Tom and Luke Get a Family Pt. 01

Tom and Luke get a family Pt 01

[This story follows on from Dom and Sandro]

Chapter I The première of Oberon and a career opportunity

A year had gone by uneventfully. Tom Appleton was now beginning his third year in his appointment as a lecturer in the University of Trabizona in Emilia-Romagna, and although he spent about 30% of his time in lecturing, the remaining time in the lab was proving very fruitful. Professor Arturo Sescantanto had even given him a doctoral student to supervise. His name was Carlo, and he was an attractive young man, who, if Tom's partner Luke Singleton-Scarborough had seen him, might have become a source of jealousy.

But Luke had other preoccupations. The long-awaited first night of Carl Maria von Weber's opera Oberon at the Teatro Musicale in Trabizona would take place under his direction the next day. The principals were all well rehearsed, the chorus was ready and the guest conductor Maestro Steinberger was satisfied with the orchestra. The sets and costumes all looked magnificent, particularly since the designer was a young man without much of a reputation. They had finally elected to use the Bodansky version of the libretto in which the spoken dialogue was replaced by recitative, as well as being translated into Italian. Critics from several European nations were expected for this first revival of a Weber opera in Italy for some years.

David, Luke's Dad, had flown over from England for the occasion, and a box was reserved for a party consisting of him, Tom, Tom's friend from the lab Ben and his wife Leonora, Arturo and Bastian, Arturo's boyfriend. An Italian tenor was singing the title role and the role of Sir Huon was sung by the English tenor Felix Arundell. Reiza, the female soprano lead, was sung by Anna Kreissmüller, a young German soprano. When the evening arrived, the guests were all assembled in the box, while Luke was sweating and fretting away backstage. The overture began and at its end, the curtain rose on Oberon's bower.

............

The performance lasted a long time, but everything went smoothly, and both Arundell and Kreissmüller got thunderous applause. Next day the critics were very complimentary, although some complained that the original English or later German versions of the libretto should have been used. Pauline the répétiteuse and Cornelio the General Manager's decision to use an Italian version was vindicated however by the fact that within three days, all eight performances were sold out, even at the high ticket price that a new commercial production necessitates. Pauline and Cornelio were delighted and David was very complimentary. He told his son that the production had probably made his career. A month later, Luke got an E-mail from England inviting him to apply for the job of General Manager of the Royal Bristol Opera.

This was a bombshell. Pauline and Cornelio did not want him to leave Trabizona, and Luke was faced with a real dilemma. No way did he want to leave Italy, whose whole atmosphere and climate were deeply dear to him. Like his mother, he wanted to make a permanent home there. Tom could not leave without breaking his contract, even though he could easily get a job back home, maybe even a chair. But Luke would never get another chance to work back in England in his chosen field, and only in England could a gay couple adopt children. But his job carried with it, exactly like his brother Sandro, the inevitable need to work permanently unsocial hours, and a restrictive holiday period. This was really incompatible with proper family life. So the alternatives open to the two men were both stark. Stay in Italy and make good careers, but childless, or return to Britain, adopt a family, but leave behind the life and climate of Italy, which even Tom had learned to love.

The decision when it came was made easier when Luke discovered that the job in Bristol involved just such unsocial hours as his present job. It was not a desk job with office hours. So he replied that he had decided not to apply. However, the invitation had shaken up Cornelio. He had really thought that he might lose Luke. So Luke had a strong hand when he negotiated a new contract with Cornelio. This gave Luke the whole of August free on full pay, and a stipulation that he would undertake no more than eight productions per year, with a commitment to act as répétiteur for two further productions, to allow Pauline the chance to try her hand at directing. This new contract satisfied everyone.

Chapter II A pregnancy and another opportunity

In the meantime, something else happened that affected the men's lives. One of the female technicians in Tom's lab got pregnant, and had been abandoned by the putative father, who had rapidly disappeared. The girl, who was about twenty-three, went to see Arturo and asked him (he was now head of department) what she should do. She did not want her baby to be adopted, she wanted to look after it herself, but she had no money, and any kind of state benefit was inadequate. She would not consider an abortion and the man who had seduced her was untraceable.

Arturo at once thought of Tom and Luke. He said to the girl, "I know personally two young gay men living in permanent partnership who are very keen to bring up a family. Italian law does not allow them to adopt, but there's no reason why they should not become foster parents to your child. This would enable you to feed the child and care for it in their home. They would give you free accommodation and pay you a salary to look after it at least until it gets to school age or maybe even eighteen. I know these men. They are wealthy, honourable and caring. They would pay all the costs of bringing up the child, and because they are gay, there is no chance of either of them ever laying a finger on you. Neither of them is Italian, but they both speak Italian very well. What do you think? You know one of them, he is Tom Appleton and he works in the lab."

"It's an interesting proposition, but of course I need to meet these two men, because I would have to live in the same house with them, even if they don't want me in bed with them!"

"OK, how about tomorrow at 6 pm?" It was Tuesday, and Arturo knew that Luke did not work on Wednesday evenings. The girl, whose name was Olivia, agreed.

Arturo called Tom in to see him and told him what had happened. Tom got extremely excited, and said "Olivia has always seemed to me a sweet girl. What figlio di puttana could fuck her, get her pregnant and leave her in the lurch?" Tom asked, in a splendid mixture of English and Italian crudities. "Come what may, I will have Luca here by 6 pm tomorrow!" And so at the time agreed, the three met with Arturo in his office the next day.

Olivia was a tall dark-haired girl with a big bulge, emphasizing the fact that she was basically rather slender in build. It transpired that she was six months gone, that she was attending an antenatal clinic for pregnancy care and that an ultrasonic scan had revealed that the baby was a boy. She looked closely at the two men. Luca, as Luke was always known in Italy, was tall, slim and dark-skinned with longish black hair and a goatee. Tom, whom she knew, was tall, muscular, clean-shaven with crew-cut hair and a hairy body. Both men were fit, with strong arms and legs and flat bellies, and not unattractive. She reckoned that they were in their early thirties or late twenties.

She felt that Sescantanto's proposition needed careful consideration. In spite of her awkward and vulnerable situation, she was shrewd and honest. She did not see herself as a housekeeper or sex partner to either or both of them: she wanted freedom to live her own life, with her own room, a private bathroom and the freedom to go out whenever and with whom she wished, subject of course to the needs of the baby.

The boys also had their own ideas. If Olivia was free to go out whenever and with whom she wished, how could they be sure that she would not take the baby and run off with another man, or even with a woman? They could not make any kind of legally binding agreement, because it would be unenforceable. The whole arrangement required absolute faith and trust between all parties. They felt that they must consult Bastian on a professional basis. Bastian, Arturo's boyfriend, was a lawyer.

After a good discussion, the four decided that Olivia should spend an evening with each of the boys for them to get to know each other. The arrangement they made was that Tom would cook a meal for Olivia and Luke and then leave the flat for the two to talk privately. When it was Tom's turn to meet Olivia, the two would go out to a quiet and discreet restaurant where they could talk tête-à-tête, because Luke was not much of a cook! After that, the three would meet again with Arturo and decide on further action.

Chapter III Luke meets Olivia

Tom cooked a simple pasta meal for Luke and Olivia, a seafood lasagna, followed by ice-cream. The girl arrived about 7 pm, and Tom served up the meal and then left. He did not feel like going to the lab, so he went to the cinema.

Olivia told Luke that she was a country girl, that she dared not tell her parents about her pregnancy, and she did not know many people in Trabizona, where she had only worked for a couple of years. She had no brothers or sisters who might have helped her. She seemed to be an intelligent girl who had been swept off her feet and dishonourably treated by a young man unprepared to take responsibility for his actions. Luke was very sympathetic: he told her how his mother had been similarly victimized by a man and how she had had him adopted.

He explained that he had been brought up by a gay couple, one of whom was his mother's brother, without any females in the house on a regular basis until his sister was born by a surrogate mother. He told her that his childhood had been very happy, that his two fathers had looked after him well, but that when he finally at age nineteen met his mother, he wished that she had been around when he was little. He said he admired Olivia's decision to keep her baby and that he would be very happy to help bring up the boy.

He did however make it clear that if Olivia subsequently formed a new relationship, she would have to leave her son behind. He said he knew that that sounded harsh, but a new relationship should be started without any strings. He and Tom wanted to raise the boy and educate him up to university level. The boy however should keep her surname. He said that it would be a hindrance to the boy to have either his or Tom's English surnames.

He told Olivia that she would have total security and protection provided by Tom and himself, but that it would really be better if she did not get involved with another man. She told Luke that she was happy with those terms, that she did not feel that she wanted a new relationship with either man or woman. Luke knew that promises or intentions of this kind are pretty worthless, and that he and Tom were totally at the mercy of her whims, and if she changed her mind, they could, and almost certainly would, lose the boy. It was only worth the risk if they could reasonably rely on her keeping to her promise. The heartbreak that could be caused if she took the boy away from Tom and Luke would be incalculable, and did not bear thinking about.

He wished that Olivia were like Leonora Curtiss, whom he knew would absolutely remain faithful to a promise. He decided that he needed the opinion of Bastian, Arturo and his mother as to the likelihood of her adhering to her promise. Of course, Tom and he had money on their side, but money is no proof against a mother who has made up her mind to keep her child.

Chapter IV Tom meets Olivia

Olivia Desparaldi had had no close friends in Trabizona, and had been lonely and miserable until she met the man who had seduced her. He was very sympathetic and seemed to be kind, but his thoughtfulness had not extended to the use of rubberware. It had never occurred to her to go on the pill, because it was not often that they slept together. She had really fallen deeply for him, to the extent of taking him home to meet her parents. They had seen through him at once and warned her that he had no serious intentions and that she ought to dump him.

So when she had found herself pregnant and joyfully announced to him her condition, she was devastated when he told her to get rid of the baby. When she told him that she had no intention of doing so, he vanished. His flat was empty, his mobile phone number no longer worked and he had disappeared into thin air. From that moment on Olivia in desperation had been closely scrutinizing the men in the department. Tom had been one of those who caught her eye. She liked his well cared-for appearance and his kindly demeanour.

Although he worked in the same department, Tom only knew Olivia by sight. But he knew that she was not a naïve and simple little girl. You had to be intelligent and hard-working to hold down a job in Sescantanto's lab.

They met at a small restaurant near the boys' flat where they often ate when neither Tom nor Costanza could cook a meal. Tom scrutinized Olivia closely and liked what he saw. She had nice eyes and attractive dark wavy hair. Already pregnancy hormones had enlarged her normally fairly insignificant breasts, so that any hot-blooded Northern Italian male would have looked at them lustfully. (Northern Italians go for tits and butter, Southern Italians for arses and olive oil). Even Tom, who much preferred muscles and trim arses to breasts, felt a slight stiffening of his tool. Unlike Luke, Tom did find women quite attractive, and he sometimes wondered if he was bi.

Olivia looked him full in the eyes and asked him about himself. He told her about how his teenage life had disintegrated after the death of his mother when he was fifteen, and how only one of his five sisters had cared for him while he studied to get into university, and how when he got there, the only person who had befriended him was Luke, with whom he had fallen in love and later become his lifetime partner. He told her how Luke's love had brought him via sexual intercourse into a belief in a loving God, and how he had been baptized as a student, and how the Christian faith had become a cement joining the two of them together. He did not tell her what we know, that he was a chemical genius, destined for high academic achievements.

Tom asked her in English how well she could speak the language. She replied that her English was not very good, but Tom reckoned that it was lack of self-confidence about her linguistic skills that made her so modest. They talked in English for about ten minutes, and it was clear that she had a good understanding of the grammar and syntax, but that her tenses were often confused and her vocabulary a bit limited. But both could easily be improved with practice.

Tom wondered why Olivia had not adopted the normal practice of girls in her situation of asking her parents or close friends to help her look after her baby. She said that she felt that she could not admit to her parents that they were right and that she should have heeded their advice. Tom told her in no uncertain terms that strained relations with her parents were no recipe for a happy upbringing for her baby.

He said that if he and Luca were to become his foster parents, no way would they consider it unless they had her parents' full approval. "You can't turn your back on your parents!" he said. "They love you, and however much they may disapprove of what you have done, you need their help and support to bring up your baby. Luca and I would of course take a father's role, and ensure that you and your son are housed, clothed and fed, but you need your parents as well as us to love and cherish him and give him the best upbringing that can be had." He reached out and took Olivia's hand and kissed it. "Go this weekend, and talk to your mother and father!" he said. Olivia was surprised at this gesture of affection, and Luke if he had seen it would have had a pang of jealousy.

Chapter V What should Luke and Tom do?

Immediately after Tom's meeting, on a Sunday night, Luke and Tom went to bed early, not to sleep but to discuss their impressions about Olivia. "I think that she is a sweet as well as an intelligent girl," said Tom, "and like your mother, she has misjudged a member of our sex. I feel ashamed to be a man when I hear of people like those two worthless wops. What she most needs is a loving honest male like Massimo to marry her. But as none of those appear to be forthcoming, we are all that she has. I think she would make an excellent wife. If we take care of her baby though, she will lead a live without sex. That may well be OK for some women, but others are not going to like that. And if she meets and falls in love with a man, she will want to take the baby and go with him. What do you think?"

"The only way that we could avoid that would be for one of us to get her pregnant. We would then have father's rights over her second child. But the main question is: What is best for her?"

"In my opinion," said Tom, "that is her big deciding question!

"But to change the subject completely, my sweet fag-boy," Tom continued, "what about a fuck? As usual, I can't lie close to you without getting a hard-on! Would you like to ride my dick?" After the usual preparations, Tom lay on his back, his lubed-up berubbered dick sticking up like a submarine's periscope, and Luke knelt over him, facing him and straddled across his body. Tom reached up and started to caress Luke's nipples and stroke the hair on his chest.

Luke bent forward and kissed him passionately. "My darling Tom, why have I made things so hard for you? If I hadn't insisted on us coming to Italy, you would be a Fellow of Buckingham and a university lecturer in Camford by now. As it is, I am stuck here with an exciting but insecure job. OK, I now have a decent salary, but nonetheless an uncertain future."

"Shut up, and let me get on with the job! No talking shop when we're fucking!" said Tom lustfully, in the crudest terms that he ever used. He was much more polite than his partner. Luke lowered himself gently until his rear end engaged with Tom's tool. They then both pushed and Tom's cock entered Luke's rectum. Then followed a very sweaty few minutes as both men worked to provide maximum friction to Tom's tool.

Tom smiled contentedly as he watched Luke's giant but limp cock shaking up and down with the movements of Luke's pelvis. Luke's sweat trickled from his armpits down his side and splashed onto Tom's belly. Eventually with a shout, Tom came violently, shaking his partner with his shuddering orgasm. "I love you, my sweet pretty youth," he said. "I am so proud that you are mine. If you wanted to go to the Amazon jungle or the Sahara, I would go with you without hesitation. In the words of Ruth, Whither thou goest, I will go, where thou lodgest I will lodge, thy people shall be my people and thy God my God. "

"There you go again, preaching in bed!" grinned Luke, as Tom's limp dick slipped out of his hole with a popping sound that made them both giggle. He flopped on the bed beside Tom and started to nibble Tom's tits.

"Quoting scripture isn't exactly preaching!" replied Tom, shivering with delight at the sensation coming from his chest. "But thank you, my sweet love for letting me fuck you! My foul dirty lust for your bowel opening increases every time that I bugger you. If making love with my fag-boy is depraved, then I am proud to sink to the bottom of the foul black pit of depravity! It's a great shame that that wonderful source of pleasure, the arsehole, should have become a term of abuse among ignorant people!"