The Valentine

"Relax. You know what you have to do. You will cum. No matter how long it takes, you will cum."

I just kept stroking his dick up and down. I did not take any breaks. I would just pause once in a while to smear my hand with gel. By now I had my own cock out of my pants and was masturbating myself with my left hand. My right hand worked on him and felt his cock starting to swell up to the point of no return. He was in real sexual ecstasy. The roller-coaster ride was almost over. He was on top of the hill ready to come hurtling down at top speed.

I paused because the intensity had also hit me where it hurts.

Without warning I felt that I too was about to erupt like a volcano. I was so close and it would clearly be some orgasm. It would be over for me, at least. Over his chest. Over his belly. Over his cock and balls. I scooped up some of my pre-cum and rubbed his cock with it. His loud moans of sheer brute pleasure at imminent release filled the small room.

The temptation to bring him over the edge was too much. I wanted him to experience the full beauty of an incredible orgasm. I also wanted us to cum together, to connect so intimately at that vital moment. I stood up, leant over him and looked into his face. He returned my gaze directly, soul to soul, totally exposed. There was a tremendous silence and a sense of time standing still, as though the entire universe was waiting for a simple human decision to be made.

Instead of merely making conversation

Make love to me

Make love to me

My darling....

But I knew that this kind of relief couldn't be part of the package. I had to leave the scene. I had, in effect, to torture myself as much as him and to stop the whole thing right now. If not, I risked it all being finished anyhow and couldn't bear to face that possibility. I turned around and virtually ran out of the room, so that I would not have to hear him calling me, begging me, pleading for relief.

Make love to me

Make love to me

My darling......

I'm so in love..... with..... you......

I closed the door of the bedroom and lay down exhausted, with my hands tight over my ears. If there was screaming, I was no longer sure where the screams were coming from.

***

I went back in to him after a few minutes. It proved to be a good move: it was quiet and peaceful and all of his desperation, like my own, had subsided.

Neither of us could speak.

On reflection, it was clear to me that we'd been at the very brink of something in much more than that one sexual sense. If I'd not gone back in when I did, if I'd stayed alone and left him on his own for very much longer, then whatever that very moment of my return to the room signified - the human bond of trust, the submission of the will, the acceptance of the unknown - would never have existed and a brick wall would have stood and remained between us.

I draped a thick warm towel over his torso and ruffled his hair before loosening the ties around his arms and legs. They wouldn't be needed again.

Then I went off to the shower.

As the warm water sprayed over my hair and ran down my back and shoulders I considered the blinding obviousness of it: that a lost soul seeking connection with another lost soul could only ever jump out of a universe of solitary loneliness and into a parallel one of solitary loneliness multiplied by two - a truly disastrous proposition yet fundamentally so tempting and so terrifyingly powerful. Such then was the futility of any traditional feelings of love I had for James.

***

That afternoon after lunch I took James up into my own bedroom, the one that I shared with Richard and, sometimes, Hari. There were no torture games now and no bonds, except for two soft silken blindfolds - one for each of us - which seemed somehow appropriate.

James had a rock-hard erection from the moment we walked in and undressed and I knew that this afternoon it was time for something to get resolved. To begin with he stayed lying there on the bed, face-down, his up-turned buttocks offering their own erotic invitation to my hands, tongue and penis. I stretched out next to him on the sheets, attaching the blindfolds first to him and then to myself.

"I'd love you to enter me," I told him. "When the time's right and you're ready... and if you want to."

"I'm a married man," he muttered from his pillow, "Fucking's what I do best."

Gently my fingers stroked James's sides and he squirmed a little as I worked my way round his body: down the insides and outsides of his legs; between his toes, across his soles; back up his legs; into his ribs and sides - all the while hitting his nerve centres bang on.

I felt him take my cock in his hand and begin to rub it slowly and gently. It was the first voluntary contact he had ever made against me and it sent me into such a spin of delight and expectation that I could bear only a few seconds, aware that I could cum very soon under such circumstances. I turned over into the softness of the sheets and mattress, moaning loudly. His hands receded.

I lay there silent and breathless, hugging the pillow to my chest. Waiting.

His hand moved to my buttocks. He stirred from his recumbent position. He climbed aboard. Now he had me.

***

I hadn't anticipated that the turning of the tables could be so exquisite. I almost wanted to experience being tied down too but the sheer strength of his body - a fine-wrought blend of youth and athleticism - made any restraints redundant. I was at his mercy now, good and proper.

"Good and proper?" he laughed. "Far from it, I'm afraid!"

He bit painfully into my neck with his bare teeth and I fought to pull away.

"No boundaries! No limits!" he reminded me. "No fucking limits!"

***

Pleasure is strictly finite and any attempt to extend its boundaries results in its transformation into pain. For this reason, the infliction of pleasure can never be so delightful to the aspiring mind as the infliction of pain. To give a finite quantity of pleasure is a merely human act; the infliction of the infinity we call pain is truly god-like and divine.

***

He was on the verge of coming. And this time I was powerless to stop him. He beat his cock desperately against and inside my body. How hard and how fast he tried! My own cock, aching for exactly the same kind of release, rubbed wildly against the sheets.

The orgasm would be the longest and most shatteringly intense either of us had ever experienced. It would go on and on. Thick, white wads of hot, sticky, savage spunk, encouraged and built up so carefully but so sadistically denied release, would gush out of our cocks like power jets from twin water canons.

We each gave a gasp and screamed and yelled as the very brink of the bottomless pit opened before us.

"Bondage or liberty, Tomas and James? The choice is yours!!"

As though an internal switch had been thrown somewhere within the furthest recesses of our minds, the searing bliss of the urgency to ejaculate just flipped right over into an indescribable rapture of identical intensity. At that moment, I am sure, something happened outside of normal time as if someone had paused the video on a filmed re-play of our love-making at this very instant before sexual release. We were totally physically aware and alert and felt the spunk throbbing within our testes, gathering all of its biological power, straining with an irresistible force against any remaining physical and psychological barriers.

Our breathing froze. It seemed as if our very hearts stopped. We must have felt each of these distinct and separate events clearly and sequentially and I clearly recall that every one of the muscles of our bodies locked tense as we each strained against the invisible straps which held us down. The sheer intensity of it was overwhelming. That part of our brain suddenly became the only part of our brain and we wanted to spend the rest of lives held down, together, helpless, tortured by these beautiful demons within our own minds. The moment stretched to breaking point and then - with a final shriek of unimaginable ecstasy - the moment broke and came forth.

"Liberty!" we shrieked, and pulled off the blindfolds, our two bodies disentangling from the grip of our frantic coupling. We turned and looked at each other in wonder.

Wave after wave after wave of something from the ocean depths was sweeping over and above and through our bodies and minds.

A physical ejaculation would have been about a huge surge of release and a gradual return to reality would have followed; there would have been a loss of sexual tension and a profound sense of arrival, of coming home; of coming, and of home; of being back where we had begun.

Neither James nor I wanted to be back where we had begun.

For him, that would have meant coming back to find yet another escape from the pain that had made him run away from England. His coming home would have been to that and he wanted to get as far away as he could. By running halfway across the globe he'd put a fair distance between himself and that problem. Except that once he got here, he found to his terror that he'd brought it all with him anyway. No wonder he wanted no password, no get-out clause. No release meant no return meant no responsibility meant no response.

For me, coming home meant coming home to the fact that James was using me far more than I was using him. Coming home meant feeling old and powerless and lonely.

For both of us, coming to climax would have meant coming to the realisation that we had to go through it all again and not with each other and that the illusion of freedom had ended.

But this was different. "THIS IS WHAT SEX IS ALL ABOUT, if you give it half a chance!" was being shouted to us from somewhere else.

We were still looking into each other's eyes. As I gazed deep into those dark brown pools within his clear, sensitive face I was aware of ripples spreading out in all directions - ripples of sadness as well as of joy; of surrender and triumph; of freedom, liberation and of vast space even within the tiny prison of my own self; of dying and growing and changing and resurrection - and I couldn't help smiling.

He smiled back, because he couldn't help it either.

Then the laughter began. Laughter to beat all the tickling and torture games rolled into one. Laughter at life, laughter at death, laughter at oneself, laughter at each other, laughter at sex, laughter at love, laughter at decay, laughter at old age, laughter at pain, laughter at pleasure, laughter at everything serious and pompous and official, laughter at poverty, laughter at anger, laughter at fear, laughter at fun.

Read those words again.

Read them a third time.

That's how it felt.

That's how it was.

That's about how long it lasted.

We held each other tightly, eyes now closed, cheek to cheek.

***

After a long time he spoke to me.

"Tomas?"

He waited.

"Can you lend me enough money to fly back to England?"

I must have been expecting something like this. My answer came easily.