The Second Oldest Profession

We met back at the red bench and exchanged our gifts.

I put mine away carefully in my red canvas shoulder bag and he told me to keep his in there too, because he was a man and didn't encumber himself with shopping bags. I rolled my eyes and he slipped an arm around my shoulder and we walked over to the food court.

At lunch, he asked me if I wanted to see a movie. I'm not a film buff; I seldom intellectualize a movie; but I love going to the movies, especially on a date, or with a friend, and I generally prefer blockbusters, with lots of special effects. For some reason, this surprised Nigel, but it also excited him. It gave us something in common. Comicbooks.

We saw Captain America. He warned me not to go into raptures over Chris Evans, or it would hurt his feelings. He and the bulked-up version of Chris had mass and definition in common, so I had nothing to feel envious about, I told him. He told me I could fondle his big, bad biceps, throughout the film, if I wanted to turn the whole thing into a kind of virtual reality ride. And so I did, stroking the stout, supple vein running along his biceps, which he silently pumped up for me, smiling down at me in the dark. It surprised me how babysoft and talc-smooth the skin of his upperarm was, around all that rockhard muscle. At one point, he reached down and fondled my crotch, and whispered, "A real man knows how to keep his girl interested."

It may sound like we were behaving badly, but we were generally quiet; it was an early show, on a weekday, so there were only about twenty of us in the entire theatre.

At another point, I sort of accidentally slipped my fingers into his armpit, ecstatic that they came away damp. Then I used the same hand to eat my popcorn, sucking on my fingers, savoring the light tincture of his body-flavor mixed in with the butter.

Now the trick was going to be getting my mom to let me move in with Nigel.

He sent me one email about his underwear gift. It said, with apparent sincerity Noone, not even Tilda, got me the way you do. Either you're a great judge of character, or I already mean something to you.

I wrote back—

Both. But the latter's a much tougher sell.

We were to meet again that weekend.

What unnerved me about Nigel was his caution. I had pretty much agreed to be his domestic bitch, with all the slights and underprivileges appurtenant thereunto, may even have been willing to have the fortysecond element draw up a contract to that effect, but he hadn't yet enslaved me, put me in my maid's uniform and place. The next time we met, I assumed we would see each other in the underwear we'd purchased for one another, but he suggested he pick me up at my house and take me out for a meal in The Cedars. He wanted to see how the other half dined.

I didn't dare reveal my horniness, or that Lesterville's burly fire chief was a little miffed at me for turning down or ignoring all his invitations of late. I don't mean to sound shallow, but Samson Pierce and I had been about to take the next step. Sometime during our next assignation—or three at most, since his wife was about to leave town to visit an ailing aunt in Maine—Pierce would have taken my cherry and made me a woman; and I had been looking forward to my metamorphosis.

But I wasn't nearly as attracted to Samson Pierce as I was to Nigel Greenwood, the latter's spinetingling accent and promise of hulking phallic mass aside. One of my former boyfriends—or, rather, friends with bennies, since, at eighteen, you don't really have much of a dating history to call upon—had been a Mexican footballer at White Oak High; I'd relished all the elastic moments my tongue had spent with his dark, agile foreskin. Rafe had shortly thereafter fallen madly in love with Corinne Baumgartner, and they'd planned to marry as soon as they graduated.

"So tell me about all your past lovers," Nigel said at Mario's Trattoria, one of the most expensive restaurants in New Jersey, located on Spruce Street, the Rodeo Drive of The Cedars, itself often hailed, in Home & Garden, Architectural Digest, and similar publications, as the Bel-Air of the East.

I flubbed my soup, patted my plump, undeniably pouty, and now delicately painted lips, and took a dainty sip of water.

He studied me with those intense blue eyes, which usually gave me the jitters, not only because of how brilliant and beautiful they were, especially heraldic in a face that was, by all accounts, despite its chiseled angularity, ferociously plain—which only indicated you could sculpt an ugly bust or a handsome one and both would be considered sculpted, so that when you described someone's face as statuesque you could be referencing either Antinoös or some jowly patrician; but also because I could never tell whether I was being admired or merely evaluated.

"Sure," his crooked mouth curved up into that alleged sneer, which was always a sort of ironic halfsmile that could give you either the chills you received from a dom or the thrills you derived from a romantic hero, "you haven't been around as long as I—but you must've had more than a few guys in highschool wanting to take advantage of those gorgeous lips—for more than one reason. Or even that luscious, haunting rump."

Despite the fact that some African-Americans can hide behind their negritude, and despite my own dark-chocolate complexion, I bowed my head to forestall his catching me blush.

Could I tell him, here in this elegant establishment he was desecrating so willfully with his dirty blue-collar talk, that I had cum three times since last night, imagining my spending the day doing his laundry, cleaning his room, cooking his dinner, my body inflamed with the quiet domestic glory of its diligent service to him; and his coming home from that construction site, grabbing me, throwing my skirt over my waist, yanking my panties down, and fucking my overused but still resiliently tight pussy with his mega-meat, the day's grime and funk still coating his rockhard, tattooed, superhero's body?

Bringing my fingers away from my glass of iced water to lay them gently against my temple, in a superficially pensive stance, I began to see that my mom may've had a point all along. Surely there had to be a limit to my submissiveness. But why should only White people enjoy the privilege of subservience?

I calmed down and told Nigel about Rafe—and the four other highschoolers I'd fooled around with, only one of whom had identified, even at seventeen, as gay, and a total top.

"I'm a virgin," I suddenly blurted out, a little annoyed.

I was wearing the coral-pink, silk-and-lace panties he'd bought me from Victoria's Secret at the mall, getting my size insultingly right. What more did he want from me? What secret reserves of restraint did he expect a horny, submissive, eighteen-year-old bottom to have around a quietly forceful, uncompromising stud such as he, who walked around, at the best of times, just dripping with raw sex?

He reclined in his seat, the virility coming off him in quiet, self-assured waves. Just sitting there, at thirtyeight, he was like one of those powerful, ruffianly testosterone factories that usually manifested as soccer stars, brawling sailors, and Australian cowboys. Despite his smart black dress-shirt, which really intensified the paleness of his skin, he seemed excitingly out of place in Mario's, among numerous elegant denizens of The Cedars whom I recognized and who'd broken their focus on their dinners or dinner companions to acknowledge me. Many of them were or had at some point been my mother's clients. People had stopped to look at Nigel, too, because his presence in any setting was never easily ignored.

My desire for him was proving to be indomitable, and the anger into which it was steadily sublimating felt almost implacable.

"I did have a boyfriend," I confessed, sipping my wine. "When you and I met, he and I were—"

The waiter interrupted at that moment, bringing me my fettuccini in duck sauce and Nigel his small Neapolitan pizza. As the waiter cleared away our empty soup bowls, I examined his bulge between the bottle of olive oil and the Parmesan shaker. He had nothing on Nigel. Why was Nigel's epic package so near and yet so far?

When the waiter had left, Nigel said, "You were about to tell me about your boyfriend."

I struggled to detect a flicker of jealousy in his tone or expression, but came up blank. This made my indignation less easy to swallow.

"He's older than you."

"Married?"

I couldn't face him, as if he were judging me.

I nodded.

"It never ends well," he said. "I'm not telling you how to live your life."

"But I want you," I began—I couldn't leave it there, so I finished it, "I want you to tell me how to live my life. Isn't that how this started? You were older and experienced. You knew exactly what you wanted and I knew exactly what I wanted, and suddenly everything's existentially fucked up."

He laughed, reclining powerfully in his chair, hands hanging from the pockets of his new, darkblue, emphatically unfaded jeans. In the black vee of his open collar, against a taut landscape of deep, hard muscle that looked like marble in the pink light of dawn, its vivid cleavage just about showing, I could see a few stars from the constellation of Sagittarius, shimmering darkly through the buff-colored haze of his light, spasmodic chest-hair.

"Did you think I was just playing some game, the other night, when I asked if you wanted to wait?"

I suddenly realized I had made the decision to wait only to appear virtuous, despite my determination, entering his house—and life—to be as submissive as possible, take the maid's role as far as I could. I had no doubt he'd completely dominated that kid from Indiana, put him through paces that weren't on any map in my imagination. Nigel had told me he had a relatively well-equipped dungeon in his basement, which many of his boys, and even older lovers—all of them his girls, his bitches—seemed to enjoy. One of the photos on his profile page on that infamous site had shown him wearing a hugely-freighted leather thong, chaps, those workboots, black armbelts; smoking a cigar. I'd been jacking off to that picture far more after meeting him, than I'd done before.

He leaned across the table and took my hand, tracing its slightly plump outline with a coarse workman's finger.

"You know," his voice was thick, almost muffled, "every now and then, at work—we're doing the foundation of a building on Cadogan—someone will leave the gate open, and I'll be able to look out onto the street, and I'll see some smart, slightly heavy, Black woman passing by. And for a moment I'll imagine you're bringing me lunch. And then I'll take a closer look, and I'll know it's not my girl. Because my girl is a princess, not a maid."

Finally we faced each other, his blue eyes no longer as distant and brilliantly cold as they could often be, and mine—I couldn't deny—brimming with tears.

"Thank you," I whispered. A vague, embryonic epiphany hovered above my cerebral cortex, refusing to step up its development and manifest. I touched my napkin to the corner of each eye, as casually as possible. His hand now rested on mine, the gesture more ambiguous than his workaday anecdote. But what reverberated through its tone was a terrifying confession of weakness at the heart of his great masculinity and strength: the weakness of a deep, long-standing loneliness no girl, or bitch, or wife, or pussyboy had ever alleviated and which he was no longer young enough to simply brush aside.

"What's your favorite Shakespeare play?"

I laughed. He had moved his princess, more gently than anyone ever had, from emotional danger to emotional safety, even if this was all still, at some level, his chessboard.

"Hamlet," I told him. "I've read it at least twenty times. No single movie version does it justice."

"The other night," he lifted my pinkie and held it, caressing it between his thumb and forefinger, "I stopped at Barnes & Noble and bought a copy of Romeo and Juliet. And then I ordered a Hawaiian pizza, poured myself some red wine, sat down to dinner and read the whole fucking play."

I leaned forward and took his hand, "What did you think?"

"I'm beginning to see what the song and dance is about. But, for the most part, I'd be pretending to like it, because I feel I have to."

"I just love what he does with language," I said. "You have to love language to love Shakespeare. Otherwise, you're right. It's just a lot of rhetorical noise."

"Like a monster truck rally?"

"Yes. But with a story arc. Unlike a Deep Purple concert."

"Deep Purple is sacred ground."

"How did I know we'd agree on that?"

"Because you're the brainiest person I've ever met. One of these days, I'm gonna take your cherry to 'Highway Star.'"

"Why, Mr Greenwood," I held out a limp hand to him, using my mom's accent, "I do declare no gentleman's ever made me such a romantic offer."

"And if this mysterious boyfriend of yours tries, he and I will be walking twenty paces."

"Not many kids my age would understand what that means."

"Not many kids your age have held my attention for more than ten minutes."

Obeying Nigel's instructions—or commands—to the letter, I entered his house and locked the frontdoor securely behind me. All the blinds and curtains of the streetward windows were shut, but the muted evening light came in from the side windows, investing the suddenly very clean and tidy, if still erratically furnished livingroom with a warm, apricot light. Despite an undeniable overlay of citrine furniture polish and floral rug-cleaner, his smell, indomitable to the desperate, ladylike evasions of household deodorants, lingered everywhere, especially to someone whose nose was attuned to it like a faithful dog's. As soon as it greeted my nostrils, my dick began to stiffen inside those famous coral-pink panties, which he'd instructed me to wear again.

I stripped down to the panties, and, leaving my clothes and footwear in the livingroom, pattered barefoot and, at my chub-level, very nearly pregnant, into the sparkling-clean kitchen; thence through the door that led down to the basement, which he'd left ominously ajar.

In the livingroom, the whiff of cigar smoke had been gentle, even a little stale, but as I drew closer to the dark, partially-gaping doorway to the basement, the aroma became stronger, sweet and pungent, wafting up to me from the bowels of my best and raunchiest fantasies; drawing me, with its olfactory piper's melody, to follow it to its source.

The basement was made of solid concrete, painted black. From what I could see, it was neater, cleaner, and more well-kept than the livingroom, diningroom, or kitchen had been on my first visit; though someone had clearly been around since then, doing for him with a vengeance. Wrythen black sconces stuck out of the walls on three sides, at carefully-spaced intervals, like a sorcerer's hands, frozen in grim, floral patterns, each with three prehensile fingers bearing flickering, crimson pillar candles like darkness making the world a mocking gift of light.

In a corner, Nigel lounged in a simple wooden throne. Painted black, its seat and back upholstered in crimson leather, it bristled with rows of silver studs that served both a functional and a decorative purpose.

His voice flat, "Go get cuffed," he said, exhaling a draft of spicy, woody smoke from his smoldering cigar. The lance of smoke mushroomed into a cloud that made his blue eyes blaze out of his hazy face as if some supernatural power were making his irises phosphoresce.

He wore a white, ribbed tanktop, sweaty and mud-stained, ripped at the neck; the grey Calvin Klein briefs I'd given him; and those heavy black workboots, without socks. I had never seen his legs before, not even on the website. They were mouth-wateringly beautiful, but more about that later.

His gesture had been barely perceptible, but I noted it right away. I followed his hand to a set of cuffs affixed to the wall opposite the staircase. It took me a moment to realize that I had to kneel before I could cuff my wrists, and then, obviously, only one wrist.

"Face the room," he said.

There were also cuffs for each ankle, screwed into the floor. It was a little awkward, my having to twist around behind me and lean down, since I wasn't exactly the most limber Gumby in the toychest, but I managed to get both ankles secured. The fit was snug and just slightly less than comfortable.

I was sure there were other points along these forbidding walls that provided fastenings that left a sub's back to the room, but that would come later.

"Are you sure you're ready for this?" It wasn't an uppercrust English accent, or exactly East End either, but, in his deep, even voice, those tidy vowels and deadpan consonants enriched the timber of his sultry commands.

"Yes, sir."

"Good boy."

He hadn't moved from his chair yet, but now, with his cigar pluming in one hand, he stood up, and sauntered over to the corner and stood with his back to me. His legs were exquisitely shaped, their lines, flowing from his hips and narrow ass, swelling and cadencing along the low arches of his strong quads, and then rising again, behind, down the sleek bulges of his perfect calves, before narrowing dynamically into the open cuffs of those black boots formed a sinuous, stationary ballet of pure muscle. They were also pretty hairy; but they didn't seem so, because the hair was so light. Their comprehensive, sandyblond fuzz glimmered invitingly against the lean, sleek swells and sheaves of thigh and calf muscle, as he squared his legs and flexed his knees.

Even these gestures, and his stance, had not indicated to me, till now, what he was upto. But when I heard the sound, I knew. He was pissing into a metal bucket. The liquid whine and clatter was fierce; manly, and thunderous; the volume considerable.

I wondered how far back he usually skinned his cock when he took a piss—maybe not at all, possibly all the way. He kept up that metallic roar of piss for about a minute—more—and it was probably closer to two minutes before he tapered off. As he pissed, he lifted his burning cigar to his lips and took a long drag, sending the smoke up toward the rugged, unvarnished beams in the roof of the cellar. I smelled the aroma of his cigar; I wanted to smell his piss. How I longed to see his naked cock, be closer to that torrential stream, sniffing and even tasting it, receiving it into my fat, unworthy body.

Then came the shake; the bulging, dividing, and stretching of his beautifully-carved, almost disadvantageously-elegant calves and hamstrings, as he packed his considerable meat away in those forthright, unpretentious briefs I'd bought him. His legs, obsession-inducing masterpieces of crural form, were less those of a soccerplayer than those of a runner or dancer. I had honestly never seen male legs this perfectly sculpted. Sure, many bodybuilders exhibited great—even grandiose—sculpture, but Nigel's legs weren't excessively massed and shredded; for all their statuary artifice, perhaps because of their lovely golden stockings of fine, shimmering hair, they seemed warmly and wonderfully natural.

Even though I was the one on his knees, cuffed, I experienced a heady sense of ownership toward this magnificent human specimen. He walked toward me and stopped about ten feet away, near a black leather sling suspended from the ceiling.

"Did you enjoy the sound of that?"

"Yes, sir."

He may call me anything he wished, his email had said, but I may only call him sir.

Holding and suggestively caressing one of the sling's sturdy silver chains, he took a leisurely drag on his cigar. The long muscles arching between careful points of insertion between his knees and groins made bridges my tongue longed to travel. In the gloom, his body seemed even whiter, but the candlelight brought out the tenuous gold tincture in his pink tan, so the considerable fuzz of his legs seemed, at certain moments, almost like a shimmer in his skin.