Collateral damage

We have the helicopter put us down about five miles from the hacienda, and my pilot agrees to wait in the middle of the coca fi We have the helicopter put us down about five miles from the hacienda, and my pilot agrees to wait in the middle of the coca field we landed in until he gets our evac signal. We check out our field radios and our weapons, then head out, a single-file march through a million-dollar landscape illuminated by the full moon overhead. Fortunately, I have enough experience with path-finding, and enough confidence in my men, to be reasonably sure we’re heading the right way. The fact that I had McPike pinpoint the hacienda’s location via satellite doesn’t hurt, either. We have the exact GPS position we’re headed for, courtesy of the same U.S. government whose plans we’re trying to thwart. Sort of karmic, don’t you think? I spend the time it takes us to reach the enclave wondering what we’ll find. Evan told me, when we’d returned to our hotel, that he’d snooped around the small outbuildings, and discovered they were outfitted as blocks of four jail cells. As far as he could determine, most of them were empty, but one or two did appear to have occupants. Obviously, those buildings are our first target. My hope is, we can avoid giving ourselves away until we have what we came for, but if we can’t find Vince, I’m going to have to interrogate the officers until I find out where he is. My team knows it, and they’re hoping for the easy answer, too. That we’ll find him in one of the cells. Of course, we couldn’t get that lucky. Only two of them have occupants, both startled looking peasants whom we set free, and who flee into the darkness in grateful silence. God knows why they were being held. Probably trying to procure a little of the local product for themselves. Which means an armed invasion of the hacienda itself. My men take the staff officers, and Evan and I make our way to the General’s wing. Obviously, security is mostly provided by the distance of the enclave from the capitol, because except for the handful of sentries around the compound’s perimeter, guards have been non-existent. Which is just dandy, since it makes penetration as easy as your favorite euphemism. We find our way into the General’s ante chamber and waltz into his bedroom to find him dead asleep in the arms of a mistress. Freed cable ties the General to the bed frame, then wakes her gently as I press the silencer muzzle of the H&K to ‘El General’s’ forehead. He opens his eyes in the dark as the woman beside him scrambles out of bed, tugging against his restraints, futilely. Evan locks her in the bathroom, making sure she’s not going to go shimmying out the window by cable tying her to the plumbing and ensuring her silence with a duct tape gag. I concentrate on the General. My Spanish is good enough for a field interrogation, especially when my gun is pointed at his frontal lobe. "Where is Vincent Terranova?" I ask him, wondering if he even knows the name of his mysterious kidnap victim from Brooklyn. He stares at me in the gloom, maintaining his silence. I know this is going to get me nowhere in a hurry, and I motion to Evan to bring me the tape. I slap a gag over the General’s mouth and rest my gun muzzle against his calf muscle, wrapping it in one of the pillows scattered in the woman’s wake. I fire, feeling him jerk hard against the cable ties. "Now. Where is Vince Terranova?" I ask him again. It’s not until I shoot him in the thigh and have my gun against the next logical portion of his anatomy that he buckles. The garbled noises he makes through the gag resolve themselves into a description of the cellars under the house. Converted to torture chambers in which to house their prisoners until they have determined that they cannot be ransomed or otherwise turn a profit for their captors, these medieval-style dungeons are dank with years of neglect and foul perversion. I’m glad, as we slip our way down the algae-slick stairs, that I pumped a round into ‘El General’s’ twisted brain. If Vince is down here, the General got off easy. Evan and I split up. I take the far end of the slimy hall and work my way back toward Freed who’s opening the doors closest to the stairs. I hear him call my name quietly as I rummage around in one chamber, looking for anything that may tell me where Vince is, and I feel the adrenaline flood my bloodstream at that hail. I go careening back toward Evan and swing into the doorway, one hand on the jam to keep from overshooting my mark. And there he is, god help him. The reek permeating the room smells of death. Vince is manacled to a seeping wall, slouched suspended, knees not quite touching the floor, his full weight on his arms. He’s dressed only in jeans, torn, stained with urine and dysentery, head lolling onto his chest. He’s battered and bloody and when I see the slight rise and fall of his chest, I think he may be the most beautiful thing I’ve seen in my life. Without even stopping to think about it, I aim my gun at the manacle chain looped through a ring on the wall and fire. It parts, sending him sprawling onto the noxious floor face first. "Shit," Freed curses, moving into the room. "I’d’a caught him if you’d warned me you were gonna do that," he tells me irritably as he crouches beside Vinnie’s unmoving body and feels for a pulse. "You didn’t do him any favors, Lococco. He’s alive, but I don’t know how long he’ll stay that way. He’s not going to be walking five miles in the dark back to our evac site, that’s for damned sure." "No shit," I snap as I crouch on Vinnie’s other side and roll him gently onto his back. He’s a mess. In just about every possible way. Where it isn’t bloody or bruised, his skin is the sort of colorless gray you find on a day-old corpse. His face is pulpy with old beatings, both eyes swollen shut, blood smeared over one entire side of his face. The only recognizable feature is that roman nose of his, which seems to have escaped being broken, somehow. Hell if I can explain it, given the size of that particular target. There’s part of me that’s tempted to kiss him on the spot, Freed be damned, but that particular can of worms can be opened later, if I muster the nerve. Instead, I unbutton his jeans and pull them loose from his skin carefully. I peel them off, leaving them on the slick stone floor along with the majority of the putrid stench wafting from him, and with Evan’s help, I get him back upstairs and outside. I find my team leader and have him call the pilot to let him know we need an onsite pick-up, and then we wait. The second we land back in the capitol, I’m on the phone to Frank, and he tells me he’ll handle things with the Stateartmartment. Vince is medivaced to the largest private hospital in San Salvador, and three of my men, along with Evan, stand guard outside his room until the Embassy people can get there. By the time Frank’s current paramour, a State Department babe named Lillah Warfield, arrives ten hours later, Vince is listed as being in stable, but serious condition. She greets me like she’s known me for years, which annoys me until she tells me she was Vince and Frank’s contact through the Profitt debacle. So I guess, from her perspective, she has known me for years. It’d just’ve been nice if someone would let me in on these things. She and I spend the next day trying to get a straight answer from the doctors about how soon Vince can travel, and after an endless litany of the things wrong with him, the short answer is, as soon as he’s rehydrated enough, they’ll release him, as long as we promise he’s going straight back into the hospital as soon as we hit the states. I make that guarantee, and less than forty eight hours after we dragged him out of a hell hole straight out of Danté, we have him on a gurney in my Lear, along with Warfield and an Embassy nurse. He’s still semi-conscious, between the drugs and his ines, es, but just getting the muck washed off has improved things dramatically, at least for the rest of us. McPike is there to meet us when we land in Miami, and I swear, I’m about to see a grown man cry when he takes his first look at Vince before they load him onto an ambulance for his trip to Miami General. He’s hustled off, Evan going with him, as McPike hugs his lady, then pumps my hand like a politician stumping for office. "Roger," he starts, eyeing me, and I can see him misting up. "I just did what I said I would, Frank. Don’t get all sappy on me now," I warn him, and he grins at me, hugging Warfield again in lieu of laying a hand on me. We make our way to the hospital, and settle in to wait for Vince to regain consciousness. It takes another three days, and when he finally wakes up enough to be coherent, we’re in for a nasty shock. Those usually brilliant eyes are clouded and vague, and the doctors go on about the concussion and hysterical amnesia, and seem geared up for making him a semi-permanent guest. I blow a fuse. "He is not staying here. He may still be a target, and even if he’s not, he’s not going to make any progress regaining his memory locked up here!" I insist. McPike is inclined to back me with the medics, but he wants to take him home to Brooklyn, to see if familiar places and people will snap him out of it. I beg to differ. "Look, Frank, he’s been through a hell you can’t even begin to imagine. We have no idea how long it’s going to be before he’s healed enough to start dealing with whatever happened. I know a place, just off St. Croix, where he can spend the next ten years just lying in the sun, if that’s what it takes to bring him back the rest of the way. Then, when he’s ready, and not one second before, he can go back home to his mother, and you. But I’m telling you right now, if you try to keep him in the OCB after this, I will personally cut you open and string your entrails around the Washington Monument. He is through, Frank. As in done. As in permanently retired. As in I’ll chain him to some immovable object before I let him go back undercover after this. And if you’re his friend, you’ll back me." McPike knows when he’s better off not arguing, and this is one of those times. He agrees to have Vince released into my custody, and a week later, he and I are on the jet to St. Croix. My property manager meets us at the airport, and he and his staff load the helicopter with provisions and my pilot takes us on the last short hop to my private paradise. Vince has been silent since he recovered consciousness, gazing into some other universe with those unfocused blue eyes. I think it’s that vagueness that scared Frank into trying things my way, and keeping that bitch of a mother of Vinnie’s out of his hair for a while. She, of course, kicked up a hellova fuss, until Frank had Vinnie’s Lifeguard explain the situation to her. And where I’ve taken him, even her Mafia don of a husband won’t be able to track him down. And it wouldn’t surprise me if she harasses him into trying it. After the first day, I send my staff back to St. Croix, since Vince seems less agitated when there are no strangers present. It takes another week before I begin to see occasional flashes of that intellect of his in his expression, but I just go on doing what I’ve been doing, which is basically not much. I talk to him intermittently, feed him, spend time in his company, and leave him be when he seems to need that. I’m not sure how it is I can tell, since the cues are subtle to the point of non-existence, or they would be to most people, but to me, it’s as if they’re written on a billboard in twenty foot letters. This is the first time in my memory that I can recall being so intensely synched with another human being. Not even in my days in the military have I experienced anything that comes close. I chart it as progress when Vinnie starts tagging after me like a Labrador puppy, watching me with interest as I rattle around the big old house attending to all the little details a property manager can’t get to right away. I’m replacing a section of shingles that were torn loose in the last tropical storm that passed through when a shadow falls over my work. I look up to see Vince, standing on the ladder, watching me. I move aside to allow him onto the roof beside me and hand him the hammer. He finishes the job in silence, and then looks up at me, waiting for something. I’m not sure what, so I settle for grinning at him. He smiles back, faintly, but it’s the most animation I’ve seen on his face since he woke up in the hospital. This slow progress is a double-edged sword. Along with the moments of recognition, come the nightmares. Night has become an endurance sport, and neither of us are getting much sleep as violent dreams sift up from Vince’s subconscious mind. It’s not until I lie down beside him that things improve. And that’s how I begin sleeping with him. At first, that’s all it is. Sleep. As I lie there in the tropical night, Vinnie’s big frame warm against my chest, I’m struck by the incongruity of it. If someone had tried to tell me that there would come a day when I’d share my bed with another man, I’d probably have castrated them on the spot. And yet here I am. Holding another man in my arms, physically shielding him from the night terrors that disturb the tranquil darkness. The weird thing is, it isn’t sexual. I was more aroused by the dream Vince than I am by the reality I hold. But he needs me. Needs the physical contact, the comfort of another human being. And I’m the only option, out here, on this remote little island. And I begin to realize that being needed is a powerful thing. A day or two later, I’m lying in the sand on the beach not far from the house when Vinnie joins me, handing me a glass of something or other. I thank him, trying not to make too big a deal of it, even though it’s the first time he’s initiated any overture like this since we got here. He sits down beside me and sips his own drink. Neither of us have a stitch on, and the last of his bruises have pretty much faded to blotchy purple and yellow rings that mark their farthest extent like some sort of tide line. I watch him stare off across the electric blue of the water, sipping his drink, obviously thinking about things. When he speaks, I’m just about floored. "Roger, you ever think about how you’ll die?" he asks, turning to look at me. His eyes are almost the same shade as the ocean, and I’m suddenly adrift in them without my bearings. "Huh?" I answer stupidly. "You ever think about how you’ll die?" he repeats, this time a faint smile in those eyes. I latch onto that smile like a life preserver. "Yeah," I admit, not much liking the topic. "Why?" "When I was in that… place… the only thing that kept going through my head was, ‘this wasn’t the way I thought it’d happen’," he explains as he watches me for my reaction. "Good," I snap. "Being kidnapped by political terrorists to be used as a bargaining ploy against a government that is trying to use those same terrorists to funnel weapons to countries unfriendly to the U.S. wouldn’t exactly be the first thing to leap to my mind, either." And he laughs. A real Vinnie laugh, with the eyes and everything, including that ‘butter wouldn’t melt in my mouth’ look that I always hated. Only now, I can’t remember why. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him look better. I let him see the grin I smother down, and he laughs harder. "No, that’s not what I meant," he says when he’s calmed down a little. He’s still grinning that shit-eating grin. "I meant, I always figured I’d buy it on the job, I just didn’t think it would be the ‘Angel of Death’ himself who rescued me and brought me to his version of heaven. Which, by the way, could use a few pretty native girls." I raise an eyebrow at this, and the grin widens. "What makes you think there’s sex in paradise?" I ask him sarcastically. "Roger, there’s sex anywhere you are. I think you consider it one of the basic food groups," he says. I shrug, a little defensively. "It’s an appetite. I feed it. What’s the problem?" He eyes me for a second then flops down on his stomach in the sand next to me. "No problem," he answers as he closes his eyes and throws an arm over my waisI liI lie there wondering what to make of that unconscious possessiveness, as well as the choices of conversation. A man who’s hardly said two words in three weeks decides to inaugurate his vocal chords again with a discussion of death and sex. All we need is taxes, and we have ourselves a cocktail party. When I wake up, the sun is nearing the horizon, and Vince lies warm and solid at my back, that arm still around me. I can feel the warmth of his breath on the back of my neck, and the sense of eroticism shocks me. It is an intimacy I can’t define, sleeping dreamlessly in the embrace of another human being, and I realize with another shock that it may very well be the first time I’ve had that experience. I feel him shift, which is my first intimation that he’s awake, and knows I am, too. Now what? I wonder, fighting down something like panic. Only Vince isn’t like that. He can feel me tense up and he shifts away, letting a little air flow between us. I shiver suddenly, chilled and startled by an irrational feeling of abandonment. "You were cold," he tells me as he sits up next to me. I roll onto my back, into the warmth of the spot he just vacated, watching him as he stands up, brushing the sand off his skin. The sun is setting and the molten light hits the ridges of his muscles with gold-leaf highlights, hiding the last of the bruising beneath that gentle burnish. Jesus Christ, he’s beautiful. I just lie there, staring up at him while he watches the sun go down. I’m caught by surprise when he catches my eye, his puzzlement furrowing his forehead. "Rog?" he asks. "Are you okay?" "I’m just fine, Buckwheat," I assure him. And so, by god, are you, I add to myself, as I get up. We walk back to the house without saying anything, and he watches me fix dinner. Neither of us have bothered to get dressed. There doesn’t seem to be much point. We’re totally alone, no one within thirty miles who’d give a damn about dressing for dinner. He does take a shower while I finish putting together the meal, and his dark hair is slicked to his head as he returns to the kitchen, still naked as the day he was born. "Watch the steaks while I grab a shower," I request, and he steps up to the grill while I take my turn rinsing the sand off. When I come out, he’s found the wine opener and a bottle of a Napa Valley Cabernet, and is sipping a glass as he stares out the big windows at the tropical stars that glitter overhead. The meat and everything else is on the table in the diningroom, and he smiles a little at me as I pull up a chair. He doesn’t say much during the meal, just watching me, those eyes big and serious. It makes me a little less nervous to realize he has no more idea than I do what comes next, and I don’t mean the physical mechanics of it, either. "Rog?" he starts about half way through the food. "Yeah?" I respond when he doesn’t continue, looking up to meet his grave blue eyes. "How’d you know I was gone?" "Frank," I tell him. "He tracked me down to the address you had for me in your will." He flushes slightly and looks down at his plate. "Sorry about that… I figured if anyone ever looked at that, I’d be in the ground somewhere. And I really did want you to have that stuff." He looks up at me, that little-boy look in his eyes. I can see why women can’t resist him. Hell, neither can I. So when he reaches across the table to grab my hand, the one with the ring on it, I’m startled, but I don’t resist. He turns the heavy band on my finger and trails his fingertips over my palm. The sensation goes straight to my groin, and all of a sudden, neither of us is hungry for food anymore. "It looks good on you," he says, voice soft, a little husky. "Yeah, well a friend gave it to me," I say a little sarcastically, then I think better of it. "It’s important to me," I add, my own voice going soft. When he smiles this time, something clenches in the center of my chest almost painfully. He’s still smiling when he gets up to clear the table. I watch him move, a big man, fully in his prime, built like he could have been a model for one of the statues of athletes that decorate the coliseum in Rome. For the first time since the nightmares started, we go to bed in separate rooms. It’s as though, with the return of conversation, the ease of simple physical closeness is gone, needing to be reestablished again under new guidelines. I’m not asleep when he comes into my room at about three a.m. "Rog?" "Yeah," I answer quietly. "Can’t sleep?" "No," he admits. "You mind if I ask you something?" He sits down on the edge of the mattress as I roll over to face him. "What?" "Why’d you really come down there to save my &quo" What do I say? To him? To myself? Can I afford the truth? Can I afford not to tell it? I close my eyes, unable to meet his look, even in the dark. "Because you’re my friend. Because I love you." I can feel the bed shift under him as he lies down beside me, and I open my eyes as I feel him brush a wayward curl off my forehead. His living warmth radiates from his skin like the glow of coals, and I’m looking straight into those glorious eyes, eyes that truly see me. No shadow in my soul can escape those eyes, the center of my universe, and no shadow goes unforgiven. "You love me," he says, the subtle surprise in his voice confusing me as he runs the fingers of one hand down my chest. "I love you," I mouth silently, knowing it’s true, true in ways that I could never have believed. The touch of his hand on my chest is doing things to me that I would not have credited, and my pulse accelerates with anxiety and arousal both. It’s a wordless question, that touch, one that generates a wordless response in me, my body reacting to the instinctive tenderness of his hands, the gentle question, the entreaty. I don’t know how to ask for what I want from him, and I settle for running my own fingertips along the angle of his jaw, then down his throat and over his collarbone. The sigh that escapes him makes me smile, and I realize he wants the same thing. To be touched, to be held. To be loved. It’s been a very, very long time since I’ve voluntarily lain like this with another guy. The last time was when I was fourteen, trapped in an all male boarding school in Berchardt, Texas. I don’t count the recent nights I’ve spent in Vinnie’s bed, because those weren’t about sex. This is. This is about trust. About friendship that transcends the limitations usually associated with it. This is about love. And god knows, it’s about desire. That alone is enough to freak me out, if I start thinking about it. Desire has always been about women, for me. Until now. Nameless, faceless receptacles for my passions, temporary mates to assuage basic biological needs. With a single exception, none of them have endured in my life beyond a few weeks, or perhaps months, departing when it became obvious to them that I couldn’t give them whatever it was they were looking for, namely, commitment. Vince is different. He has steadfastly, stubbornly, refused to drift out of my life. He has gradually slipped past all my defenses and become a friend. Sex with a friend is an entirely new concept for me, and the shiver of nervousness in the pit of my stomach is about the potential risks that change in the relationship leaves me open to. The risk that I may jeopardize the very friendship that I want so intensely. That by taking it to a physical level, the fundamental trust may be eroded or compromised. "Have you done this before?" I ask him, knowing the answer. Vince nods slightly, his thumb brushing lightly over my lips and down my chin. I can feel the night’s growth of beard disturbed by that touch, astonished that it could suddenly become an erotic sensation that sends need spiraling through my abdomen, hardening my loins, tightening my balls. "Sonny and I… kinda stumbled into something like this, a few months before it all went to hell," he says softly, sadness coloring his voice. "Neither of us really meant for it to happen, but it did." I think about it for a minute or two, distracted by the light stroke of his fingers along the line of my jaw, a gentle exploration, unthreatening, innocently arousing. "Show me," I request. I see his smile in the dark. "I’m not exactly an expert, Rog," he warns me as he caresses the edge of my left ear, fingering the pair of tiny earrings that pierce the lobe, one onyx post, one gold ring. Acquired in a moment of drunken machismo just before my penetration of Mel Profitt’s organization, their former connotations of homosexual leanings fallen by the wayside in the eighties. "You’re such a homophobe… Why’d you ever do this?" he wants to know. "It seemed like a good idea at the time," I say dryly. "I was hanging with a crowd of dealers and assorted other thugs in Miami, establishing a cover that’d eventually get me close to Mel. Call it protective coloration." He chuckles softly, stroking them again and then leaning in closer to brush his tongue over them. The wet heat followed by the coolness it leaves in its wake go straight to my libido and my breath catches in my throat as I realize his face is a fraction of an inch from my own, his breath warm on my cheek. His lips brush past the same spot his fingers touched mere seconds before, lightly, almost accidentally, giving me the opportunity to withdraw without recriminations. And, almost, I do, my heart hammering in my chest, sweat breaking between my shoulder blades. "Is this how it was, with Sonny?" I ask, regretting it even as the words are out of my mouth. He doesn’t take offense, nose and lips tickling my throat as he runs his tongue over the skin, tasting me. "Not exactly," he assures me quietly. "It was Sonny’s idea, not mine. We were drunk as hell, and the ‘ladies’ we were with had passed out before we were finished. When he started touching me, I couldn’t decide whether to freak, or go with it. You want to hear something funny? I kept thinking that if I wigged out on him, I’d trash my cover, and even if I didn’t, he’d never trust me the way he had. Never let me that close again. I slept with him in the line of duty, and I’ve never regretted it. No one else’s ever touched me the way he did, Rog. The way I want you to…" his mouth trails up my neck again, nuzzling me lightly, the question still unresolved on my end. I lower my face into the dark hair, scenting the cleanness of soap, the subtle aroma of him, and feel the kiss against my adam’s apple, a little suction, the barest hint of his teeth, and abruptly, doubt is banished, subsumed in overwhelming need. I kiss him on the forehead tentatively, and slowly we find our way towards each other. When lips meet, it’s like high voltage zinging through my blood, my cock rock hard without so much as a touch needed to bring me to the edge. I can’t help the groan as I feel the tip of his tongue trace along the inside of my upper lip, then past my teeth, to stroke along my own. He tastes exactly like he did in my dreams, I realized hazily as I weave my fingers through his hair so I can kiss him back. I arch my back, bringing myself into contact with him from knees to chest, feeling his erection alongside my own. This time he’s the one who groans, and the sensation of power is heady and totally unexpected. Maybe neither of us really knows what the hell we’re doing, but as long as it feels this good, who the hell cares? "Tell me you want this," he whispers, and I can hear the near-desperation in his voice. "That you want me," he continues, lips barely touching mine, his breath so soft against my skin. More than I’ve ever wanted anything in my life, Vince, I think, and can only manage a nod and a garbled laugh. "Oh, yeah," I reply. Hell of a question to ask me when I’m lying here with a hard on the size of Genoa salami. "You’re sure?" he gives me a last out, one I no longer want. What I want is him. All of him, touched, tasted, made mine, my claim staked on his living flesh with my own. In answer, I guide one of his big hands downward between our bodies over my abdomen, to my groin, letting his palm come to rest along the shaft of my penis. "I’m sure," I answer in a whisper of my own, feeling him stroke me intimately, cupping my balls with gentle care, moving up the shaft’s length softly to graze the edge of my foreskin where it stretches tight against headhead. God, I’m sure. I’m sure I’m going to come in his hand if he doesn’t cut it out. "Vince, god, I’m sure!" He grins fleetingly and kisses me again, more aggressively than he has before, and there’s no doubt in either of our minds that we’re in uncharted territory now. I’m startled when he gets up and heads for the bathroom, returning a few seconds later with a container of Vaseline, and I fight down the panic attack that threatens to swamp me unexpectedly. I swallow hard, taking it from him when he hands it to me, waiting as he settles back beside me. I make a deliberate effort to slow my breathing, to still my racing heart, to disengage my fight or flight reflexes. He senses my shattered composure and he rolls onto his side, facing me, resting his forehead against mine and just gazes into my eyes as he strokes my back. His hands and his forehead are the only points of contact between us, and despite the warmth of a tropical night, I’m suddenly chilled, shivering. Vince gathers me closer, his body heat thawing rig rigidity out of my muscles. We lie there in the light of the Milky Way that comes pouring in my bedroom windows, silvery illumination glazing our skins with stardust. I relax against him, closing my eyes, concentrating on simply feeling him, experiencing the sensations he’s stirring in me, letting thought and reason and the baggage of years fall by the wayside. This time, I take the initiative, and when I open my eyes again, locking gazes with him, I begin to explore him with the same care he used minutes before. I’ve dabbled in sculpture for years, mostly welding and iron work, but human anatomy is no mystery to me. This level of intimacy with another man’s body, though, is way outside my realm of experience, and my hands move slowly over him, revealing him to my touch. His sigh of pleasure eases my fears of inexperience, and I immerse myself in the moment. Immerse myself in him, the taste of him, the smell of his skin, its texture, the softness of the hair on his forearms, its coarseness on legs and pubic areas. The corded muscle of his body is limned in the cool light, a bas relief made three dimensional, sturdy, beautiful, with the same solid grace as a classical statue. I concentrate on him, on gaining confidence that his body does indeed respond the way my own does, self assurance returning slowly as that fact is confirmed. His arousal is almost an afterthought on my part, my goal far more selfish than his pleasure. Knowledge, the ability to predict what will please him, comes first. The fact that he responds so uninhibitedly, with such pleasure, is the guideline I use to measure the success of my studies. When I run my tongue up the massive shaft of his prick, savoring him, impressed and maybe the tiniest bit envious of his size, he moans, his hands threading though my hair as he cradles my head. "God, Roger, please…" he begs, neither of us entirely sure what he’s asking for. Since we’re definitely making this up as we go along, I experiment, taking him into my mouth and slip my tongue inside the foreskin. His groan is accompanied by the tightening of every muscle in his abdomen as he strains against the orgasm I can feel trembling against my lips. I can taste the tiny drop of semen that beads at the tip, giving away just how ready he is, and as I release the head of his cock and run my tongue along the bulging vein that runs the length of the underside, I hear his breathing falter, sharp gasps of intense desire, and his hands tighten against my skull. When I exhale over his testicles, following it up with the sort of attention from lips and tongue that always sends me into hyperdrive, I can feel he’s about to lose it, and I return to my original position and take him over that edge. "Ahh, god, Roger," he moans as his cock jerks hard against the back of my throat twice, three times, a fourth, and I have to swallow fast to keep from choking on his ejaculate as it pours down my throat with bittersweet heat. I stay where I am until I’m sure he’s given me everything he’s got, and then ease back up along his belly until we’re lying face to face, my erection still rampant between us. He kisses me softly, searching out the taste of himself on my lips, and I sigh as I feel his hands run over my spine to my ass. I return the gesture, the feel of his muscled ass against my palms enticing beyond belief. Trailing my fingertips along the cleft between his buttocks, I ask my own silent question. "Fuck me Roger," Is the answer I get, the one I’ve been hoping for, dreaming about, and I reach behind me for the Vaseline on the nightstand and beginanoianoint my beloved as though he were a Roman gladiator about to step into the ring. When he’s slick, I let him coat my prick, and kiss him hard before urging him onto his other side, his back to me as I fondle his flaccid penis, spending time on his balls, knowing how much I enjoy it myself when a lover lingers over them. I pull one of the pillows down and wedge it against his belly, and he leans forward against it, his uppermost leg bent forward to brace himself, allowing me unfettered access to everything from his ass to his cock. And I take full advantage. I’m so turned on by this time, I have to remind myself to move slowly, to ease into him gently, as I begin my penetration. His moan cons ths that it’s been a very long time since he’s been fucked this way. I can feel the tightness of him around me, and I have to keep up a whispered monologue reminding him to relax, to let me in, as I caress his abdomen, his chest, his prick. When I’ve reached my full depth, my balls warm against his, I begin to move inside him, his silent whimpers ernierning me until his hand covers the one of mine that caresses the inside of his thigh, urging me deeper as he braces himself against my thrusts. I can feel the bulge of his prostate against my penis, and I take aim for it, nailing it dead-on on both entry and withdrawal, moving harder, faster, my own need so intense I can barely manage a rational thought. Both of us are panting by this time, and Vince is chanting my name under his breath like a mantra. It’s maybe the sexiest thing I’ve ever had a lover do at the brink of orgasm. Though his cock is still soft, I can feel him tightening around me even more, impossibly, and as that moment of ultimate pleasure explodes like fireworks along my every nerve, I hear him cry out with his own ecstatic moan, and realize, erection or not, he just had himself another orgasm. I lie there, buried inside him, unable to bear the thought of freeing myself from his exquisite grip. Instead, I nuzzle the nape of his neck, tasting the salt of his sweat on the skin, and stroke him, gentling him, easing the tension in his trembling muscles, half worried by his reaction. I whisper his name in his ear, along with quiet endearments, reassurances, slowly feeling him relax against me. His sigh, from the bottom of his lungs, is long, slow, aneakseaks of satiation, pleasure unexpected. As I move to free myself, he protests. "No, Rog, stay. Please?" he asks softly. "Just … be… with me?" I can’t help smiling into the damp darkness of his hair. "Always, Buckwheat," I promise him. "I’m not going anywhere." We fall asleep that way, Vince warm against my chest, and wake again together, in the cool light preceding dawn, to lie staring into each other’s eyes with amazement as we try it again. The sunrise is warming the sky with pink and gold when he mumbles a reiteration of his initial question against my mouth. "Why’d you go down there to save my ass?" he asks again, teasingly, this time. "You have to ask?" I tease back. "Besides, it’s a hellova nice ass…" I assure him as I run my hands over the portion of his anatomy under discussion. *****