Kept Men

The first thing after breakfast of my first day in Asheville, we were out in his carriage, with him taking me to his tailor to be outfitted in clothes expected of a successful young kept lawyer in Asheville. From there we went to his golf and tennis club, where he sponsored me for membership. Then we drove to his favorite luncheon restaurant for a noon meal at his expense. And finally to the apartment on Carolina Lane, the next street over from the firm's offices on North Lexington, that he proudly said he was paying for and where I would be living. I could have covered all of this easily myself, from my family income that nicely supplemented my law firm salary, but Holloway wanted to make clear that all of this--and I--were being kept by him.

I don't know what the word would be for the male mistress of a man, but that's what Holloway, who was married and had a family, wanted me to be. He wanted a mistress. But he wanted the mistress to be a young man who dressed as a woman for him during sex and who liked to have his nipples sucked and was willing to do that for Holloway, in turn.

I quickly understood that this had been Harry's apartment before it was mine. The location was obvious too. The building was small, with only six apartments on three floors, mine being on the middle floor. It fronted on Carolina Lane, but it backed on a deserted walkway between it and the back of the lots on North Lexington. There was a secluded entrance into the apartment house in the back. Immediately behind the apartment house, fronting on North Lexington, were the law offices of Collins, Bagwell, and Holloway. As there were gates between the rear-yard enclosures of the two properties, this gave Calvin Holloway private access to my apartment. He frequently used this access during ensuing months for an extended noonday tryst, having sent me out on errands beforehand, to enter the apartment house from the front, and prepare for him, and await him in my apartment--our trysting nest.

I also knew this had been Harry's apartment and what he'd done here because its furnishings included a closet containing women's lingerie in a young man's size--large enough to fit me. I didn't have to buy anything to be what Holloway wanted from me. It was all here already.

That first day when Holloway showed me the apartment after our shopping spree and lunch at his favorite noontime restaurant, and having discovered that my luggage had already been placed in the apartment, he selected a black, lacy bra, panties, and negligee combination from the closet, had me slip them on and parade for him in the bedroom, and then fucked me through the afternoon on the bed.

He took me to his club--our club now--on the slopes of Town Mountain, near the Grove Park Inn and overlooking the city, for supper, showing me off as his new boy. The club obviously was for likeminded men to him as we were welcomed and treated as a natural couple. It was clear that Holloway's fetishes weren't seen as unnatural here. The club had accommodations and he wanted to show me all that the club membership offered, so after sitting with him and a couple of other male members of his set and age in a smoking room afterward, enjoying port and watching men play billiards, the three took me to a club bedroom, I once more slipped into a silky slip, and the three of them fucked me on the bed, one after the other, as the other two watched and gave instruction and encouragement. Holloway's fetishes included voyeurism and gang banging. So far, I was good with this, looking forward to having more spice in my life than I'd previously gotten.

The others in the law branch office were polite and welcoming enough when I started work there. They showed me the deference of being the senior partner's assistant and of having been brought in to smooth over the cultural differences of the client being from the North, from New York City, while those representing him being fully entrenched in the South and in southern culture. I was there, with experience in both worlds, to breach the divide between them. But they knew. It was obvious that they knew that I also was Calvin Holloway's kept man, and I'm sure they knew that Holloway practiced sexual kinks.

I didn't know if they had any specific idea what Holloway's fetishes were, and I wasn't about to give any hints about that. I didn't even confirm that I was gay or that I was Holloway's kept young man.

There were a few other young men on staff who obviously were of the same preference as I was and, being of an age and interests close to mine, would have been natural intimate companions. But they all stood off, recognizing that I was owned and that my owner had the power of livelihood over all of them. And I didn't do any big reveal with any of them either. They were all submissives, like me.

Everything in the office was done to accommodate Calvin Holloway's wishes and preferences. I was sure that occasionally he went off with one of the other young men in the office--there were very few women working there, and that young men of a certain preference worked there was directly connected with Holloway's interests--but he only regularly was with me, and I suspected that his fetishes only clicked in with me. None of the other men who went with him came back in the shock of discovering what he liked best. I was sure that some knew why we were both away during long lunches and what we were doing, but it was never alluded to in the office.

I had only been in the office for a couple of weeks before George Vanderbilt, bringing his own entourage, including an architect representing the chief architect for Biltmore, Richard Morris Hunt, arrived from New York on an inspection tour of the house construction, which was beginning to take shape. My intended role was to remain in the background, observing and listening, and then to give Holloway my impressions of Vanderbilt's reactions and comments later, in private. But it wasn't long before Vanderbilt saw me sitting in the back benches and brought me forward.

"Benton Barkley? Is that a New England accent I hear in your introduction? Any relationship to Bradley Barkley?"

"Yes, sir, he's my father."

After that I was brought up to the table, and although I continued to hold as close to the brief Holloway had given me as possible, I was being placed more in the forefront, and my relationship with Holloway was adjusted ever so slightly, but still significantly. I no long was completely his, beholding only to him. Vanderbilt took a shine to me, as did the architect he had brought, Ronald Carlson, and now I was there as much because Vanderbilt wanted me there as that Holloway did. Holloway could hardly complain. It was why they had brought me in--for the ability to relate to Vanderbilt and those who came from New York with him. The unforeseen wrinkle was that I already had social connections to the Vanderbilts. The saving grace was that Vanderbilt had no sexual interest in men--including me--at all.

The change was slight, but it was significant, and it led to a touch of reservation in bed. Almost as soon as my position as a wholly kept young man had begun, the edge was coming off it. Holloway still visited and bedded me, but he turned increasingly to other young men in the firm as well and he never again, after that first night, shared me with other members of our club. I knew that full control was important to him, so I also knew that my life in Asheville now hinged on how often Vanderbilt would visit and need aid from a local law firm. There was no hint that the connection with Vanderbilt would be a sexual one, though, which simplified that matter significantly.

Of course, when I thought about it, a favorable connection with Vanderbilt was what my whole association with the law firm of Collins, Bagwell, and Holloway had always hinged on. Holloway was just using me sexually; there was no real affection between us.

* * * *

I wasn't the only one in my apartment house being kept. The young woman in the apartment across the landing from me, an actress at the semiprofessional stage theater nearby on Broadway Street, named Sally Ames, frequently had a middle-aged man visit her apartment, using the rear entrance as Holloway did. I presumed this meant he was paying for her and the apartment. She was a beautiful young woman who I met and talked with on the stairs occasionally. I found she was working at the Broadway Street Theater and she learned that I had studied creative writing at Yale in preparation for law school and aspired to be a playwright. I'd written some plays, I showed scripts to her at her request, and she was showing them to the theater ensemble as possible productions at the theater's annual local playwrights festival.

I knew why the man visited her because the way our apartments were configured my bathroom window looked into her bedroom. He was a gross-featured, heavy-set man and she had a great figure, which made a sight of him bending her over the bed and fucking her from behind while he manipulated her breasts with his hands seem a little sordid and sad. She always had a stoic expression on her face as he slowly banged her from in back, so I don't think she was doing that from love. That's why I assumed the man was paying for the apartment. I compared this in my mind with the arrangement between Holloway and me, but I assured myself that I enjoyed Holloway's attentions as well as having him pay for the apartment. He certainly was in better shape than the man who visited Sally Ames in her bedroom.

She held Bohemian parties that I could tell by the sounds coming out of her apartment were quite open, and it was natural that she would invite me to them and that some evening when I knew Calvin Holloway would not show up unexpectedly because he and his wife were hosting a dinner party, I accepted an invitation.

The party, indeed, was open and sensual. Everyone there was young and Bohemian, drinking and smoking and loving each other up. They were all artists in some way or other and rebelling against the strictures of society. They were all flamboyantly dressed to the extent that they were dressed at all. The group was predominated by people from the Broadway Street Theater, but there also were some artists there, some wealthy young people of no particular calling other than hedonism, and more than one musician.

The middle-aged man who visited Sally's bedroom never attended one of these parties as far as I could discern.

As the evening progressed to the sound of flutes and a saxophone and the buzz of conversation that ran the gambit from high art to low intentions, the attendees willowed down to those intending to move into the sexual. Sally was lying on a sofa, her skirts bunched up to her waist, smoking and looking languidly at a pair on the carpet in front of the sofa, where a young woman with alabaster skin and Asian features was being fucked by an Italian sous chef from one of the city's fancier restaurants. Sally herself was being fucked, initially by his fingers and eventually the whole shaft, by an ebony poet.

I had been making eye contact all evening with a theater friend of Sally's, a dusky man of no more than twenty-one who was achingly handsome. Sally had introduced me to him after she had made an unsuccessful pass at me and had fondled me through the material of my trousers without the response she was seeking. She merely laughed and said that, although it was a waste of perfect man, it was fine--that there were plenty of men for both of us at the party. Sally told me he was a young actor at the Broadway Street Theater, a mulatto, black father and white mother, named Jacques Franklin.

I knew I should have left before the open sexuality descended on the party, but I couldn't bring myself to do so. I was much too much interested in Jacques Franklin. And he obviously was interested in me. All of the others remaining had paired off--in one instance in a two males and one female threesome--when Jacques, slouching on a loveseat, caught my attention and waved me over. He had stripped off his shirt some time ago, exhibiting a magnificent chocolate, brown, muscular chest. But now he'd unbuttoned and flare his trousers and had the biggest, blackest cock I'd ever seen out and was stroking it into an erection. He gave me that "come here" look.

The shaft was mesmerizing. I'd never seen anything as big and black as that before. It and his plump balls were darker than the tone of the rest of his body. He was uncut. When he pulled the foreskin back, which he did to gain my interest, the bulb proved to be a huge, purple mushroom cap. He knew he had caught and captured my attention with it, and he wagged it at me, stroked it, and beckoned for me to join him.

"Come here," he said, looking directly at me, and everyone around us hazed off into the background. I was just the two of us in the room in my mind. "Come to me on your knees."

I went on my knees, crawled to him, took the shaft in my hands and mouth, and worshipped it.

"Come up here and sit on it. Fuck yourself on it," he murmured to me.

"Not here," I responded, my voice thick with lust, and suddenly aware that we were not, in fact, alone in the room. "My apartment is across the landing."

"Even better," he said.

Across the hall, in my apartment, both of us naked, both of us body beautiful, Jacques younger than me, a novelty in my experience, he sat at the foot of the bed, and I crouched over him in his lap, facing him, rising and falling, with glorious difficulty considering the size of him, on that big, black cock of his. Through the night, he took me in one position after the other, possessing me with his enormous black shaft, filling me with his cum. At no time did I have to dress or act like a woman for him.

In the morning, as I was lying on the bed, unable to rise or close my legs and as he was dressing, he said, "Could you give me money for a cab?"

"How much do you need?" I asked.

"Twenty dollars would do it," he said. I knew he didn't need a cab and I knew a cab wouldn't cost him twenty dollars to go anywhere in Asheville. I knew what he was asking for, what he was establishing. And I didn't care. He was worth it. That big, black cock of his was worth it.

"No problem. My billfold is there on the bureau. Take Twenty dollars."

There was more than twenty dollars in the billfold. He counted out two tens and stopped, looking at me. "Will we do this again?" he asked.

"I want to, yes," I answered. I watched him fan out more bills from my wallet and look at me expectantly.

"Take it all. Everything in the wallet," I said. He smiled and did so.

"Tonight?" he asked.

"Yes, please." I knew the Holloways had houseguests and that I could safely count on him being occupied for another night.

"And right now, again," I added. Smiling, he stripped off again, mounted the bed, stroking his magnificent black cock into erection against, mounted, penetrated, and began fucking me again in the missionary position. I lay back in complete surrender, back arched and pelvis elevated, luxuriating in being stretched and owned by a big, black bull.

Lying there in his arms, torso reclining toward the bed, pelvis elevated over his, his shaft deep inside me and moving, as, his torso hovering over mine from the side, he looked down into my eyes, catching every nuiance of the caressing of my passage walls in the core with that big, purple mushroom cap of his. Did I own him or did he own me? It probably wasn't really a contest.

The next week I found time to go with Jaques to find new, better rooms for him in a nearby apartment house. I, of course, took over the rent. I could afford it. Holloway was fully keeping me and I had extra income anyway.

Now, in addition to being a kept man, I was keeping a young man myself.

The arrival of summer gave me increased opportunity to establish myself with Sally's Bohemian artists crowd, to spend more time with Jacques, and to enhance my connection with the Broadway Street Theater as they worked with me to include one of my plays in their local playwrights festival. The Vanderbilts were doing a European tour, so I had little to do with that account over the summer other than watch their palace being built and outfitted. The Holloways were taking advantage of the absence of the Vanderbilts by doing Europe as well. That kept me out of negligees and out of Calvin's clutches. He continued paying my rent, though, so he was still keeping me.

The relationship with Jacques wasn't solid, as I knew he was fucking other men--and women--as well, but he was still accepting my apartment payments, so he was still my kept man. And as long as he kept pulling out that black snake of his and letting me worship it...

He still had that magnificent black cock of his, and he still knew how to use it.

I was just floating along--being kept and keeping.

* * * *

"Do you, by chance, play tennis? These tedious meetings have me cramped up and in the need of exercise. The club I'm staying at has tennis courts and I would dearly love to find someone to help me unwind. You look like a tennis player. You look athletic."

"Yes, I play tennis," I said to Ronald Carlson, down from New York for intensive meetings on the interior architecture of Biltmore in advance of George Vanderbilt's return from Europe. Everyone anticipated he'd want to come almost directly to Asheville to see the progress on the construction of his southern castle. The Holloways were still in Europe, as well. I had been assigned to guide Carlson around on his previous inspection tour, and that hadn't been a chore. We were coming out of our first round of meetings on the construction progress. He was in his late forties, but he was an extremely handsome and fit man. We had hit it off quite well. "I play most often on clay, though, I said, so--"

"Some of the courts at the club I'm staying at are clay. They are actually easier to sign up for on short notice."

"Oh, they are clay at my club too," I answered. And that's when I discovered that it was my club--the club for men who enjoyed the intimate company of men--that Carlson was booked at for his Asheville stay.

"Oh, you're staying there," I said. "I presume you know--"

"What kind of club it is? Yes, of course," Carlson said, with a smile. "I found out from Cal Holloway where I would be comfortable staying. I know he's a member of that club. I know you are, as well. You can relax. I know about you and Holloway, and I have no problem with that. I go with men too. And, like Holloway, I enjoy covering young men. Holloway tells me he covers you and that you are well worth the experience." The smile remained on his face and he reached out and touched my forearm.

Oh. That was explicit enough.

"Does that disturb you--that I know? Am I being too forward?"

"No, not at all," I said. "No, to both. I'm relieved to know."

"Is there any chance that--?"

"Yes, every chance," I said, interrupting him, wanting him to know that I wouldn't have any reservations.

"Would you like to come to the club and play with me... tennis?" he asked.

I realized then how smitten I'd become with him and had looked forward to his visits. "Yes. Yes, I would very much like that," I answered. "Shall we?"

We did play tennis, watching each other more than the ball, going bare-chested when we got heated up, which we only could have done at this club, and getting heated up more by watching each other play bare-chested. We fucked in his room at the club. There was no question that he would be dominant and I the submissive. That saved a lot of possible awkwardness.

When he came out of the bathroom from his before-sex shower, naked and swinging free, I gasped, and, looking down, he shrugged and laughed. "I should have told you. I'm what is called an octoroon--three white grandparents and one black one. A particularly well-endowed one. It was by chance that the fourth one could dominate in this department. I forgot that this is the South. I hope the size or color don't put you off."