Tangled Sheets (33 page)

“I would very much like that,” I said. “But who will be the model?”

“I have asked a man from town to come over tonight,” he answered. “A blacksmith by the name of Marcello Antovicci. He is due here in a few moments.”

The idea of watching Lorenzo work was more than I'd hoped for from my visit, and I couldn't wait to begin. A few moments after Lorenzo finished, there was a knock at the studio door. Lorenzo opened it, and Marcello Antovicci came in. In his mid-forties, he was of average height. He was dressed in his work clothes, heavy pants and shirt and thick leather boots. His dark hair was cut short, and his wide, open face was clean shaven. In one hand, he carried a heavy leather bag that I supposed held his tools.

Lorenzo greeted the man warmly, as though they knew each other well, kissing him on both cheeks. He introduced Marcello to me and then clapped his hands together. “Shall we begin?” he asked. “Marcello, you may undress and then stand over there,” he said, pointing to a spot in front of the table.

Marcello put his bag down and began to unbutton his shirt, his big fingers fumbling with the buttons. As he took it off, he revealed a broad chest, heavily muscled and covered in thick dark hair. His arms were likewise developed, his shoulders rounded from hours upon hours of lifting his blacksmith's hammer. After removing his boots, he lowered his pants and stepped out of them, folding them neatly before laying them with the shirt on a chair. Like the rest of him, his legs were thick and strong, the thighs heavy and the calves rounded.

Turning toward Lorenzo, he asked how he should stand. Lorenzo positioned him beside a small table and, opening the bag Marcello had brought, removed a hammer. He handed it to him and asked him to raise it as though he were striking an iron freshly drawn from the fire. Marcello did so, holding his arm halfway between his shoulder and the imaginary piece of iron. When Lorenzo was pleased with his position, he told him to hold it.

Coming back to the table, Lorenzo took up a pencil and began to make a hurried outline of Marcello on the paper. I was amazed at how quickly the lines came together and the shape of the man emerged. After only a few moments, a rough image of Marcello had begun to form beneath Lorenzo's skilled fingers.

“His body is exquisite,” Lorenzo whispered to me. “Look at how smoothly the lines flow together in his arms, at how the muscles at his waist stand out. It's as if he is at his forge right now, a piece of iron before him waiting to be struck.”

I looked at Marcello, standing silently in the warm amber light of the studio lights, and pictured him in his shop, surrounded by the smoke from the fires, translucent lines of heat rising in swirls around his sunburned face. I imagined a thin bead of sweat running down his cheek and slipping along the muscles of his neck until it reached the hollow of his throat. I saw the muscles of his legs tensing and releasing as his hammer rang out on the glowing iron, sending showers of sparks into the air.

“Go to him,” Lorenzo said quietly. “Discover what it is that draws you to him.”

Lorenzo gave me a push in Marcello's direction, and I moved toward him. As I came closer, he never moved, holding his position as I moved forward and placed my hands on his back. The muscles lay in thick layers across his shoulders, and my hands moved over them lightly, feeling their power, picturing them moving rhythmically like waves as Marcello worked. I slid down to his waist and ran my hands over the full curve of his meaty ass, letting my fingers slip between them to feel the rough hair, then moving on to cup his large balls. His cock was thick and warm, and I wrapped my hand around it from behind, pulling it downward in a slow stroke.

Only then did he release himself from his pose, putting down the hammer and turning to face me. His dark eyes looked into mine, and his callused hands cupped my face. Then he reached for my shirt and undid the buttons, pulling it off quickly and dropping it to the floor. I placed my hands on his chest and felt the rough hair on it as I slid to my knees and took his swelling prick between my lips. The head was smooth and round, and my tongue moved around it in lazy circles, tasting the sweat of Marcello's skin, drinking in the rich smell of him.

His cock hardened quickly to its full length, the thick shaft straight and covered with dark hair several inches up the underside. I soon had the entire length buried in my throat, my lips pressed against the musky hair of Marcello's crotch. As I sucked him, letting his delicious prick slide along my tongue, I once more thought of him at work, his cock covered by his heavy pants, his hands twisting and bending the steel. I wanted him to hold me the same way, to take me with the same force.

Standing up, I dropped my pants. My cock swung up from between my legs, the head stained with beads of precum. I saw Marcello look down at it, saw his eyes cloud over. He came forward and pressed against me so that I was forced to lean against the edge of the table, which pressed uncomfortably into the small of my back. Positioning himself between my welcoming legs, he began to rub his body against mine, his cock sliding against my stomach, our balls slapping together.

Putting his rough hands under my ass, he lifted me so that I was sitting on the table, then pushed me back so that I was lying on my back looking up at him, my legs around his waist. His face was not that of a beautiful man, but I was enchanted by his power, wanted to feel him in me desperately, wanted him to fuck me. I raised my feet and put them on his shoulders, exposing my hole to him.

Marcello positioned his cockhead at the opening of my chute and pressed forward, pushing into me in one quick motion that brought with it a rush of pain that took my breath away. His big prick was stretching me wide open, and the feeling was amazing. I closed my eyes and lost myself in it as he started pumping my ass in short thrusts, the thick head rubbing over my sensitive opening every time he pulled out to the edge.

Marcello fucked me for a long time, adjusting his movements as he sensed that I was close to coming. He knew exactly what he was doing, and I felt as though I were made of glass and that if he touched me for one moment more I would shatter in his hands. My entire body was trembling as he made love to me, his hands as skilled at working me as they were at working a piece of raw metal.

When I finally came, Marcello stroking my chute with his prick in short thrusts that coaxed the swelling load from my balls, ropes of wetness flew from my swollen head and covered me in sticky smears from my throat to my waist. Marcello continued to pump me after I came, then pulled out and jerked himself off, his thick fingers holding his piece tightly as they moved up and down, his balls slapping against them fiercely. His first burst slammed into my face, a spray of hot jism that coated my lips and dripped from my chin. His next few landed on my balls and still-hard cock, fat drops that drenched me in Marcello's heat.

Marcello came several more times, each new spasm washing another load over my skin. Finally he stopped, letting his cock fall from his fingers and looking down at my cum-splashed body with a satisfied smile on his lips.

“It seems you've learned something from what we talked about, Mr. Caffrey,” I heard Lorenzo say, his voice breaking the silence like a stone dropped onto the surface of still water from a great height.

 

The next morning, as I was leaving, Lorenzo handed me a package wrapped in brown paper. “This is for you to open on the train,” he said. “It is something for you to remember your visit by.” He kissed me good-bye, and then I was walking to the station.

Later, as the train moved slowly through the mountains taking me back to Switzerland, I carefully opened the package. Inside was the drawing of Marcello, his arm raised and holding the hammer. A spray of hair was visible beneath his arm, and Lorenzo had drawn the lines of his cock and balls perfectly. He must have stayed up all night finishing it. As I looked at it, I smelled once more the sweat of Marcello's skin and felt his hands on my body, and my prick began to swell within my pants.

“Y
ou throw like a little old lady,” Paul yelled from down the field as he trotted after the ball I'd just tossed to him. Falling short of reaching him by a good fifteen feet, it had bounced off into the trees. It was the fourth incomplete pass I'd thrown that morning, and this time it was really off the mark. As I watched him run after it, I thought once more that for a man who'd just had his thirty-seventh birthday, he had one fine ass.

Paul and I had played together on a weekend football league for about a year. Every Sunday when the weather was decent a bunch of us would get together at the park and toss a ball around for an hour or two. Strictly weekend athletes, most of us were well past the age for showing off our passing and receiving skills, happy just to get a break from the everyday routine of our jobs as teachers, doctors, or policemen. More often than not, we'd play for a while and then head off for breakfast at the diner, where we could brag about our minor triumphs while we loaded up on pancakes and coffee.

While I'd been attracted to Paul almost immediately, I'd been disappointed to discover that he played on the wrong team. For a long time after he'd first joined the group, he'd talked about little else but his divorce, which had recently become final. He and his ex-wife had met in college, where Paul had been studying to be an architect and she was the daughter of one of his professors. After graduation, they'd gotten married and Paul took a job in a small firm. Things had gone along as planned for a number of years until the day he came home to find her with her legs in the air and the FedEx man banging away.

Paul had moved to our small New England town shortly after, thinking that a change of scenery would do him good. He'd joined the football league a few weeks after he arrived, when he'd seen us playing while he was taking a run through the park. It turned out he'd played some ball in high school, and we welcomed him as someone who could add some skill to our amateur game. Watching his enthusiasm as he played, I'd quickly developed a big crush on him that made me feel embarrassingly like a schoolboy at the age of thirty-three. I hadn't had a relationship since breaking up with my lover and moving to the coast to work on my writing, and now the one guy I was really hot for turned out to be off limits.

On this particular day, the park was largely deserted. The first killing frost had arrived the week before, and all of the grass had rapidly turned brown under its icy touch. The trees had burst into color almost immediately at the first stirrings of winter, and now the ground was scattered with their leaves, as though someone had papered the field with patches of red and yellow. The air had taken on a palpable crispness, and the evening came earlier each day, driving people inside to sit in front of their fireplaces to wait for the first snow. A couple of the other guys had been playing when I first showed up, but the late October chill had sent them home after half an hour, and only Paul and I had stayed. Now, as I waited for Paul to come back with the ball, I rubbed my hands together to keep warm.

“Getting pretty cold,” he said as he ran up holding the ball. “Feel like coming over for some coffee?”

Although he'd stopped talking about his wife so much lately, I wasn't sure I wanted to spend a whole afternoon alone with Paul knowing I could never have him. Especially with the way he looked. He was wearing dark gray sweatpants and a white T-shirt covered by an unbuttoned blue-checked flannel shirt. Tufts of dark hair were visible along the neckline of his T-shirt, and despite the baggy clothes I could see the curves of his body, especially the heavy bulge at his crotch. His brown hair was still uncombed, as though he'd just woken up, and the way he looked at me with his big brown eyes made him look like a little boy asking if his best friend could come out and play. Except this little boy was six feet tall and built like a logger.

“Sure,” I said, watching his face break into a smile.

Paul actually lived a little ways out of town, in a big old house he was using his architectural talents to fix up. I hadn't seen it yet, but I'd heard all about it from him at our Sunday morning breakfasts. As we drove over there in his truck, he told me all about the new roof he'd recently put down. I kept myself occupied by looking at the trees slipping by us and the way the cold autumn sun glinted off the waters of the reservoir Paul lived near. Turning into his long driveway, we pulled up in front of the house. A grinning jack-o'-lantern was sitting on the steps leading up to the side door, and I imagined Paul carefully scooping out handfuls of seeds and cutting out the face alone in his kitchen.

As we walked toward the house, Paul was passing the football from one hand to the other. When we reached the long sloping yard that ran up to his door, he hefted it in one hand. “Go out for a long one,” he said, pointing toward the house. “I'll show you how it's done.”

I dutifully took off, running up the leaf-strewn yard as he pulled his arm back and threw a long, solid pass. The ball arced up, spinning, and then fell back down toward me. I put my hands together and it landed awkwardly in the nest made by my fingers, sliding sideways and threatening to tumble to the ground. As I brought my hands to my chest in a desperate attempt to keep the ball from falling out of them, I looked up and saw Paul running straight at me.

Before I could dodge him, Paul's arms went around me and I fell to the ground, pulling him down with me. I landed hard in a patch of leaves, the football still cradled in my arms as I stared up into the clear, blue sky. Paul had fallen right on top of me, pinning me beneath him, and I was very conscious of the weight of him bearing down on me. Then I felt something else, something hard pressing against my stomach. It took me a second to realize that it was Paul's cock, and that he had a hard-on. I could feel his breath on my neck where his mouth was next to my head and the way his arms were holding me loosely. His prick was getting thicker, stretching along my belly.

Then Paul suddenly pushed against me and stood up. Leaning down, he held out his hand. “Sorry about that,” he said, grinning. “Guess I took you down a little too hard. Even winded myself there for a minute.”

I took his hand and he pulled me up. Paul said nothing as he walked up to the side door of the house and unlocked it. I followed him into a large, bright kitchen. He threw the football onto the big wooden table and gestured around. “This is it.”

“It's great,” I said, looking around at his handiwork. I knew he had done everything himself, right down to building the cabinets, and again I felt sorry for him living alone and having no one to share it all with.

“Come on, I'll give you the whole tour,” he said, leading me through a doorway into the rest of the house. Walking room to room, he showed me everything he'd done to the place. He had really done a great job, carefully stripping the old wallpaper and repainting, plastering the ceilings, rehanging windows. While he didn't have much in the way of furniture, the house was very comfortable. Paul was like a kid showing off his new toy, and I made sure he knew how impressed I was, asking questions about everything he showed me.

“The best part is upstairs,” he said, opening a door in a hallway to reveal a staircase. “Wait until you see the view from up here.”

The stairs went up for a ways, turned sharply left, and then opened out into a large, open space that Paul had turned into a bedroom. Nestled at the top of the house, it had two big dormer windows that looked out over the backyard and the pine forest that rambled behind the house. The narrow boards of the wooden floor had been carefully stripped down and refinished, and the walls were painted a soft green. He had furnished it very simply, focusing the room on a large wooden bed covered in a soft white goose-down comforter.

As I was looking out the window admiring the view, Paul came up behind me. His hand brushed the back of my sweatshirt, and I jumped. “Sorry,” he said, pulling his hand away quickly. “You had some grass on it from when I tackled you.”

“I'm not surprised,” I said. “You really knocked me over.”

Paul sat down on the edge of the bed and removed his sneakers, pulling them off and tossing them aside. “You just have to learn how to catch the ball without looking down,” he said. “Come here, I'll show you what I mean.”

I walked over and stood in front of him. Still sitting, he took my hands in his. “Look,” he said, putting his big hands over mine, “you need to hold them closer together. Like this.”

He held my hands loosely, his fingers brushing the backs of my hands. Having him touch me that way was making me a little too excited for my own comfort, and I hoped I wouldn't appear too nervous. I tried to concentrate on what he was saying, nodding but not really hearing anything as the pressure of his fingers on my skin increased. Then his grip tightened and he pulled me down, leaning back on the bed so that I was on top of him. He was still holding my hands, and I was looking down into his face.

“See what happens when you look down,” he said.

His voice was strangely soft, as though he was afraid of something. But he made no move to let me go, his dark eyes looking into mine expectantly. I looked at his handsome face, his jaw shadowed with dark stubble, the small scar on his chin. His lips were slightly parted, and I felt his heart beating heavily against my chest. Without thinking, I leaned down and kissed him gently on the lips. When I pulled my face away, I saw that he was smiling.

He let go of my hands, and I ran them over the worn, soft flannel of his shirt, feeling the muscles of his shoulders and moving down his sides. I reached inside and ran my hand underneath the bottom of his T-shirt, touching his warm skin and feeling the hair of his belly rasp against my palm. Sliding my hands up his stomach, I pushed his T-shirt up, exposing more and more of his torso.

I stopped when I had reached halfway up his chest, letting my hands rest on either side of his rib cage and enjoying the warmth and solidness of him in my arms. His navel was surrounded by a splash of short hair, and I bent down and ran my tongue in circles around it, dipping into the center and kissing him. Moving my mouth slowly upward, I followed the line of hair that ran from his belly to his chest, lightly licking his skin. He tasted slightly of the sweat he'd worked up playing ball, and the sweet muskiness of it on my tongue combined with the rough touch of his hair against my lips in an overpowering way.

Throughout all of this, Paul hadn't once moved, just watching my every movement on his body. It was as though he were under some kind of spell, holding his breath until something woke him. When I reached the line his T-shirt formed across his body, I told him to sit up and slipped his flannel shirt off and pulled the T-shirt over his head. His chest was broad and solid, his pecs firm. The hair I had seen over his collar dusted his chest, and his nipples formed small rosy peaks against the lightness of his skin.

Standing up, I shed my own clothes quickly. Paul's eyes remained fixed on me as I removed my shirt and slipped my sweats off. His gaze traveled from my well-developed chest to my cock, which hung half-hard between my legs and was rapidly filling out. Climbing back onto the bed, I lowered myself onto him, once more kissing his mouth. His hands went onto my back and rested there, tentatively feeling the muscles of my shoulders and then moving down to my ass, where his fingers gripped me tightly. The feel of his sweatpants on my bare skin was a sharp contrast to the warmth of his naked torso, and I rubbed myself against him as we kissed, enjoying the way the rough material scraped against my cock and balls below while above I was pressed closely to his flesh.

Paul began to moan softly as I kissed his throat and tickled him by rasping my unshaven cheek against his skin. My tongue slid behind his ear and then into it as I worked slowly along his jaw and down his neck, exploring his body with my mouth. Taking hold of his thick wrist and raising it behind his head, I slipped into the dark forest beneath his arm, my lips sinking into thick hair wet with sweat. I nuzzled deep in his damp patch, breathing in his masculine scent and licking him clean.

I could feel Paul's cock pressing against me through his sweatpants, growing harder and harder. As I had suspected from the size of his bulge, it was long and hard. My own prick had stiffened as well, and the two of them lay alongside one another like great sleeping beasts. Moving down between Paul's legs, I pulled the waistband of his sweats down until the tip of his cock was sticking out. Wide and tapered to a heavy, blunt point, it was leaking a sticky stream that had matted the hair on his belly. Taking the tip into my mouth, I closed my lips around it and sucked gently, washing away the heady fluid. I could feel the blood pounding beneath his skin as I worked my tongue along the ridge and into his hole, drinking up his juice.

Sliding Paul's pants farther down and off, I got my first glimpse of his massive prick. The shaft was thick between his thighs, his balls heavy and round in their smooth sac. I hefted the big tool in my hand, sliding my fingers up and down it slowly while I milked more juice from the lips of his swollen head. It ran in a steady line down the underside of his cock before I wiped it away, sliding my tongue in long strokes up Paul's shaft.

Paul sat up, watching me lick his prick. “Come up here,” he said nervously. “I want to suck you, too.”

Positioning myself alongside him so that our faces were between one another's legs, I went to work on his balls, taking one into my mouth. Paul put his hand on my ass and pushed me toward him as he took my cock into his mouth. I was surprised at how easily he took the whole thing in, his lips eagerly moving up and down my shaft. His mouth was hot and soft, surrounding me like a warm blanket as he worked every inch. Looking down, I watched as my prick slid in and out of his face, his cheeks swelling and releasing as he blew me.