The Christmas Present Cruise

“I suppose,” I answered. But then after a brief silence, I decided it was his turn to bare his soul. “But why are you in here and alone? And why are you melancholy.”

“You’ve come on this cruise for enjoyment. I shouldn’t burden you with my sadness.”

“But you said you were glad to have someone to talk to. I would like to know why you are sad . . . why you are on this voyage. What are you looking for? Another man? Have you found the prospects of the voyage unsatisfactory? The mood of the passengers too hedonist for you?”

“Too hedonist, yes, perhaps—at least under my present circumstances, although I assure you that I’ve made a party fool of myself often enough in my time. I’m not a demonstrative man usually, though. I’m going home, actually. I have been in the States, and I’m returning home. I live in Bermuda. So, it’s really only half a voyage for me, and I thought that seeing all of these young men around, being happy and making love, would stave off my mourning. I didn’t realize—although I should have—that they would be making sex, not love—and that underneath the veneer of happiness is a core of frantic need.”

“Mourning?” I asked. “Have you had some sort of breakup with a lover?”

“He died. He was American. I brought him home for his final rest.”

“Ah. I’m sorry.”

“So am I. We were together for over twenty years. And in all that time, I didn’t acknowledge him. Bad for the box office, you know. Now I wish I had. But now it’s too late.”

From there we moved to less-painful chit-chat for both of us. I told him of my studies and he spoke to me of his years in film and his life with his Chad. He seemed in a less reticent mood as darkness slowly turned the sea into shimmering light reflecting from the moon and accentuated the white caps of the wake and the colorful festivity of the Christmas tree.

The discussion had lightened my mood too—helped along by a few more drinks than I should have had.

“Thank you for the company,” he said as he rose from his chair. He cut quite an elegant figure still—trim of body, handsome of face, and noticeably well cared for. “I mustn’t be late for the gala dinner. I’m afraid I have to endure a captain’s table performance. I never can seem to get off stage.”

“For some reason, I’m at the captain’s table too,” I said as I rose from my chair.

“Ah, then, I at least will have someone I can talk with enjoyably,” he said. “Shall we? And shall we go arm and arm so that any mashers get the impression that we are together?”

“That would be splendid,” I said, as I offered my arm to him. And I surprised myself in the realization that it, indeed, would be splendid.

Continued conversation was not to be, though. My new-found friend was placed on the captain’s right, with a blowsy middle-aged banker type, simpering at the presence of a famous British leading man at the table, placed on the captain’s left. To his left was the ship’s first officer, a florid, beefy redhead not more than a couple of years older than I was who was expressive with his hands the entire meal—certainly with the use of them on my arms and knees and thighs as he made suggestive small talk. I was confused and slightly embarrassed when I didn’t react even when his hand went to cover my basket—and giving a low growl when he found I was hard—but through the buzz I reasoned—idiotically, of course—that it was just the drink affecting me like this and that I’d go straight to my cabin when dinner was over.

I was placed on the first officer’s left. So Magnus Brooks, the former matinee idol, was too far down the same seating line from me for interaction between us to be possible. I felt I regretted not having him to talk to further, although it seemed like he must have exhausted all topics of mutual interest back in the lounge.

I found it difficult to talk with those sitting across from me, the whole line being young, fit, handsome men who obviously were placed there to be eye candy for the captain and his chief officers, all of whom revealed in the language they used and jokes that they told that they too were gay. It wasn’t that the young men might not have been pleasant to talk with, nor was it because I tried several times to divert the first officer’s interest from me to them. It was because my world was going hazy and disjointed from the drinking I had done before and during dinner. The first officer was my partner in crime in this, topping off my wine glass before it was even half empty and proposing toast after toast.

I have no recollection of the transition that somehow was accomplished, but the next time that I was in consciousness enough to observe my surroundings, I was in a cabin not much larger than mine, and not nearly as well appointed as mine, and the florid redheaded first officer’s pelvis was asserting itself between my spread thighs as I lay on my back on his bed. We were both naked; my mouth tasted foul and musky, as if I’d given the beefy stud a blow job, which for all I know I had, and I was being jolted jerkily back into awareness and the sensation of pain as he worked his cock inside me and began to plow me.

I think—but am not sure—that I initially tried to cry him off, but he only laughed and told me that I had begged for it, that I’d asked him to fuck me during desert at the captain’s table, which I couldn’t declare with any certainty that I hadn’t done. I do know that once he was inside me and the initial pain had subsided, I felt a flood of relief that I finally was giving in to the urge. I do slightly remember having begun a rhythm of the fuck with him and moaning of the pleasure it was bringing me—and the pleasure I felt when I heard him groaning and moaning as well.

I assumed I was trying to cry him off the assault with my booze-slurred speech, but someone in the cabin was begging for him with exclamations of “Yes, yes. Fuck me.” The more aware I became of my surroundings, the more I realized that the voice was mine.

Near the end of the fuck, another figure entered the cabin—the captain, I realized, a tall, muscular, dark man in his forties. He was Moroccan, or so I’d been informed at dinner. I had not been informed that he had a long, thin cock that curved up from the black, curly hair of his groin when he was in erection. When the first officer was finished with me, he turned me over on my belly on the bed, and fucked me doggy style. He laughed, hands on my waist, as I began to counter his thrusts with the motion of my own hips, pushing back on his cock, and when I raised my torso to his, flung my arm around his neck, and pulled his face into mine for deep kissing.

Where the first mate had been quite satisfactory for the release of my inhibitions, the captain’s cocking was divine. All of this had been in that Valentine’s Day note from Wade. I was just following a preordained script.

Wade certainly had guessed right about this cruise. I wasn’t going to return to Baltimore as a reluctant virgin.

I embarrassed myself by begging for the fucking and riding the first officer’s cock again entirely under my own power when the captain had ejaculated and left us, wishing us both a happy Christmas. I couldn’t gainsay him on that. Now that I’d actually done it, I was insatiable. I regretted the captain’s departure. One cock was hardly enough.

I woke up in the first officer’s bunk and listening to him taking a shower and happily singing a Christmas carol in what he said, when he came back into the cabin, was his mother tongue, Welsh.

“Here, drink this,” he said, offering me a glass filled with a cloudy liquid. “This will take away that hangover of yours and put you in a Christmas mood.”

His idea of a Christmas mood and mine were two entirely different concepts. The drink made me groggy again and took control of my reason entirely away from me. I grabbed for his hips, pulled him to me, and sucked on his cock until, laughing, he agreed to fuck me again.

After we’d both showered, the first mate carried me, naked, up to the pool deck. He laid me down on my back on the diving board and called out cheerily that I was free for the taking—a Christmas present for all interested takers. A succession of men—too many for me to count, even if I’d been sober and in control—took advantage of the offer.

I had enough control of my faculties—but just barely—to realize that I enjoyed each and every fucking.

The next time I was aware enough to put two thoughts together beyond how much I liked having a man’s cock churning inside me, I once again was in a cabin. This time it was a suite, dominated by a king-sized bed. I was laying on my back on the bed, naked, but I had been bathed.

“Are you back in the land of the living?”

The voice was that of Magnus. I felt comforted and safe. His voice alone was enough to make me melt to him.

“Oh, god,” I murmured. “I’m so ashamed. I would never . . .”

“I know. It was the drink—and, I dare say, something that someone was putting in your drinks. Don’t think of it. Just try to forget.”

He was sitting in a club chair not far from the bed. He was wrapped in a blue dressing gown, and, like the previous afternoon in the lounge, he was smoking a cigarette and holding a snifter of brandy in his hand. Also like the previous afternoon, he looked elegant even though he was in a dressing gown rather than a tux.

“It wasn’t all bad, though,” I said in a low voice, at length. I seemed to be addicted to acknowledging the truth to Magnus.

“Your hopeful lover’s wishes are fulfilled then? You have learned that you enjoy sex from men?”

“Yes,” I answered, once again surprised that I could be so honest with him. “From some more than others, though.”

“Oh. Some of the men at the swimming pool were quite young and muscular. I’m sure you must have enjoyed them.”

“Surprisingly, yes. But if I had to choose, I think the captain was best. Older, more mature, more experienced men are better, I think.”

“The man who sent you on this cruise is such an older man?”

“Yes.”

“So, you are likely to welcome his advances now?”

“Probably. Yes. I didn’t know how pleasurable it could be.”

“There is something I didn’t tell you yesterday,” he said at length. “The reason, I think, that I asked you to come sit with me yesterday, why I spoke with you so openly is . . .”

He seemed to be struggling to say it. So I said it for him, having already seen the photographs he had on the nightstand. “It’s because I look like your Chad, isn’t it?”

“Yes, like he looked twenty years ago when we first coupled.”

“Tell me. When you made love, did you . . . or he . . . ?”

“I made love to him. I was the top.”

“Do you miss it?”

“Oh, god, yes. It’s only been a few months, but I ache for it.”

“Can you stand and let your dressing gown drop and let me see you? All of you?”

“Are you . . . ?”

“Yes, I’m serious. I’ve said I liked mature men best. It’s Christmas. Time for giving and receiving presents.”

He was everything I could wish for. And he was hard. I turned to the edge of the bed and opened my legs to him. As he moved between my thighs, I took his cock in my hands and pulled him inside me. He sighed and I gasped, wrapping my legs around his waist to hold him inside me as deep as possible, as he began to caress every nook and cranny of my channel with his expert cock in a slow, masterful fuck.

* * * *

Wade LaPage stood at the dock in Baltimore, his eyes anxiously scanning all of the passengers, most of them marked off in closely embracing couples, as they walked down the gangplank from the Bermuda gay cruise party ship.

After a couple of hours, the departees thinned out and the crew began to leave the ship.

One sweet, mincing late-departing trick gave Wade a flutter of his eyelashes and a seductive smile as he passed close to him.

When the first officer hit the dockside from the gang plank, LaPage walked swiftly over to him.

“Has it worked?”

“Yes, by Christmas Day, your young friend was fucking like a bunny. Couldn’t get enough of it. He’s a great fuck too, I’ll tell you. I can see why you invested the money and effort into him. But I think I gave you value for your money for my part in breaking him down.”

“And no doubt you took him first,” LaPage said with a snort.

The first mate grinned, telling LaPage everything he needed to know about that. “Yes, and third and fourth, as I remember. And he wanted it bad. Before the night was out he was riding my cock and telling me he couldn’t get enough.”

LaPage scowled, this being just a bit more than he wanted to hear. “I haven’t seen him come off the ship, though. Do you know where he is?”

It was the first mate’s turn to scowl, and he turned away as if he was going to walk off without answering.

But LaPage grabbed at his shirt sleeve. “Is he still aboard?”

“No,” the first mate answered. “He got off in Bermuda with the British movie star, Magnus Brooks. And he didn’t get back on before we sailed. If you want him, I guess you’ll have to go to Bermuda to get him.”

Wade LaPage was thinking about doing just that as he walked out toward the parking area. But when he reached the curb, he saw the cute young trick he’d seen mince off the ship while he was waiting for his art student to appear. He sauntered up beside the young man.

“Are you waiting for a taxi?”

“Yeah, but, fuck all, I got off the ship late. It may be hours before any get back here.”

“So, you are in a hurry to get somewhere?”

The young man stood back and looked Wade up and down and then smiled. “Not particularly.”

“I could give you a ride, if you like.”

“What sort of ride?” the young man asked saucily.

“I’ll give you $100 for a fuck and then I’ll drive you anywhere you want to go. For another $100, I’ll take you home for the night. Then we can talk about what sort of ride. You will enjoy it.”

“Well, Merry Christmas to you too. So, where’s your car?” the young man asked.