I Met a Man

"The Israeli paid you extra, didn't he?" I growled.

"That is none of your business," Mehmet said. The warning in his eyes stopped me dead.

I turned and moved as far as the still-open door. Now the cot in that room was adding its raspy tune to the concerto of the courtyard. Tabib was on his back, his arms akimbo and his face turned toward the door. His eyes were glazed over and the position of his body showed that he was totally spent. The Israeli was standing on the floor, between Tabib's spread legs, pushing off on the balls of his feet, his cock now slow-fucking Tabib's ass, coming out all of the way and sinking in to the hilt again and twisting this way and that way before pulling back out. The Israeli was holding Tabib's thin, but well-shaped legs up and spread wide with hands wrapped around the youth's ankles. Tabib was still wearing one sneaker, which attested to how little time the Israeli had initially given him to accommodate the assault of that thick cock of his. Tabib's butt cheeks were a rosy red and there were savage bite marks on his torso and an angry red welt around his neck. Two spent condoms littered the dirt floor of the room and a fourth and fifth, unopened packet lay on the cot beside Tabib's trembling body. Five condoms, 100 lira, five ejaculations by the one paying. That was the going rate. The Israeli was barely half finished with Tabib.

I stood there, poised, ready to intervene at any signal at all from Tabib, but the Italian brought me out of my intense stupor.

"Please. Come back into the room," he whispered in a wheedling voice. He was holding up forty more lira.

And Mehmet was still standing there, warning me with his eyes that it was not my place to intervene.

"Sorry," I muttered to the Italian. "Not tonight. No more tonight. There should be someone waiting for me in the café."

There was a look of disappointment in Luigi's eyes, but Mehmet cleared his throat, and I saw the Italian's expression turn to pleasure and speculation as his eyes went to Mehmet's crotch and saw that the Turk had his piece out and was displaying the magnificence of a gigantic, ready tool.

When I walked back through the arch and under the spreading limbs of the Tree of Idleness I saw that I, indeed, had someone waiting for me—although he didn't know he was.

I recognized the American immediately. Layla had said he claimed to be seriously ill. I couldn't tell that from his build. He was a handsome, athletic blond, straight out of the pages of the American men's fashion magazines that Nazim liked to buy up in Lefkosa to jack off to. But there was a drawn look about his face, a look of defeat and utter sadness.

Layla had told me that it was a look that I would want to fuck away—and, in an instant, I understood exactly what she had meant. I felt an immediate need to meet his need.

"Hello, American," I said as I eased myself down in the chair beside him at the table. He was looking at my bare chest, and I knew that look. I knew he was a man who would take a cock. Layla had told me that as well. Layla didn't like renting the Durrell villa to a man who didn't take a cock, and she had an uncanny awareness of just who to rent to.

"Yes, I'm an American," he said, a bit flustered. ". . . but how . . .?"

"And your name is Clifford," I said, and then I grinned.

"Now you do have me at a disadvantage," he replied. He was smiling, but there was confusion in his smile. And I felt he was becoming more reserved.

"I hope that will be the case," I said. But then I rushed on. "The woman who rented you the villa. Layla. She told me to come here for you."

"Layla? Come here for me?"

"I'm sorry, I'm not that good with English. And sometimes I am too, what do you say, straightforward."

"Your English is fine," the American said. "Quite fine," he repeated. But I somehow thought, from the trembling of his hand, that he was talking about something other than my language skills. He was tense, nervous, and fidgety, like a thoroughbred horse. His nostrils were flaring. I knew he was interested—that he wanted me. But I also knew that he was struggling with himself.

"Layla told me that you needed a companion, someone who could help you at the villa," I said.

"I told Ms. Ergun that I wanted someone a couple of days a week, and she convinced me I didn't need anyone," he said frowning. "But . . . ," he hesitated, not wanting to make waves. Yes, he was very high strung, I thought. Stretched tight as violin strings. Needing to be loosened up—set free of something, something I could not name yet.

"Layla is responsible for the villa," I said, trying to keep my voice neutral and composed, trying to calm down this thoroughbred. Layla had told me that he might be worth the effort, and I could see that he was. My cock was already throbbing at the anticipation of him. "She wants your stay to be pleasant, and she wants the villa to be well taken care of. Surely you can understand that."

"Yes, yes, I guess I can," he conceded with a sigh. "So, do you know of someone who can clean the house for me?"

"Yes. Yes, I do," I answered. "Layla says that it will cost you 200 lira a week."

"That sounds quite reasonable," the American said.

"And that I will live in."

"Live in?" he asked.

"Yes, live in. I will be keeping house for you, so I will live in," I said.

"You?" he said, just now having caught that nuance in what I had said. "But . . ."

"Yes," and then, while he was still silent but wide eyed. "And I will be tending to your every need. Your every need." I reached over and touched the forearm he had lying on the top of the table with my fingers, brush the hairs of his arm there. I'm sure he understood my meaning. Any man who was touched thusly would understand.

I expected an explosion at that point, but he merely lowered his eyes to where he was looking at his forearm on table top, not at me. But he had to hold one hand in the other on top of the table to keep them from trembling uncontrollably.

"Come, we go to the villa now," I said, as I stood, the hardness of me inside the crotch of my jeans at his eye level, unavoidably evident when he turned his head in that direction, which he did. He was only inches from my crotch. He could smell the manliness of me, I am sure. "We go home now."

I took his hand in mine and guided him up from the table with the other hand in the small of his back. He seemed so fragile now, his manner belied by his athletic build. Whatever he thought was consuming him must be doing so quickly from the inside, because, if I had not been told and if I had not seen it in his eyes, I would have thought he was in the prime of health.

When we had walked beyond the reach of the fairy lights in the spreading branches of the Tree of Idleness and up the narrow cobblestoned street—more of a worn path than a street—to the Durrell villa, Bitter Lemons, perched on the mountainside overlooking the Mediterranean coast of northern Cyprus, he moved about the few rooms in the villa, showing me this and that, avoiding eye contact with me as best he could.

"You need not show me more," I said, as we stood on the terrace beside the small pool and gazed down into the lights of the Girne castle harbor town. "I have serviced men here before."

"Serviced?" he asked, suddenly shaking with chill although the breeze coming up from the sea was quite warm.

"I have lived with men here before." I answered. "I'm sorry. I said I was straightforward. But I can't help that. I fuck men. And I'm told I do it well. The men who have lived in this villa before have wanted to be fucked. Does that repel you?"

A long silence, and then I just barely heard the "No. No, it doesn't repel me."

"It's late," I said, overriding him—but with a whisper rather than a shout. "I think it's time we turned in, don't you?"

"Yes."

Chapter Three: Erol

I waited for an hour, in the dark, in the little room off of the kitchen where I often stayed—at least in the beginning.

When I came to him, he was asleep, his breathing soft and regular. He was naked, on top of the sheets. And he was beautiful. Lightly, but perfectly muscled. Downy blond hair tufted around his nipples and descending in a thin line down his hard belly and into a soft, curly spread of pubic hair across his groin and around the base of a plump cock. If he was ill, as he had indicated, it certainly couldn't be seen when he was in repose as he now was.

He turned in his sleep, raising an arm above his head, and I saw a similar soft, curly tuft of hair in the pit of his arm. I couldn't resist. I sat down on the bed beside his waist and leaned over and pressed my nose up into his pit and breathed deeply. He smelled sweet and musky at the same time, and I flicked my tongue out and pleasured myself in his pit.

He sighed and turned on his side so that we were perfectly spooned as I lay down beside him and gathered his body into mine with my arms. Beams of lights from the terrace were bouncing off the pool into the room and reflecting on the slowly turning ceiling fan above us, bringing flickering and fleeting light and shadow to his torso, which I explored with my hands while he sighed and slowly, languidly writhed and, in moaning stages, awakened to my touch. He turned his head, and I took his lips in mine in a long, lingering kiss that set him gasping.

Then he surprised me—both in his action and his strength—as he turned and pushed me onto my back and suspended his body above mine, facing me, his elbows on either side of my torso and his legs encasing mine. He looked intently into my eyes, devouring my eyes with his, as he put his pelvis into motion and slowly started stroking his cock against mine. I heard another deep moan and was surprised to realize that it was mine, not his.

I took his butt cheeks in my hands and rubbed and rolled and parted them and slowly worked my fingers toward his hole from both sides. He was panting hard and lifted his head and let out a loud moan when I first entered him from either side with an index finger. He was still moving his hips, running his cock against mine, with both of us filling out and poking at each other's groins. He leaned his face down to my nipples, and I gasped and groaned under his attention there, while slowly digging deeper into his ass and opening his sweet channel to me.

He moved up straddling my hips and holding my dick to his hole.

"Wait," I said. "I brought . . ."

"No," He murmured. "Not unless you are afraid. I am clean, and it hardly matters to me if you are. I want to feel it is you—just you—inside me."

I lay back with a sigh as he impaled himself and descended on my dick. It was clear that he knew what he was doing—though he was tight and no expert in the fuck.

He fucked himself with my cock for nearly a half hour before his strength gave out, and then I turned him on his belly and straddled him and held his body close in mine and slow-fucked him to fully satisfying conclusion for both of us.

I dozed then, still embedded in him, and was awakened in the darkest of night to the sound of heavy rasping breathing.

"Am I hurting you?" I murmured in his ear.

"No, no, please stay inside me. No, You're not hurting me . . . it's just that . . . no, do not leave me."

Early the next morning, I was sitting in the kitchen, drinking coffee, with an exhausted Clifford still abed, when I heard the door knocker.

It was Nazim. I wasn't the least bit surprised that he knew I was here. There are no secrets in a Turkish Cypriot mountain town.

"Come. We will be late," Nazim chimed out. "The hotel will not build itself."

"It will rise without me," I answered. "I have another job now."

"Speaking of rising . . ." Nazim said with a big grin.

"Yes, he is a very nice fuck," I answered, matching grin for grin.

"Well, I have time for breakfast here before I leave. I will be back to check on whether you have changed your mind. If you walk off this job, the contractor may not be interested in hiring you again—and he may talk to the other contractors. You sometimes forget how small our community here is."

I stood at the door, naked, sipping coffee, while I watched Nazim saunter back down toward the Bellapais square, wiggling his ass with every step. Nazim was a very nice fuck too.

And for a moment I worried about Tabib and wondered where he was this morning. If he was all right.

Chapter Four: Clifford/Erol

Clifford

I lay there and could hear the sound of him moving about, I struggled for his name, Erol that was it, Erol. And there had been too much anticipation and fucking and not enough sleep the night before. I could feel it. I could feel the lack of energy, the aching tiredness.

I had been ready for something wild when he took me back to the villa, waiting for him to make his move and take me, but instead he had gone to bed as if it was his house, and I had been left like the visitor, to go to bed alone. What had become of the wild animal passion of the Turkish Cypriot men that Mark Amalfi had written about, I wondered. Was I no longer desirable? I was overwhelmed by anguish that the chance to let myself go had been missed, and tossed and turned sleeplessly.

But then he came to me in the night. I was so overcome by relief that I attacked him with a passion and let him fuck me repeatedly and came repeatedly. This was the fantasy I had come for, but now I wished he'd leave.

I had never had anyone I'd had sex with living with me, not after Cash, back in the beginning. I wrote better in solitude, and when I needed sex so badly that I went looking for it, I had preferred going to somewhere anonymous. And if we went home, it was always his place, unless he didn't have one. That was what I had striven for all these years, anonymity in sex. Solitude to write. Why? Too many reasons.

I didn't want this man, this Erol, living with me in my house. He would disturb me. I wouldn't be able to write, I knew. And I lay there, wishing he'd leave, wondering why I had ever accepted his offer to look after the villa for me. Why I'd ever let him come home with me last night. Why I'd let him into my bed—let him possess my body to exhaustion. Why I had been so wanton in pulling him into me.

But last night I had been full of some wild romantic fantasy that I could be someone else—Mark Amalfi perhaps, or any one of a dozen other wildly promiscuous men I had met in my life. But feeling the way I did now, I knew that I could never be like them. I was myself and didn't have enough time or energy to become someone else. Life was too short and too precious to be wasted feeling the way I did now. Feeling death tugging at me, dragging me away from life. And in the cold light of morning I also wondered what was so romantic about a dirty Turkish peasant with chipped dirty nails and dirt in the crease of his neck, who spoke halting English and didn't know how to do anything but fuck. And he was noisy. I could hear him moving about, and the radio on. Noise. Noise. Noise. Where I wanted quiet.

Someone had come to the house for him, and I heard voices. For a moment I was hopeful they'd leave together, Erol and the visitor. But then I heard laughter and the sound of the door to the street being closed, and footsteps, and he was there in the room. I could feel him invading my space, taking away my privacy, and I lay, pretending to sleep, until he was gone.

But I had to have my medication, and that was in the kitchen. And I had to eat. And I wanted to start writing again, to continue what I had begun the afternoon before. I'd have to tell him to leave. I'd done it before. It might be unpleasant for a few minutes, but he had to go. I needed solitude; I always had needed it.

I struggled up and threw on shorts and a T-shirt and pulled myself together and tried to walk out to the kitchen as if I was feeling well. When I got there, there he was, naked, his meaty cock swaying, his balls full and hanging low, the dark hair seeming to bust out of his skin in glossy lush expanses on his chest and down his belly to his profuse bush. And when he saw me, he walked toward me, arms outstretched and welcoming. But still with dirty chipped fingernails and that line of dirt filling the big crease on his neck.

"No," I said, pushing him away, "you need a wash, and . . . get dressed," I said, repelled now by what had so aroused me the previous night—the animal nature of him. The raw masculine physicality. I headed straight to the fridge, finding it empty still, remembering I had not bought any food the evening before, eating instead at the café. I got my pills and a glass of water and hurried unsteadily back to the bedroom, searching for the rest of the chocolate bar and swallowing it all in big gulps.

I wanted to be alone and I wanted order in my life. And clean, I liked things clean, and I needed proper food. I could be moody too, I knew—the drugs, my illness, all of it. Exhaustion.

* * * *

Erol

I could have torn him in two if I had wanted to—or if I hadn't been in shock at the change in him. He'd been all passion last night. He wanted me and he was ripe for the fucking; he'd actually started the fucking. He came again and again, like he hadn't had a man like me in years. And I bet he hadn't had a man like me in years.

Dirty and unwashed. That was what he called me this morning. My cum was good enough for him to swallow last night, but this morning I was too dirty for him. And then he'd hustled me out of the villa and shut the heavy old wooden door with a slam of finality that made me want to turn and hammer on it until it fell down, after which I'd search him out and teach him how a dirty, unwashed man could fuck.

The sound of the dry laugh was the last straw. I turned to see Nazim lounging against the hood of the American's convertible, a mocking smile on his face.

"Turned you out, did he?" Nazim almost sang in a teasing tone. "I heard him say you were too dirty for him. Too good for us Turks at the café and too dirty for the American in the fancy-boy villa. Poor Erol; caught between two worlds."

My bellow could be heard down in the square, as I let all of my fury and frustration and embarrassment take complete control of me.

I heard the clunk of Nazim's head on the top edge of the passenger door and the pained "ooff" he exhaled when his hip came down hard on the steering wheel, as I charged at him and pushed him over into the front seat of the convertible. He was dazed, and I saw a small smear of blood on the edge of the door where his head had hit, after I jerked the driver's door open and ripped off his jeans as his legs fell out of the door. It only took me a couple of seconds to unbutton my own jeans and peel them down to my knees, and then I was lifting and spreading Nazim's legs, hooking the heel of one of his feet on top of the windshield and lifting the other over the top of the driver's seat.

And then I was showing Nazim who was a man, unwashed or not. I was man enough for Nazim, and I was man enough for the American.

I fucked Nazim with pent-up fury, and when he came out of his daze, he arched his back and cried out for the fuck. I gave it to him hard. And that's what he wanted. That's what Nazim always wanted. But he had to make me mad to get me to give him what he wanted. That wasn't me. That wasn't the real me.

But today Nazim got exactly what he wanted.

Afterward, while I was nuzzling his neck and apologizing to him for the gash on the back of his head, he begged me to take him again—and hard again.

"But maybe not in the American's car," he said. And then he laughed. "We've gotten blood and cum on his upholstery. Do you think he won't want the car anymore because it's dirty?"

I knew Nazim was baiting me—trying to get me in the mood for a nasty fuck again, but all of the anger was drained out of me now. And, having come back to my center, I remembered that Layla had warned me that the American was skittish and seemed to be fighting with himself on what he really wanted—but that she had a premonition about the American and me and that I should not give up easily.