Perfect Freedom (74 page)

Jim trailed a hand over his body as he moved down to the foot of the table. Lance heard unidentifiable sounds and then his legs were parted and Jim clambered up onto the table between them. He didn't need encouragement, after all. The masseur kneeled over him and dropped forward with his hands on his shoulders. With long sweeping gestures, he began to apply oil to his body from shoulders to buttocks and down between his thighs, fondling his balls.

Lance felt indecently exposed but congratulated himself for allowing his body to be handled in this way. The novelty of it excited him, resistance to being wanted by a guy sharpening his appetite for the unknown. He lifted his hips slightly to ease the pressure on his cock. Jim made a sound like a grunt of satisfaction and slid his hand under his balls and stroked his erection. He lifted his hips higher to allow the hand free play. Both hands became active on him, kneading his thighs, squeezing his cock, parting his buttocks. A finger was inserted between them and exerted electrifying pressures within him. He gasped as he was brought still closer to orgasm. He started to twist his hips away but the imminence of climax paralyzed his will. He apparently could be made to come this way.

Jim ran his oiled hands up over his body again and slipped them under his chest. He folded himself over him and drew him in against him. Panic struck as Lance realized that his partner was no longer wearing shorts. A man's nakedness was pressed to his. He felt the hard thrust of his erection against his balls. His heart pounded. There was a strange drumming in his veins. He began to tremble so violently that he lost control of his body. Jim drew back and gripped his hips and drove into him.

“No!” Lance shouted as everything in him was abruptly wrenched into a knot of outraged protest. His body was being brutalized, every shred of decency in him violated. He writhed and bucked as he struggled to free himself but the grip on his hips was implacable and the invasion slowly deepened, growing enormous, too great for him to contain. It was tearing him apart. Pain sharpened outrage. He was being fucked.

The word splintered his mind. A man was in him, finding loathsome satisfaction in him, indifferent to his consent. His instinct to protect himself wavered as a deeper urge came boiling to the surface, an urge to participate in his own debasement. He was being dragged down into the filth of life, being compelled to face for the first time his common humanity. He claimed no special rights or dispensations. Resistance was shattered. He was overwhelmed by his will to surrender. Tension drained from his body. The pain was gone. Hard flesh moved smoothly in him, asserting its mastery of him.

He began to move to Jim's rhythm. His erection had wilted under the initial assault but he became incredulously aware that it was reviving. He was being taken, possessed, enslaved. The fastidious Lance Vanderholden was nothing but a body being used for a man's pleasure. He exulted in his degradation. He wanted to be fucked.

Their bodies were in tune for the approaching climax. They grunted and cried out and Lance shouted with triumph as they had simultaneous orgasms. He welcomed the full weight of the powerful body that collapsed on his back in tribute to his ability to serve another's desire. His chest was heaving but he was scarcely aware of having had a sexual experience. He retained no sense of pleasure or lust satisfied. It had been a psychological shock, a radical realignment of his whole personality. He felt as if he had taken a first faltering step in learning who he was. He was lying under a man who was still in him, defiling him, retaining his claim to him. Lance belonged to him more than he belonged to anybody else in the world.

He uttered an audible gasp as Jim withdrew from him. He lifted himself off the table and Lance watched the strong back disappear into another room. He still hadn't seen the instrument that had forced his surrender. He lay numb and motionless, soiled by his own sperm, amazed and appalled. There was an emptiness in him that he had never felt before, an emptiness that could be filled only by a powerful man seizing him, brutalizing him, bending him to his will. He couldn't think clearly about what it meant. He was seething with outrage and revulsion and an exultant sense of having triumphed over his carefully cultivated sensibilities.

Jim returned and stopped near him. “You can go clean up if you want,” he said in a quiet, pleasant voice, the accent softer than a New Yorker's.

Lance was aware that Jim was wearing his shorts again but he couldn't look at him. How could he face a guy who had fucked him? Jim turned away and Lance quickly pulled himself up from his mess and hurried to a small bathroom. He took a healing shower, assessing the damages. He was sore but seemed unharmed. Trailing a towel at his side, he returned to the massage room. Jim was standing at a trolley-table arranging tubes and bottles on it. Lance forced himself to look at him as he approached. He saw no conqueror's gleam of triumph in his eyes, only stolid amiability. Jim's apparent indifference was more humiliating than letting himself be had. He wanted him to pull off his shorts and take him again. Still unsure that his cock was big enough to offer for inspection, he lifted the towel over it while it burgeoned startlingly.

“I've never been fucked before,” he said.

“That so? Don't let it throw you. Lots of guys don't know they want it until it happens. You sure as hell wanted it. God, what a body. Having my cock up Lance Vanderholden's ass made me feel like God Almighty.”

The crude words thrilled him; they stripped him of all pretensions. “You know me?” he asked.

“Doesn't everybody? Mac told me you were one of his regulars.”

“How did you know I'd let you?”

A small grin appeared on Jim's friendly face. “It was obvious. You were hot for it. I don't go in for rape. If you want to make a definite date for next time, I'll be sure to be free for you. We can have some extra time.”

“Tomorrow,” Lance said, amazed by his unhesitating shamelessness. “Four o'clock.”

“Okay. Try not to be late.”

It sounded like a parental admonition. Lance had always wondered what it would be like to have a father. Jim's authority over him was absolute by right of possession. He couldn't imagine refusing another session. He dropped the towel to his side, revealing what had happened while he stood in front of him, waiting to be sure that he was still going to be dismissed.

“Okay. I've seen your cock,” Jim said, smiling comfortably. “It's a beauty. Beat it before I start thinking I'm Superman.”

“Is yours much bigger?”

“Bigger than that thing? No such luck. You'll see tomorrow.”

“It felt huge.”

“Look, cocks are like clothes marked Small, Medium and Large. Guys who take Large aren't all the same size. I might be a Large but you're bigger. Why should I have to tell you? Don't you suck?”

“No.”

“Famous last words. See you tomorrow.”

Lance thought of him during the rest of the day and first thing when he woke up with a girl at noon the next morning. He was coming to terms with the experience. The moment when he had resisted, the moment when Jim had taken him by force, was seared on his memory. He had felt a sense of atonement not unlike, he thought unexpectedly, what he imagined he was supposed to feel when his mother sent him to confession. As he entered adult life, he had begun to be aware of sins of which no priest could absolve him—the sin of being spoiled and pampered and protected, of being suffocated by privilege. Jim's merciless cock had been an instrument of absolution. He was learning to atone for his heritage. His humiliation had given him a glimpse of genuine humility.

Somehow, he didn't think it had anything to do with discovering that he was queer. Atonement wasn't supposed to be a pleasure. Nobody had ever made demands on him the way Jim had. Regardless of shame or suffering, he was eager to offer himself for his satisfaction.

When he went to his appointment that afternoon, he had a hard-on almost before he had closed the door of the massage room. He discarded his towel. Jim looked up with his small grin from the trolley-table.

“Well, hi there,” he greeted him. “Thanks. That's very flattering.” He peeled off his shorts and sauntered over to him. Lance's eyes were fixed on an erection for the first time in his life. It looked muscular somehow, like the rest of Jim's body, knotted and aggressive and bigger than he expected a cock to be. Something in him instinctively recoiled from it. He glanced down at them both and saw that his own was undeniably bigger. He felt a small lift of pride as Jim put his hands on him appraisingly, looking down at it.

“I've seen bigger. You should be thankful it stopped there. I know a kid with a twelve-incher. He has a terrible time, poor guy. Nobody can figure out what to do with it.”

Jim put his arms around him and pulled him in against his powerful body. His tongue was aggressive when it entered Lance's mouth. Lance hadn't known that guys kissed each other. It seemed a bizarre dislocation of the natural order and he responded avidly. Their whiskers scraped against each other.

Jim released him and pulled a wrestling mat out from a wall and threw towels and a bottle onto it and pulled Lance down to it. He kneeled over him, his hands on his hips, his knotted erection thrust out with crude command. “Okay. Let's see Lance Vanderholden suck cock.”

Tears of shame stung the back of Lance's eyes as he moved to obey. He could feel Jim observing him as he opened his mouth wide to receive him. His craving for self-abasement provided an illusion of eagerness to his performance. His own erection grew painfully rigid. The hard flesh in his mouth felt like some strange rubberized manufactured product, unlike anything his lips had ever touched. It stretched his jaws uncomfortably. It didn't satisfy any of the senses. He couldn't feel the pleasure he was presumably giving, as he could when his mouth was joined to a mouth. He supposed that the reward might come with orgasm but hoped that it wouldn't reach that point. He was grateful when Jim pulled back.

“That does it. I don't want to come,” he said.

“Don't I do it right?”

“Beautifully. You're going to be an ace cocksucker but I've just got started on you. We're in no rush.” His expert hands took charge. Struggling against shame, surrendering self-respect, Lance felt as if his body were being reinvented. It assumed positions at the slightest bidding of the hands, legs sprawled out wantonly or lifted in the air, kneeling with his body flung out backwards on the support of Jim's arm so that his cock soared into his mouth. He masturbated when directed to do so and his ejaculation was flung out between them, soiling them both.

“Fuck me,” Lance blurted, swept by a fierce exhilaration at acknowledging his abject lust for punishment. He cried out as a blinding flash of pain struck him. He choked on a sob. Tears welled up in his eyes. Jim knew that he didn't want to be spared.

The next few days dulled the edge of Lance's ecstatic submission to the masseur's will. He lost the exciting feeling of being brutalized. His body had adapted. He had learned how to serve Jim's depraved demands. That thrill remained but what they actually did, their unorthodox acts, became a banal catalogue of sexual license. He had grown accustomed to the feel of a man's body, but caressing a cock or a hairy chest appealed to him less than caressing a girl's soft body. He felt in closer contact to ugly reality but he was sure there was a world of depravity that remained closed to him. He kept hoping that Jim would impose on him some ultimate degradation beyond which there could be no further atonement. The thought of it kept his cock hard for his partner.

When he went for his usual appointment after a Sunday break in the country with Pam, he found old Mac, the regular, back at his accustomed post. Lance didn't ask any questions. He assumed that Jim must have been a temporary replacement. They had never talked about anything except sex. Jim hadn't felt it worth mentioning that they wouldn't be seeing each other again. Maybe Mac had returned unexpectedly.

He was left with the feeling of emptiness but supposed it was time to stop before he went too far. Whatever cravings remained in him were too daunting to be explored except under duress. Shackles still confined him. The looks he encountered from guys in the street no longer frightened him but he didn't see anybody he felt like taking on. He doubted if many queers could match the masseur's brutal authority. He couldn't imagine choosing to go to bed with a guy simply for peaceful pleasure.

He had been booked with Geraldine Fleet, his costar, to make a publicity appearance in Chicago on the following Sunday, flying out after the show on Saturday night, and he had checked to make sure that they would get back early enough on Monday to see Jim before the evening performance. He wouldn't have to worry about that anymore.

Waiting at the airport for the plane to load, he left his star sitting with their luggage and wandered off to a newsstand on an island in the middle of the lounge. As he browsed, his attention was caught by a pretty girl similarly occupied on the other side of the stand. He gazed at her across a stack of newsprint. She looked very young and her short brown hair was boyishly tousled. All he could see of what she was wearing was the top of an open-necked man's shirt; a view of her breasts was cut off by magazines. She looked up and their eyes met. Despite her youth, hers immediately filled with such explicit, knowing sexuality that he began to get an erection. He had never known a girl to make it so clear so quickly that, she wanted him.

She lowered her eyes while his mind searched frantically for something he could do with her. There was only half an hour before his scheduled departure. An airport offered no shelter for eager lovers. He hadn't ever picked up a girl and this seemed hardly the time to try.

She looked up again and their eyes locked into each other. The desire in hers was almost palpable, like hands caressing him. She seemed to take it for granted that they were going to make love. Her lips parted and he saw the tip of her tongue between them. His heart accelerated. He was struck by something undefinably odd and ambiguous about her, suggesting that sex with her would be different from anything he had ever experienced. She inclined her head as if to beckon him and turned and strolled away.