Journey to Mirage Ch. 13

The man who had brought him here in his Mercedes—who Rick only now knew was named Bill Grimes—had half carried Rick to a Leather sofa near the fireplace and gently lowered him down into the corner of that.

"I'll be just a few minutes," he'd said. "I'll prepare a room for you and be right back down. And I'll bring you something that will help with the pain."

The man disappeared up the stairs to the second floor. Rick looked around and it didn't take him long to find out something important about the man who had saved him in the desert. There was considerable art work around. Bronze and silver sculptures and oil paintings. All large and showy, and obviously expensive. The sculptures were all of men's muscled torsos and the paintings were male nudes. There wasn't much more bric-a-brac around except for along the tops of the bookcase balcony rising in a semicircle around the inner side of the living room, separating the sunken area from the corridor and dining room on the raised level. This space was devoted to framed photographs. They were too far away for Rick to see, and his eyes kept going back to the nearer artwork anyway. Two art books lay on the huge, glass-topped coffee table, both with black-and-white photos of artfully posed male nudes on the cover.

When the man returned, he had changed to a short cotton robe and was carrying a glass with fizzing liquid in it. As Rick took this down in several long gulps, the man asked him what his name was, how old he was, and where his family was and, it seemed, told Rick his own name. But none of this stuck—neither the specific questions nor the answers. Almost before Rick had finished drinking the medicine, his eyelids were drooping and he was drifting off to sleep.

The next face Rick saw was the face of the doctor in that room with the posters and the athletic trophies.

After the doctor left, Bill Grimes appeared with a bowl of soup and a glass of milk, and Rick's nearly two-week period began of healing his wounds from his beating at the Big C ranch and his heat stroke from the stumble on foot along the highway out of Amarillo.

Grimes gave Rick plenty of time to rest and sleep and during that time, all conversation, which was terse and relatively rare, was focused on Rick and on making him well. Grimes said little about himself and Rick didn't press him. For most of the first week, Rick was in a semiconscious state, often almost in a coma, induced by whatever medicine the doctor had left to be given to him. The doctor only visited three times—covering the first three days. Whatever he left for Rick to take was of such a strong nature that Rick spent more time sleeping and when he was sleeping, he slept as the dead.

Each morning when he came back into a semiconscious state, he was naked and clean under the sheets.

Twelve days after his arrival, Rick made his first journey down the stairs and to the living room. For two days prior to that, he had made sojourns out onto a balcony off the bedroom he was in, the bedroom also having its own full bath and a massive walk-in closet with just two hangars—his neatly cleaned and pressed jeans, cowboy shirt and briefs hanging on one and a cotton robe similar to the one he'd seen Grimes wear on the other. Rick's duffel bag was on the floor. There was very little in the duffel bag; just some clothes. Whatever money Rick had once had was now gone, and it took Rick a few minutes to remember the Hispanic men who had robbed him by the side of the road.

Feeling well enough to move about, Rick put on the cotton robe and went out on the balcony, which was oriented out toward the west and hovered over a steep slope down the ridge side. He shivered when he looked down into the ravine. It must be a drop of five stories or more down to the rocks in the dry stream bed.

When he decided to go down to the living room for the first time, he put on his jeans and cowboy shirt. When he got to the bottom of the stairs, which required some effort as weak as he was, he found a rather rotund Mexican woman in the kitchen cutting up food and humming. She smiled at him and he smiled back. He went to the window by the fireplace in the living room, which turned out to be a French door—all of the space on either side of the fireplace was devoted to the same sort of door—Rick turned the handle, wanting to go out onto the portal beyond and take in the fresh mountain air. The door was locked, as was the one beside it. He didn't see any knob or anything to unlock it from the inside.

He turned to ask the woman in the kitchen about going out onto the portal, but he saw, instead, Bill Grimes walking briskly toward him from a room beyond the kitchen.

"Ah, Rick, it's good you're up and about. Come on back to the den and let's have a drink and I'd like to show you the book of Ansel Adams photographs I was in Dallas buying before we met. Do you know who Ansel Adams is?"

"Yes, I studied him in a photography class," Rick answered. The reference brought Groton and the movie he was making to mind. It all seemed eons and continents away now.

They entered a room almost as large as the living room. All of the artwork here was of Southwestern art—and most of it consisted of photographs. There were bookcases lining two walls. These cases were packed with art books, most, that Rick could see, of Southwestern landscape oils and lithographs—Georgia O'Keefe type stuff or of landscape photography. One whole section, though, caught Rick's attention. They looked like photographs of male nudes. He started to gravitate toward those, but Grimes took him by the arm and led him toward a leather-covered sofa with a glass-topped coffee table in front of it. A large book was open on the table, and even Rick could see that the photo shown was an Ansel Adams.

"Here, this is the book I wanted to show you. And here's a drink. I'm sure it will be OK for you to drink this now. You're almost fully well, I think."

Rick could tell from the delicate touch of the man's fingers on his arm and from the way he looked into Rick's eyes—the flash in his own hazel eyes, and the curve of his mouth when he smiled—that he wanted Rick. Rick had now been into this sort of thing for quite a few months—going back to Tony, who had given Rick the exact same look before fucking him.

Although the artwork in the living room had alerted Rick, he would have known from how the man touched him and looked at him now that this is what the man wanted. What the artwork had done for Rick, though, was to give him time to think about the circumstances. The fact that the guy had stopped for him and brought him here and gotten a doctor to see him and nursed him. This all made Rick feel like he owed the man something. Beyond that, the man was quite handsome and well built. And overriding everything else, Rick liked to be fucked and hadn't been for two weeks.

Rick would like this Grimes guy to think he was seducing Rick, if that's the way he wanted to play it. But Rick was already prepared. He was ready to play.

Rick started drinking the drink as he sat next to Grimes while Grimes turned the pages of the Ansel Adams book and spoke in that rich baritone of his about this nuance and that of lighting and location and time of day. Rick had no idea when either the drink or the photography show was finished, though, as the strain of a first trip downstairs had gotten to him and he drifted off to a deep sleep.

The next morning he awoke in the room on the second floor. He was clean and naked under the sheets.

The next night, Grimes himself decided that Rick was well and strong enough to come down to the dining room for a full meal. The cook prepared them a delicious steak dinner with excellent wine. As they ate, she cleaned up the kitchen and was gone before they were finished.

Grimes invited Rick to go on down into the living room and to take his wine glass with him. Rick felt hazy from the wine, but it was so good that he took another drink of it at the table. He didn't feel steady enough, though, to carry his glass down into the living room, so he left the glass on the dining room table and carefully negotiated the stairs down there with the use of both hands.

Rick perched on the sofa as Grimes moved about the room, dimming the lights, putting soft music on the CD changer, and lighting the fire.

As Grimes was doing this, Rick looked around, sensing that there was something different about the room than from the time he'd first sat on this sofa two weeks previously. It wasn't the artwork; that was all still in place. Then, he noticed that the photographs were gone. The living room bookcases were now empty of all photographs. In their place were some replicas—or genuine as far as Rick knew—of black and white Southwestern native pottery.

Rick didn't dwell on this find. His head was spinning from the first alcohol he'd drunk since coming here. But that wasn't completely true; he'd had a drink in the den with Grimes the previous afternoon. Of course he hadn't been able to hold that very well either.

He wanted his head to stop spinning. The fire and the bear rug looked so inviting. He slipped down onto the rug on his belly, facing the fire.

Grimes entered from the bedroom wing, dressed in his short cotton robe. He offered Rick some port or Cognac to top off the evening, but Rick begged off. Then Grimes was leaning down to Rick, with a portfolio in his hand.

"Here, take a look at these," he said. "I work with photography. I'd like to know what you think."

As Rick fanned the photographs out—artistic nude shots of a young man, and more explicit photos below those in the stack of the young man with Grimes—Rick turned his face to the sofa to see the cotton robe fall onto it in folds.

And then Grimes was lowering his naked body onto Rick's back.

They fucked for an hour and more, in several positions—all inspired by the photographs Grimes dropped on the rug under Rick's face. As the logs in the fireplace were being reduced to glowing embers and Grimes was on his side, with Rick cuddled into his chest and Grimes holding Rick's leg up for access to Rick's channel as he was still stroking him deep in a side split, Grimes put his lips to Rick's ear and said, "It's so nice. You're such a sweet fuck."

"Yes, yes, it is nice," Rick whispered back with a mellow sigh.

"It's so much nicer fucking you when you are conscious," Grimes said.

"Conscious?" Rick responded, in confusion.

"Yes, we have made loved more than a dozen times already. Even asleep, you responded fully and openly to my fucking you. You are a sweet lay."

"But . . . but I was asleep."

"And your sweet vulnerability enhanced my enjoyment of you. I assure you that you were able to move your hips in rhythm with me and moan in your sleep."

Rick froze in shock and instant realization. Going out like a light after being given a drink; waking up naked under the sheets and clean—it all fit into place with just that one statement from Grimes. Rick gasped and tightened up and shuddered, marking this as the start of his need to be out of this house, to escape the insane clutches of this man.

If Grimes noticed the change in Rick, he didn't signal it. He just kept on stroking deep inside Rick's channel. And ultimately Rick gave into the fuck fully and lay there panting and moaning, arms and legs spread in full supplication for anything else Grimes would want to do and with a sloppy grin on his face. When Grimes was finished inside him, he withdrew and stood and went to the kitchen for another bottle of wine. He came back into the living room with a photography book on Mapplethorpe nude male models and sat on the sofa, leafing through the pages. At length he looked down at Rick again, still sprawled on the bearskin rug, completely open to him. Grimes smiled and got up from the sofa and went over to a table and retrieved a camera. He came back.

"Don't move. You look lusciously vulnerable and open."

Rick did as he asked, watching Grimes circle him, snapping off shot after shot. This was something Rick was accustomed to; this was of the world Douglas Groton had initiated him into. Gradually, Grimes narrowed in on Rick until he was kneeling between the young man's open thighs.

"You. You do it," he murmured.

Rick reached down and took Grime's reengorged cock in his hands, crowned him with the Golden Ticket condom taken from a packet on the nearby coffee table, and guided the sheathed cock into his hole, as Grime's fired off camera shot after shot of the entry and then panned up to catch the pain and shock in Rick's eyes as Grimes slammed his cock home deep and immediately began to stroke hard.

* * * *

Rick hadn't thought about escaping Grimes's house nearly fast enough, and the more he just drifted along, the harder thoughts of escape became. The easiest time to try to split and run would have been at the point of learning that Grimes had already been fucking him while he was unconscious—probably from the first night Rick had been here. Thinking on it retrospectively, Rick remembered that the first thing Grimes did when they arrived at the house was to strip and put on one of those skimpy cotton robes of his. He'd then given Rick something to drink that had put him out like a light. There was every reason to believe that Grimes fucked him as soon as he was unconscious—that first night. Most of the reason Rick wasn't quick off the mark was that, when conscious, he loved Grimes's cocking. He loved seeing the photos of what the man was going to do to him—and then having it done—and then, sometimes the photos Grimes took while fucking him. Groton had taught him to love this.

And at the same time he found that escape wasn't going to be easy, he began to see what the rhythm of life was going to be like around here.

Grimes had fucked Rick so silly on the bear-skin rug in front of the fireplace that he let Grimes help him upstairs to his bedroom. While Rick showered, Grimes stripped the bedroom bare of all of Rick's clothes. And when Rick came out of the bathroom, he found he had been locked into the bedroom. So much for a quick exit.

And then, late in the night, Grimes came back into the room and woke Rick in mid fuck.

"No, no, go back to sleep," Grimes whispered. "Fucking you in your sleep is more arousing for me."

Rick relaxed and closed his eyes, let his limbs go limp, his torso arched back and his arms dangling at his sides, as Grimes shoved his knees farther under Rick's buttocks, wrapped an arm around the small of Rick's back, and slow pumped Rick's channel.

This was a more gentle, loving fucking. Always the taking in other parts of the house was exotic, lustful. But here, in Rick's bedroom, it was slow and attentive to Rick's needs—almost loving. It was this fucking, too, when Grimes dispensed with the use of a condom. It was then, at the height of passion, as his ejaculation started and Rick felt the strong flow of Grimes inside him, that Grimes murmured the name that wasn't Rick's: Jeff. They then settled down to sleep, their bodies entwined. In the morning, Grimes was gone and the door was locked.

He appeared with a breakfast tray.

"I think it best for you to rest up here during the day, Rick," he said. He made no mention of the missing clothes. And believing the man unbalanced and set on a short fuse, Rick said nothing about the missing clothes either. He was more concerned that Grimes didn't mention not using a condom the previous night. This gripped Rick like a hand tightening around his throat. This brought permanence to this ritual of the night that caused the ringing of trap doors shutting in Rick's mind as nothing else had.

The man wanted to fuck him when he was unconscious and without a condom—and while murmuring the name of someone other than Rick. He clearly was bonkers.

"I'll bring you your breakfasts and lunches. The housekeeper will make enough for you to eat a dinner she's prepared after I have done so in the evening, and then you can come down and we'll enjoy ourselves. I have so many interesting photography books to show you—so many ways I want to fuck you."

Rick thought of trying to get to the housekeeper while she was here, but he already knew she only spoke Spanish, and, from the evidence of what he saw that Grimes kept around the house, Rick could only assume that she already knew about Grimes's "arrangements" and perhaps was paid enough to not help Rick even if she could. And then there was the part that Rick could only come into her presence in the nude.

That night, after dark, when Grimes let Rick come downstairs to eat dinner, the first thing that Rick noticed were that two video cameras had been set up—one in the dining room and one in the foyer corridor, that were panned down to the bear-skin rug in the living room.

He knew what these were for. And, strangely, they were more calming than shocking to him. This had been what he had associated with the sex act as Doug Groton had brought him across the country toward Mirage, Arizona. Being on camera would give him a role. He had experience in that.

As Rick ate, wolfing the food down both because it was good and also because fucking taxed so much of his energy and he was being taken multiple times twice a day now, Grimes, in one of the several short cotton robes he had, sat patiently at the table, looking through a book of pornographic male art, showing Rick images Grimes liked or thought that Rick would.

"This is the art of Dan Saba," he said as he turned the book toward Rick. "Can you see the sensuality of it? The time they obviously are taking in his posings? The arousal and love in their eyes?"

"Umm, muh," Rick responded. Yeah, right, it looked like the younger guy was enjoying the older one fucking him. And, yeah, the shot of the young guy leaning back and his legs raised on the bench and spread and giving a good shot of his hole, cock, and balls was pretty good too. And the one of two guys fucking in a shower.

Rick looked away when he saw a well-thumbed image of a man being fucked in his sleep on a bed.

"And here, in this book, Tony Caperton's 'On the Beach'—obviously mimicking that famous pose from the movie. Don't the two lovers look totally taken with each other?"

Grimes was holding the book open with one hand and already stroking Rick's cock with the other.

"Oh, god, yes, I like that painting. It's a lot like the one you have on the wall over in the foyer, isn't it?"

"Yes. You've a good eye. That's by the same artist."

"I think I've eaten enough now," Rick said, as he laid a hand on Grimes's chest and ran his fingers through the curly hair there. His eyes told Grimes that Rick was ready and open to him.

Grimes fucked Rick slowly and sensually on the bear-skin rug, murmuring that Rick should think of the artwork he had seen. All the time the cameras were whirring. The slowness and total taking of the cocking did recall in Rick's mind the artwork.

On successive evenings, the two played wrestlers on the rug for the cameras after the form of a Thomas Eakins painting of that name and Rick was introduced to a psychedelic drug for a wild, full-color and high fantasy taking in the style of Jon Smith. An image of a fucking bent over a table was played out in the dining room and another series of art photos inspired a scene where both just stood in the middle of the living room, and Grimes spiked Rick's ass from behind and wrapped his hands around him and Rick arched back to him and they kissed while Grimes gave Rick a rocking fuck.

A Tom of Finland portfolio moved them on to Rick's wrists being tied to two pillars in the foyer, and Grimes gripping his butt cheeks and standing between Rick's spread legs and swing fucking him roughly.

They even explored Japanese art, where Grimes produced two brocade robes and Rick sat in his lap facing him, and the fuck started inside the robes, with nothing provocative seen other than the expressions on their faces and knowledge of the movement of their bodies assuring the camera-aided voyeur that they were fucking. And then slowly, ever so slowly Grimes opened up Rick's robe to expose body parts that Grimes would tease with his lips and teeth, until Rick's body was revealed fully at the height of the fuck. The film would be cut to focus in on root of the cock lengthening and shortening as it moved in and out of Rick's hole, surrounded by the folds of the soft brocade of two Japanese robes, ending in a shudder of the cock root marking the ejaculation.