Heart to Hart #1
Simon got out of bed and found a towel in his linen closet. Drawing his robe on, he tied the sash and left for the small cast iron bathtub down the hall.
He turned the handle, expecting if the room were in use it would not yield to his pull. But it yielded, and he stepped inside.
There, like a grizzly bear immersed in a tiny honey pot, sat Michael McCree in the small claw footed bathtub.
Again Simon felt the pounding of blood in his face and he turned to leave.
“Nay, Simon. Bolt the goddamn door, man, an’ stay. We don’t have all day to bugger around with fine courtesies.”
“I…am sorry…about last night.”
“Get in the tub, lad.”
“No, I—”
“Damn ye, Simon, grow a pair of testicles, will ye? Do I look like a mad rapist?”
...Simon stepped into the tub. The water was pleasingly warm, not soapy. He stood a moment looking down at the hair, like corn silk, which fell almost to Michael’s shoulders. He sat. Both of them had their knees drawn up in an attempt to fit inside the small enclosure.
Michael began to run his hand up and down Simon’s shins in a slow caress. He made no attempt to pry his legs apart, now locked together as if glued in place. “I don’t ask ye to suck me, lad. I don’t ask if I can sink me flesh into your honeyed rump. All I want is to have ye to wash it. Will ye?”
Simon swallowed carefully. “Yes.”
Michael handed him a small cake of soap and a washcloth. Then he rose from the water like a god rising from the sea, water cascading off his hips and down his large thighs.
For the first time, Simon gazed on the full, erect phallus of Michael McCree.
His own imagination hadn’t been far off the mark. He seemed big as a stud stallion. The shaft was a trellis of purple veins. The cowl seemed almost like a coil of heavy rope wrapped around his shaft. His testicles were long and darkly gold, cobwebbed with fine hairs, pendulous and full.
“Do it,” Michael whispered.
Sparring with Shadows #2
“What you called me. What you must think of me.”
Michael knew instantly what was bothering his friend. The word omi-palone, homosexual, once out of his mouth tonight, was forever said. Michael knew he could not—would not—retract them. Simon must be able to solve the mystery of who he was. He had to come to terms with himself before he’d ever wholly accept Michael as a lover. Before he’d be able to solve any other mystery, he needed to start with the secret of who and what he was.
He looked at Simon and saw his head tilted to stare up to the ceiling, a look of anguish on his face. “You called me omi-palone. You think I’m a sexual toy. A ready hole. A piece of flesh. All the things I saw tonight, that’s what I am to you or to any man.”
Michael felt a huge sense of loss threaten him. His throat began to close up, and he tried to clear it, to force air into his windpipe.
“What I called ye? I called ye me love.”
Crap. Simon was forcing his hand one more time, shaking loose the cards entrenched in his sleeve. He struggled to tell Simon something of what was cramped and curled in his gut.
“An’ what I think of ye? I think ye’re the best thing ever happened to a broken down Irishman. An omi-palone is not one to revile. That’s who I am. Proud to be a lover of men. Of a man. One man. God damn it, what d’ye want me to say, Simon?”
Michael, head bowed, saw the limp suspender lying on the bed, a shadow of Simon’s despair. Then his lover’s hand began to inch toward his own.
“I would rather you say nothing. I would rather you lie here with me. Only that and no more. Will you?”
Still in his rude trousers, Michael rolled to where Simon lay on his back. He pulled the naked shoulders into his own chest and let the man’s tangled hair spread there, a dark wound.
To The Bone #3
On the verge of another curse, Michael felt a slight tremble of the bed, and he knew without over-thinking it that his lover had crawled in next to him.
He continued to lie on his belly, his face turned into the pillow. Let Simon speak and act. He would merely listen. Or do whatever Simon needed from him.
“I’ve been meaning to apologize.”
Michael wisely did not answer.
“I…accidentally left my gift behind. The beautiful book. The mistake has clawed my heart. You must think me a coward and a cad.”
Still Michael waited and then he felt the touch. Simon’s fingers lightly trailed the back of his neck, then his shoulders. His skin turned to tiny bumps from his nape to his balls; his breath came slow and labored. His lover’s low voice sounded muffled, strained. “You said we were starting the chess game from the first pawn move. Not my intent. I think that cannot happen anyway.”
He felt Simon lean over him and the brush of his hot mouth on the back of his ear. “The match is too even. And we are too far advanced in our moves ever to turn back to the beginning.”
Still not speaking, Michael spread his legs, ever so little. His arms, already splayed above the pillow, moved subtly toward the dowels, before he grasped them and waited.
“Mee-cha-el.” Simon’s voice held all the music of heaven, playing along his ear and down his backbone, on its way to the crack in his ass. His tongue began to trace the cleavage in his buttocks, and Michael began to shake, like a goddamn kid, unable to bear the outright pleasure of his wet mouth.
Simon had never put more than a finger near his asshole. And even then, it had been the kind of almost shy insertion a man like Michael might not even feel, his rear so pummeled for so many years by fingers, even fists of rough trade lovers. But this licking of his butt crack, this lapping and browsing of his most sensitive skin… Oh, God, he rose to it, arcing his buttocks and pushing the rim of his hole closer to the beloved mouth boasting a slick, hot tongue.
It was a few seconds only of outright bliss, but Michael’s mind and body feasted on a deep delight he’d never known. Too soon, Simon moved away. Michael felt his lover’s tangled chest hair grazing the length of his back, then his lips seeking his ear.
A whisper, a murmur, words almost unspoken. He strained to hear them.
Thin as Smoke #4
A muffled cough, a shimmer of silken shirt, the smell of a man’s cologne… Simon felt the presence of a stranger before he saw his shadowed face. A man, a very slender man, was leaning over Michael, his mouth close to his ear. Yet Simon heard his words clearly.
“May I have this dance?”
Michael seemed as startled by the intrusion as Simon. He saw his companion begin to shake his head in automatic denial. And then his eyebrows shot up, and his jaw slackened a little. Leaning close to Simon, he mouthed, “Finally,” and then he lifted his head and grinned at the gangly man.
“Sure. Love to, me dally.”
He stood. A languid hand seized his, drew him away from the table and into the crowd.
Simon sat dumbfounded for a few minutes, not hearing the music or seeing anyone in the cluster of bodies except for Michael groin to groin with a thin, even gaunt, yet not-so-bad-looking partner.
Even from a four-meter distance, in the wavering light, through a film of smoke, Simon could see the man’s features. The languorous dancer had a shock of dark hair combed straight back from a narrow face, and over his top lip crouched the razor’s edge of a mustache. His eyes were unreadable. Black, heavy-lidded, almost deliberately expressionless. Dusky smudges under the eyes bespoke either sickness or sleepless nights, or both. Below the dark circles, his prominent cheekbones reminded Simon of a bird of prey. A raven…or a vulture.
He shuddered. Who is this creature, and why is my gut in knots looking at him?
Masters of Cane #5
The next instant, Michael found himself arse-over-bollocks on the carpet. Simon had hooked his ankle with the cane handle and jerked just hard enough to send him crashing to the floor.
He and Simon became a tangle of hairy legs and bony knees, each struggling to pin the other to the thick rug. How in bloody hell Simon kept his robe together was a mystery he intended to crack. Managing to sit on his chest, Michael reached down and tore the sash from his opponent’s waist. The once-hidden cock lunged, a rabid dog seeking the flesh of its victim.
“Damn you! Get off me!”
Michael had begun to pant a little, not with effort but with blind lust.
“Aye, but not without a bite o’the beast. Ye said ye’d take me. So do it, or stop bragging.”
“Sodding bastard!”
Simon’s vocabulary was coming along nicely, Michael thought. In fact, his partner’s maddened speech made him so stiff he began to ache for relief. Simon had asked for it, plain and simple. No sense tittering and pretending, like a spinster in the face of a rare suitor.
He leaned on Simon’s chest and sought his mouth, tearing at the brooding lower lip and jabbing his tongue in a series of hard thrusts, as though the sensuous mouth was a willing asshole.
But he’d misjudged Simon, as usual. Where did the man’s strength come from? True, he worked his body mercilessly in his gentlemen’s club almost every day. But it took a special determination and skill to best Michael McCree. In a throb o’the heart, Simon had slid from his hold and turned him on his belly.
The cane came from nowhere. Simon used it as a vise to pin his arms behind, and then he felt his hands being wrapped by the sash of the dressing gown. In moments, he was trussed like a holiday goose, his gut sunken into the wool fibers of the rug and his chin and his dick ground into its surface.
Simon lay along his spine and put his mouth in his right ear. “This time, McCree, lie still. Or I swear to God I’ll roll you under the bed and leave you here.”
“An’ ye’ll recruit what army?”
“Just my cane and my cock.”
