Love on the Edge Pt. 01

This is the second story in the series 'Love in a Limestone Landscape'. It is not necessary to have read the first story to appreciate this one.

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Alec set up his easel by the limestone wall. Before him a field of stubble fell away gently to the white and grey farmhouse, which formed one side of a yard of which a barn, stables and a cattle-shed comprised the other three. Behind the house rose a long slope of woodland, composed mainly of oaks, ash and beech. Pasture, dotted with large horse-chestnut trees, ran down to the right of the buildings to a stream. A few cattle moved slowly across the grass, which was beginning to yellow in the heat of the August sun. Beyond the stream wheat was being reaped in the great field which stretched to a copse on the horizon.

He concentrated on the farm buildings. He saw something timeless and deeply rooted in the soil in the simple solidity of their shapes, as though they grew out of the land itself. Indeed, if he turned his head, the lip of the quarry from which their stone had come was just visible away to the left but, in the three hundred years since the house was built, nature had reclaimed the scar and all but obliterated it in scrub and trees.

A man strode across the farmyard into the barn. Alec heard the sound of a petrol engine starting up and a moment later the man re-emerged sitting on a quad bike. He drove up the track, below which Alec was sitting, and reappeared a few minutes later in the wheat field. Alec had merely registered the existence of the man with one part of his brain whilst his conscious mind continued to scrutinise the subject in front of him.

Today he was painting in oils on a small board set into the lid of his paint box. He had roughed in the fields and the buildings and was now catching the light and shadow which defined the square of the courtyard but, as he worked, the sun passed its zenith and, from Alec's vantage point, the courtyard was becoming flattened out by the light. He stopped and swore gently to himself.

'You need to come up first thing if you want a few hours with the light on the right-hand side of the courtyard,' said a voice. The man on the bike was back and had stopped behind Alec, who had been so absorbed in his subject he hadn't noticed the sound of the bike returning or of the engine being cut off.

'You're right,' he said. 'I'll come back tomorrow and just hope the light's the same.'

'The weather should be, so perhaps the light will be too.' The man smiled awkwardly, as though it wasn't something he did often, though he appeared friendly enough. 'Actually, you might find the buildings inside the courtyard a good subject. Would you like to come down and see?'

'Thank you. Will my tackle be alright here?'

'We're an honest lot on the whole, but you never know. Put it in the trailer and I'll take you down on the bike.'

As Alec clung to the man he realised that he had the sort of muscular torso Michelangelo would have loved to sculpt. By the time they reached the farmhouse Alec's cock was beginning to be uncomfortable in his trousers and he was glad to get off the bike and surreptitiously rearrange himself.

They looked around the courtyard. The large, simple shapes of the buildings and the stone of which they were composed, made a really satisfying series of subjects. Alec turned to the man and said, 'You're absolutely right. I could really do something there and there and there.' He pointed to three groupings of buildings. 'May I spend a few days coming here each day? I'll try not to get in anybody's way.'

The man smiled fully this time.

'That's good,' he said. 'When we start bringing the straw in you might get a bale on your head if you don't watch out, but the lads know what they're doing. I'm going to make a pot of tea. Would you like some? My names Mike, by the way, Mike Standedge.'

'Alec Stonegate. Yes, please.'

Alec sat drinking his tea at the kitchen table. It was large, clearly very old, made of oak, probably from a tree which once grew nearby, and scrubbed to a silvery whiteness, reflecting light back towards the two big windows which illuminated the room with a clear northern light.

Alec said, 'This doesn't look like any farm kitchen I've seen before. Those windows must be new, aren't they?'

'They were put in by my father who was an amateur painter. This room doubled as his studio. It meant we only had to heat one large room during the winter.'

'This must have been a wonderful space for him to paint in. Steady northern light. Exactly what any painter wants.'

'I'm getting slow. Your name has just rung a bell with me. I saw your work in a mixed exhibition in London about two years ago. I was impressed.'

'You take an interest in art?'

'Born into it, so to speak. Come through into the sitting room.'

'Most of these were bought by my father before any of them were famous,' said Mike, gesturing towards the paintings and drawings which crowded the walls in the comfortable but, except for the works of art, cheerfully non-descript, room.

Alec moved around the room, stunned.

'You've got the history of English painting in the twentieth century on your walls.'

'Not all bought by my father; his father before him also collected and, in a small way, I've continued the tradition.'

'Have you any of your father's paintings on display? I'd like to see them.'

'I'm glad I asked,' thought Alec, 'Mike looks pleased. I just hope they aren't so awful that I can't be positive about them.'

It occurred to Alec that pleasing this man he had just met mattered to him greatly and he thought, 'Oh shit. I hope I'm not going to make a fool of myself.'

Mike took him into a small room containing bookshelves, a desk and two chairs, clearly Mike's study or office. The only patch of wall which wasn't books or window was occupied by a small oil study of a boy's head. Alec recognised that the boy was Mike and that it was an astonishingly fine piece of work.

He let out a sigh of relief. Mike smiled again and this time it was a broad grin. 'What would you have said if you thought it was crap?' he asked.

'I don't know but I wouldn't have lied. Painting matters to me too much to lie about it.'

Then he added, almost against his will and far too fast, 'And I wouldn't lie to you anyway.'

Mike let the remark go and Alec wasn't sure whether he was glad or sorry. Mike asked how Alec had got there and where he was staying. Alec replied that he was at the Rose and Crown in the next village, Hooton Weyland, and that he had hired the local taxi to drop him off and pick him up again about five.

'That gives you another four hours. My housekeeper has left lunch for me if you'd like to join me. Don't worry, there'll be plenty. She always makes enough to freeze some later,' he said, seeing Alec's hesitation. 'Then you could do some more work and I'll drop you off in Hooton on my way to a farmers' meeting about six. You can cancel the taxi.'

Lunch turned out to be a great pleasure to both of them. Ever since Alec had sat behind Mike on the bike and had locked his arms about the muscled back he could feel beneath Mike's cotton shirt, his sex had been aroused by this man. He wondered how old Mike was. Alec was realising that, whilst it was true that he fancied him, there was also another, more unusual dimension to his feelings. As they talked and as he, however slightly, began to know this man, he realised that he was falling in love with him.

For Mike's part he had entered a new world of experience. He had always accepted that he was gay and, at forty-five, he had had affairs, some of which had given him great satisfaction but, he now confessed to himself, he had never been wholeheartedly in love. He looked at this man who might have fallen out of the sky into his field, who sat at his table and ate his food, and was all the angels in heaven rolled into one slightly-built, blond-haired person, probably about ten years younger than himself. He felt lumberingly physical at the side of him and wondered if Alec could possibly reciprocate his feelings. He had noticed Alec's needing to rearrange his erection when they dismounted and hoped it wasn't simply the product of the movement of the bike.

They went their separate ways after lunch; Mike back to the reaping; Alec to making a series of pencil drawings of the subjects he intended to attempt in oils over the next few days. At half past five the two men packed Alec's gear into Mike's Land Rover and drove into the village. Mike said he would be returning about nine the next morning to do a bit of shopping and so he could pick Alec up at the pub and bring him back to the farm with his equipment. So they parted. That night, each man imagined their making love to one another and when they met each felt the stirrings of hope that something good might come out of the situation, although each also feared that he was reading into the other man his own desires and so was hoping too much of so slight an acquaintance. Yet each of them knew beyond doubt that his fate would be determined by this man he had just met.

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Alec was painting in the courtyard and had captured what he wanted for one of his pictures by the time Mike returned for lunch. Mike was sweating and his shirt clung to his torso, emphasising his magnificent pecs and abs. Alec's cock sprang to attention and he tried to hide it behind his palette. Mike noticed and he hummed a little tune to himself as he went to wash. When he came back he was wearing a fresh shirt which showed his body off to perfection. Alec goggled slightly and pulled himself together with difficulty to try to concentrate on the prospect of lunch, which Mike's housekeeper, Mrs Mundy, was putting on the table as he entered the kitchen.

'I'll be going now, Mike,' she said. 'You remember, it's Gordon's prize day at school this afternoon.'

'Of course, Lena. Have a good time and give my congratulations to Gordon. Tell him there's a big pike been seen up by the bridge and I'm saving it for him if he wants to come fishing with me on Saturday.'

Mike turned to Alec and said, 'Lena's son's won a place at Oxford for next year and he's going to get two school prizes today. We're all very proud of him in the village.'

Mrs Mundy blushed and made a mock frown. 'Don't you go giving the lad a big head. He's still a long way to go.'

She went out and Mike said to Alec, 'Lena and her husband are as pleased as Punch about the boy but praise tends to be a bit sparse at home for the lad so I try to make up for it when he comes here.'

Alec suddenly felt an overwhelming sense of liking for this big, gentle man. All his critical faculties died and he looked at Mike with simple, unadulterated love.

Mike stared across at him and said concernedly, 'What's the matter, Alec.' But, in the moment of asking, he knew the answer and his voice softened as he said the name of the man who now held his heart.

'I love you,' whispered Alec, looking as though he might faint.

'I love you too. I want to be your man. Will you be my woman.'

Alec couldn't reply for the emotion choking his voice. He stood as Mike came round the table and took him in his arms. Their lips met and within seconds they were undressing each other feverishly and stumbling up the stairs to Mike's bedroom. Mike's great hands were everywhere about Alec. Alec grasped Mike's pecs and took his nipples into his mouth. He descended, licking and sucking all the way to Mike's great cock. He held his balls in his hands and Mike let out a cry of longing and almost threw Alec onto his front on the bed as he ravished his pussy with his tongue. Alec now let out a high-pitched sigh and his pussy lips spasmed about Mike's tongue. Mike picked him up and laid him down on his back. He bent Alec's legs back and up until his pucker was again entirely exposed to Mike's entranced gaze, but this time it wasn't Mike's tongue which found entry. Mike positioned his cock at Alec's rosebud; he whispered, 'I want to fuck you so much it hurts.'

'Please fuck me. Fill me with your baby batter and make me pregnant. I want your babies inside me.'

Mike's cock pushed past Alec's sphincter, then further and further. Alec started to respond, his channel grasping the velvet and iron rod which plunged deeper and deeper until Mike's balls beat against Alec's buttocks. Then Mike started the real fucking, partially withdrawing only to plunge harder into Alec's newly created cunt. As Mike locked his lips on Alec's and his tongue explored Alec's mouth and the great battering ram of Mike 's cock did its work in Alec's cunt Alec knew that he was no longer the man who had come to the farm to paint. He had become a woman, a woman who owed her existence to the magic of Mike's expression of his love in the steam-hammer of his cock.

When Alec thought ecstasy had reached its climax, Mike started to come. He wept with joy as he spurted cum again and again into Alec's cunt and Alec found himself in a new world of sensation so extreme he almost lost consciousness.

Afterwards they lay panting together, kissing and murmuring their love to each other. At last Mike raised himself on one elbow and, gazing down on his beloved, said, 'We hardly know one another but will you trust me with your future and be my wife?'

A tear ran down Alec's cheek. He raised his hand to cup Mike's cheek and said, 'Of course, I will.'

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The next day, when Lena Mundy arrived, full of the previous day's happenings at her son's school, she found that Alec had moved into the farmhouse. Three days later Alec had to return to London but the two men had decided that Alec would tell his agent and his friends that from now on his address would be Standedge Farm, Hooton Weyland. They would keep Alec's flat as a base in London. His rented studio they would dispose of as soon as they could accommodate all his gear at the farm, which they would do by fashioning a new studio out of a group of north-facing outbuildings beyond the kitchen, so that the kitchen itself would continue to be Lena Mundy's domain.

'It's almost coming home, for me,' said Alec on that first morning they woke in the same bed together. 'I was born less than five miles away but I hadn't been back since my parents died ten years ago. Then, suddenly, a couple of months ago, I felt a longing to paint my home turf, so here I am.'

'So you were born and brought up on The Edge. I'm surprised I didn't know you,' said Mike, stroking Alec's hairless chest.

'I'm not,' replied Alec. 'My dad was a miner and we didn't mix with the gentry.'

'You're from Weylandswood? I should never have thought it. And I'm not gentry.'

'You are compared with us. You call it The Edge. We call it The Ridge, actually The Roman Ridge because of the great Roman road which still runs to the south of Weylandswood. I won a scholarship to one of the London art colleges and, unlike my contemporaries, I insisted on painting. They said I was hopelessly old fashioned and would never get anywhere, so I made up my mind to show them they were wrong. I mounted my own final year exhibition and invited all the major London gallery people. A few of them came out of curiosity to see this arrogant so-and-so's work and one of the grandees was so impressed he offered to represent me. I accepted and people started to buy. I've never looked back.'

Mike pulled back from the licking he had been giving Alec's right nipple and turned his eyes to his face.

'You look like a Botticelli angel but you're a tough little devil, aren't you?' he said.

'I have had to be, but actually all I've ever wanted is to be the wife of a loving, virile man.'

'Darling girl,' said Mike. 'When we're living together and we are just the two of us will you dress for me? Will you be my Anna?'

'I should like that,' said Alec. 'Actually, in London there is a little group of us, like-minded men, who meet at one another's flats or houses once a month as women. As my husband you could come with me.'

'You don't expect me to dress as well, I hope.'

'I'd hate it if you did. I want you to be my male chauvinist pig.'

'Good. I like pigs.' Mike slid his hand down to cup Alec's cock and balls. 'But I like my little girl's clitie even more,' he said.

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Their host and hostess lived in a large house looking down over the city from the heights of Hampstead Heath. Mr and Mrs Michael Standedge were greeted by their hostess, a tall, willowy woman, who could have passed anywhere except for the size of her hands and feet, which she disguised as far as possible by restricting her hand movements and wearing a floor length gown, which emphasised her glorious breasts and so directed anyone's immediate gaze away from the offending limbs.

'Darling.' She air-kissed Anna. 'So this is the new husband we're all agog about. I can see he's got something. Perhaps we'll find out what.' She held out her hand to Mike who responded by raising it to his lips briefly.

'And he knows how to treat a lady.'

'Darling, 'said Anna to her husband, 'This is our hostess, Jasmine Lister.' She turned to Jasmine to say, 'You can talk to him directly. He does understand English.'

Mike said, 'My wife told me what a lovely house you have and she didn't exaggerate. What a wonderful view.'

Before they had set out from Anna's flat she had told him a bit about the group they would be meeting. Although most of the womanly men were gay there were one or two regulars who loved to dress as women but who were essentially heterosexual. Their hostess was certainly not one of them but there didn't seem to be a husband around.

Mike had been interested to see the care his wife lavished on her dress and make-up and on ensuring that her husband looked his best. Clearly the opinion of this group mattered to her. 'Or is it,' he wondered, 'that she feels the need with this group to assert something about herself or about us?'

'Darling,' he had said, as he sat on their bed watching her applying her eye-shadow. She smudged it, swore and began again. 'I've never seen you so nervous before. What is it?'

He moved up to her so that he could kiss her neck and cup her delicate breasts in his hands.

'What's worrying my little girl? Tell Daddy.'

'I can't hide anything from you, can I? You just know, and we've only been together two months.'

'I know because I love you more than I ever expected to love anyone and I feel when you are tense as though the tension ran through my own body. Tell Daddy,' he repeated. Gently he nipped her ear lobe with his teeth.

Anna turned towards her husband. She laid her hands against his swelling pecs. 'I need this group to provide me with the company of women like myself. I am grateful to them because, before I met you, I should have been very lonely without them and there's one girl, Sonia, who has become a real friend, whom I want you to meet particularly, but...'

'Come on sweetheart, spit it out.'

'I feel with a number of them that I am constantly being judged and probably found inadequate as a woman.' She hung her head, embarrassed by her admission. Mike had never seen his wife like this. In her painting she was so certain of her worth and in their love-making she gave him the whole of herself, without reservation, which argued a degree of self-confidence.

He thought for a moment. He kissed her on her lips then said, 'You are the most beautiful, the most accomplished woman in the world so far as I'm concerned. You have me now and only our opinions of each other matter. If anyone tries to take a rise out of us they can go fuck themselves.' He paused. 'Actually,' he said, 'I need terribly to fuck this pretty little pussy.' He slid his fingers inside her panties and she opened her legs to him, which is why they arrived an hour late at the party.