Perfect Freedom (32 page)

Carl lighted them down the hill with a flashlight and waited with them while Rico brought the dinghy in for them. They thanked him for a charming evening and exchanged pledges of future friendship. Stuart told him that he would expect to fix dates for his visit to St. Tropez when they met next. They stepped into the dinghy and waved as they were rowed off into the night.

They wandered on across the legendary sea, through days of reverberating light, past bare islands of rock, putting in at gleaming whitewashed villages where the natives received them with grave kindliness and offered them glasses of water and little dishes of sweets.

At the classical site on Santorini, high on a windswept hill, an attractive young guide with impudent eyes managed to separate Robbie from his parents to show him a stone plaque covered with crude lettering with a phallus incised at the bottom. The guide explained that it was a dedicatory offering from a rich merchant to a beautiful dancing boy. He ran his forefinger along the phallus.

“You like?” he said. “I show you.”

Robbie's heart was beating rapidly as he followed the young guide around ruined walls and along a weed-choked path to a pile of masonry that formed a sort of enclosure. The guide opened his fly and showed him the real thing, not very big but commandingly erect. Robbie unbuttoned his shorts and displayed his conspicuously bigger one. The guide smiled approvingly and put a hand on Robbie's shoulder and exerted pressure. Robbie dropped down and worshiped male potency with his mouth. If it wasn't the done thing here, he wondered how the guide had guessed that he was willing to do it. Maybe it was expected of foreign boys. Receiving the copious ejaculation gave him an unassisted orgasm.

At Crete, they left the boat for a few days because the harbor was hot and hideous. They stayed in a seaside hotel. Late one afternoon, back at the hotel after a long day of sightseeing, Robbie took a refreshing swim and lay out on a deck chair to dry off. He was aware of a man pulling a deck chair over quite near to him and facing it in his direction. He sat and Robbie felt eyes on him. Robbie's cautious glances took in a mature body that was still fit and trim and a cock that was clearly outlined in brief trunks. His eyes lingered on it, enthralled as he watched it lengthen and thicken. Robbie's responded. He lifted his eyes and met a gaze of magnetic intensity. The man's features were clean-cut, with an unsmiling air of command; he inclined his head slightly toward the row of little bathhouses provided for changing.

Robbie consented with his eyes. The man rose with a little nod at him and strode away. He watched him unlock one of the bathhouse doors and leave the key dangling outside as he went in. He waited for the beating of his heart to subside and tried to resist the temptation that had been offered him. He had promised himself to stop thinking about sex but he couldn't help it if his cock was straining for satisfaction. The man had singled him out and was waiting for him. He gathered up his towel and rose and followed him.

He pulled the key out of the lock and handed it to the naked figure standing behind the door of the tiny cubicle. A crisp white uniform with a great deal of gold braid was hanging on the wall. He felt a little shiver of awe at having been chosen by a man of high rank. The officer's erection wasn't as impressive as he had expected; it conformed to what he was beginning to think of as the norm—about the same as Rico's and the twins'. It was already oiled in preparation for him. Robbie stripped off his trunks and delivered himself into the hands that reached for him, one completing the preparations, the other making an appreciative assessment of his cock.

The officer nodded at the floor where a towel was spread. Robbie dropped down to his hands and knees. The officer moved in behind him and inserted himself and drove fully into him. He gripped Robbie's hips and pulled him back with him onto the floor and straightened his legs and lay out full length with Robbie seated on him, impaled. Hands still guided him and Robbie swiveled around and threw a leg over the body beneath him and straddled it on his knees. The officer sat up and lifted Robbie's arms and folded his hands on top of his head. He held Robbie's hips and moved him up and down on himself. In this position, being arranged like an object for the other's use, Robbie felt indecently naked and exposed. Compelling eyes seemed to burn into his soul. He choked back his shame and moved his hands to the back of his neck and lifted his chin and arched his back to display his cock, offering himself wantonly.

He swayed his body and ground his hips down in lascivious surrender. Grasping hands moved on him, not caressingly but with a craving to seize every part of him, his armpits, his chest, his cock, his buttocks. It made Robbie feel as if his youth were being torn from him. The officer pulled him close and lay back and opened his mouth with his tongue. Their teeth clashed as the tongue lunged for his throat. Robbie let his mouth go slack to become the passive prisoner of the other's. They writhed against each other and Robbie's body grew frenzied in its service to his master. They were engaged in a conspiracy to goad each other to the limits of their endurance. The body beneath him bucked and jolted him with the power of its thrust. He could feel them rushing toward orgasm. At the last moment, the officer pushed Robbie up and seized his hand and moved their joined hands rapidly on Robbie's erection. The supine body leaped and a shout broke from it and Robbie could feel its spasms in him as his own ejaculation was scattered on his partner's face and shoulders and chest. The officer lifted his knees and Robbie sank back against them with his eyes closed, feeling sick with shock. They had shared in each other's degradation.

He lay inert for a moment while their erections subsided and then disengaged himself and rose. He wiped himself with a towel and pulled on his trunks and left without looking at the body on the floor. Not a word had been exchanged between them.

Robbie returned to his deck chair, drained and shaken. He had left it barely five minutes earlier but his world was irrevocably altered. He had made a deep commitment to a forbidden side of him that he had refused to acknowledge until now. He could no longer pretend to himself that all he wanted was a complete expression of romantic friendship, including the affectionate fondling of bodies. With Theo and the twins, sex had been a celebration of physical well-being and fraternal love with no clear distinctions of gender, but something in him set him apart from them. Was it only that he wanted to put their cocks in his mouth? Johnny had made him feel that there was nothing unnatural about that. Girls apparently did it. He wasn't a girl but lots of the boys at school had what were regarded as feminine tastes. Needle-point, for one. There was something else that he still hadn't been able to grasp. The bathhouse had offered a frightening confrontation with all his darkest yearnings. He still shied away from the word, but he had engaged in an unequivocally homosexual act. He had wanted the officer to humiliate him and force him to acknowledge his abject enslavement to men.

Homosexual. His mind could barely contain the word when applied to himself. Vile, corrupt, depraved, damned by all decent people. A pervert. What of Theo, glowing with wholesome masculinity, his eyes filled with untroubled tenderness? He seemed to be confronted with two different worlds between which he could find no bridge. He knew only that he must save himself from the shameless, perverse world he had glimpsed at St. Tropez.

He wished he could talk to somebody who could explain what he was going through, somebody with experience who knew what it was like to love boys. Carl? Delos was getting closer every day.

At Rhodes, he almost succumbed to temptation when a blatantly willing and spectacularly attractive young shopkeeper invited him to look at some special merchandise in his back room. Somehow his resolution held, possibly because the shopkeeper reminded him of the American on the Acropolis. He was beginning to recognize something in people to which the appalling word could be applied. The shopkeeper had been a homosexual. The pilot book indicated that the few stops that remained before Delos were small villages where he was unlikely to run into trouble.

When they sailed into the deep natural harbor of Ios, the place looked uninhabited. One end of a house just visible at the edge of a fold in the surrounding hills was the only sign of humanity. They had encountered some heavy seas during the day and the sudden late-afternoon stillness was profoundly soothing. Stuart reported that the pilot book described a village on the hill. The bit of house they could see must be part of it. Robbie decided to row ashore and look around. He was nearing the beach when the silence was shattered by the roar of an engine. He glanced over his shoulder and saw a slim young man on a motorcycle hurtling toward him along the road that circled the harbor. When he climbed out of the dinghy and beached it, he saw that the man had stopped, sitting astride the machine with the engine running, watching him. Robbie's interest quickened. At least there was somebody to talk to.

He gave the dinghy a final tug and strolled across the beach toward the stranger. As he drew nearer, Robbie saw that he was about thirty, lean, and hard-looking. A lock of dark hair fell across his forehead. He was attractive and had no trace of the special something that Robbie was beginning to recognize.

“You American?” the man called in greeting.

“Sort of,” Robbie replied.

“I seen you come in. I been watching if anybody come ashore.” Robbie stopped in front of him. Their eyes met. “You're a helluva good-looking kid.”

“Thanks.” His elders said that to him in a completely impersonal way. “You speak good English.”

“Sure. I work on ships. I speak English, German, lotsa languages. I'm Yanni.”

“My name's Robbie.” He shook the calloused hand that was offered him. Yanni had hooded eyes and a sensual mouth with a hint of cruelty in it. There were interesting hollows under his cheekbones. He looked freshly scrubbed and meticulously clean. He was all bone and sinew under a shirt and pants so tight that they left little to the imagination. Robbie wasn't indifferent to the hard body or to the thought of seeing the slightly menacing eyes soften with desire. He was Greek so anything could happen. He still expected others to make the first move. He let his eyes linger on the hard curve of red lips.

“Where are you going?” Yanni asked.

“Nowhere in particular. I was just going for a walk.”

“It's good I'm watching. You get on. I take you wherever you want to go. It's too hot to walk.”

“Thanks again.” Robbie looked into his eyes and saw a glint of what might be lust. He put his hands on Yanni's shoulders and swung a leg over the machine and sat behind him. The seat was a single oblong pillbox with no division for a passenger. There was nothing to hold on to except the driver. Their bodies were against each other, Robbie's hands finding out what the hard flat chest felt like. It was exciting. His cock began to harden, pressed against the small of his companion's back. There was no way to keep Yanni from feeling it. It continued to harden, making clear what it wanted. Robbie was making the first move after all.

“All set?” Yanni asked, gunning the motor.

“Okay. Where're we going?”

“There ain't no place to go around here unless we just happen to think of something. Here goes.” They were off with a burst of speed.

When he had found his balance, Robbie moved his hands down slowly over the spare torso and gripped Yanni's hips, with his fingers directed toward the Greek's groin. The friction of their bodies against each other was bringing him close to orgasm. He wondered if he should pretend to lose his balance and ask his chauffeur to stop.

“You like it?” Yanni called over his shoulder.

“What?”

“My body. You've given it a good feel. A pretty kid like you, I'm flattered. You put your hands in the right place, you'll find something to hang on to. It's as hard as yours.”

It took Robbie a moment to react. He was still amazed at how easily and naturally it happened and at the widespread acceptance of it. “I don't want to interfere with your driving,” he objected for the record.

“Don't worry. Go ahead. You want it, don't you?”

“I'll say.” He leaned forward so that his face was beside Yanni's and moved his hands over a long slim erection. He gripped it and felt it respond.

“I'll take you somewhere and let you have it. I figured we'd think of something to do. Okay? You wanna get fucked?”

“Yes.”

“That's good. That's all I want with guys—a good fuck. Nobody fucks me, in case you had any ideas. Is it big enough for you?”

“It feels fine.”

“Yeah. It's pretty big. Yours feels a helluva lot bigger. That's okay with me. I like to see a big cock. It gives me a kick. You like to suck? American guys are usually good cocksuckers, better than girls.”

“I'm an American.” Robbie laughed at his bold admission. Maybe Johnny had been right. Maybe it had to do with nationality, part of his heritage.

“It's not for me but I like guys to do it to me. Hey. You better watch it. You're going to make me come.”

Robbie let go of the erection and moved his hands up over his torso, unbuttoning the tight shirt as he went along. There was only a light scattering of hair on Yanni's chest. He planted his hands on it and pressed himself against him and ran his tongue up his neck and around his ear.

“You're a helluva sexy guy,” Yanni said. “You like me, hunh?”

“The question was touching. He had imagined menace; Yanni just wanted to be liked. He kissed the hollow of his cheek. “You're damned attractive.”

“You, too. When I seen you coming, I thought, Boy, there's a piece of ass I wouldn't mind having. There ain't no kids like you around here. Frankly, you're the most beautiful guy I ever seen.”

The road was deserted, winding through trees. Yanni was so nearly naked that Robbie couldn't see any reason not to go further. He dropped his hands and unbuttoned his pants and pushed them down as low as they would go. He ran his hands over the hard flat belly and reached in under his balls and lifted everything out.