm not reprimanding you, Dane. Be as self-conscious as you want, if you really want to. But not on my account and certainly not because that's what you think society expects of a fat girl. Fuck society. Inside this house, we're going to make our own society, and that's what you have to be comfortable with."

Elation surged inside me, making me talkative, "Don't you want to know anything about me, aside from what you can see?"

"Sure," he gestured. "You want to go to college in the fall?"

"Maybe. If I can work it into my other interests."

"I thought all other interests had to be worked around college."

"For some people. Did you go to college?"

He shook his head, that crooked, lazy grin never far from his lips, "Barely passed my O-Levels."

"What's an O-Level?"

"An inane school-leaving exam in Britain."

"Here we just graduate. It's so simple."

"Simple people, you Americans."

"Do you hate us?"

"Yeah. That's why I left London, the center of the world, to live in this American town."

"I live in The Cedars," it just slipped out.

"So," without missing a beat, "you're a rich boy?"

I nodded and bowed my head, as if my being rich were far more shameful than my skipping college altogether so I could keep house for him.

"Don't worry," he said, tapping his boots on the hardwood floor. "I've been known to fuck rich people. Till they were ready to leave me all their money and go begging in the street."

He did follow me home. It wasn't late, and I think the fortysecond element did tweak aside a curtain and survey my evening's end. But a fortuitous sycamore gave me and Nigel privacy.

"You do know," he said, leaning against his care-worn and rather grubby Honda Civic, "what I'm looking for's a live-in deal?"

I nodded and looked down.

He lifted my chin with a finger, so I was looking into those piercing cobaltblue eyes at unnervingly close range, "You think you can leave this place?"

I was so horny, I would've promised to live on the street with him, if it came to that, but the words that sound great in our heads often lose their heroic reverberations when they hit the outside air.

Suddenly, he leaned in and kissed me softly on the mouth, and said in a low, over-sexualized growl, "I want you in my house and in my bed, Dane. Make no mistake about that. But we have to find a way to make that work for both of us. I have some kid flying in from Indiana tomorrow. He says he'd travel thousands of miles to have someone plow his butt with a big, uncut cock and talk dirty to him in an English accent. He's a dark-skinned Brazilian. We've had cam-sex twice, already. He has a real hairy arse. I can go for that, too."

Exiling the irrational hurt and despair from my tone, I asked, "What do you really want?"

He shrugged, "I don't know, exactly. If you can't handle the uncertainty—"

"No," I gripped his forearm. Its thick, long muscles undulated in my tentative grip, its fine golden hairs shimmering in the muted yellow lights of our lawn.

"Suit yourself," he said. "But I'm trying hard not to be selfish here."

"What do you mean?"

"If it were upto me, you'd be naked in an apron right now, doing my dishes, trying not to drop and break anything, while I fingered your plump Black pussy, getting my girl all worked up for one of the most amazing butt-slammings she's ever had."

We met, four days and numerous emails later, at the Lesterville Galleria on Trenton, the largest mall in town; though Lesterville, especially if you included the unincorporated gated community of The Cedars, was really more of a small city.

I dressed more butch, but I carried a large red canvas shoulder bag no boy who valued his masculinity in the public eye would ever be caught dead with. Nigel's jeans were baggier; those scarred, heavy, shit-kicking workboots of his were every bit as clunky and thrilling; his tanktop molded itself to his torso like the wings of angels around the throne of God.

Lesterville's a pretty liberal town, so people didn't give us looks, when he hugged me, almost crushing me with all his lean, powerful muscle, and gave me a peck on the lips.

We took a seat on the main level, on a red pleather bench between two trees, each in a beautifully-carved, terracotta Tuscan planter.

"So why're we here?"

"For the second phase, Dane."

"How was the Brazilian?"

"I fucked him like it was my last go at an arse as a single man, before I allowed you to ruin my life."

"Should I be flattered?"

"Very. Since Tilda, I've been an insatiable socket-junkie."

"Is that a Britishism?"

"No. A Nigelism. It covers all orifices."

"Human and animal?"

"Plant and mineral. And let's not forget transsexual. Now here's the deal. I've done this a few times before, with girls of all genders. You go and buy me a pair of underwear you think best suits my personality. And I go buy you a pair of underwear I think best suits yours. Consider all factors. Fabric, design, color. I usually chose this mall, because it has no kinky or gag underwear stores. This is serious stuff. Then we wrap these gifts in plain brown paper, meet back here and exchange them. The next time we meet, at my house—unless your mum—"

"No," I said, almost too loudly.

"—fine—we wear them under our clothes—and we see what happens."

"I like this game."

"How long do you think we should spend?"

"Half an hour?"

He shrugged his lips and nodded, "Reasonable." He slipped an arm around my shoulders. I almost fainted from the delicious smell of his pit. It wasn't rank; his deodorant still predominated; but it was a hot, muggy day and his pit offered me an intoxicating undertow of man-musk. He leaned in and kissed my cheek again. "If you think keeping my hands off you's easy, even with a whole retinue of dark, hairy arses to distract me, you probably also believe in Santa Claus." He sprang up and his bulge sort of thrust itself calmly into my face. He reached down and ran a finger tenderly down my cheek, then swung away from me and sauntered off.