Marking the Decades

"You wouldn't have to work like a dog," Mason said. "You could get experience by also taking the first read of manuscripts coming in over the transom. You'll learn what merits getting past that first barrier; it will do wonders for you own writing."

Ken, of course, had said yes. His practical education and networking beyond what Columbia could give him in formal classes was about to begin. He knew he had to be grateful for that even what he'd have to give to Mason. The man was a giant slug, but he knew how to fuck; was introducing Ken into exotic positions that were both arousing and would be useful in Ken's work with the escort agency, which he had no intention of giving up even in the face of the offer of other work; and the man had a big cock.

* * * *

They were both reaching climax. "Let's try to shoot off together," Clifford Langston hissed through heavy panting. He was doing Ken in a side spilt on the bed in a different room at Gentleman Jim's than they'd used on New Year's Eve. He was holding Ken close to him, the young man's right leg raised and bent to give Langston's thick dick full access to his hole. Langston was stroking the young man off to the same rhythm he was fucking him in.

They both concentrated on timing their ejaculations, keeping each other apprised of where they were in losing control. They managed to come together. Collapsing back on the bed, each had a surge of a sense of accomplishment. It was only their second session at Gentleman Jim's and already they could come together. Langston pulled his arm out from underneath Ken, turned the youth on his back, and kissed down the small boyish torso, taking Ken's cock in his mouth and sucking him off to a secondary ejaculation. Ken ran his fingers into the author's wavy salt-and-pepper hair and moaned his total surrender.

Giving Ken's cock one last squeeze, Langston laughed, rolled off the bed, and padded over to the chair where he'd left his folded clothes and a briefcase. He took a manuscript out of the briefcase and tossed it on the bed beside Ken as he passed on his way to the bathroom. "Here, read this. This is your first novel."

Ken had worried that his first night with Langston, four days earlier, on New Year's Eve into New Year's Day had been a one-time deal, but he needn't have worried. When he went to his first creative writing class in the new year, ready to tell the class that he'd met the best-selling novelist, Clifford Langston, and gotten some writing tips from the man, Langston was there, already, at the front of the class, talking with the professor, Ellen Daniels. Langston gave Ken a wink when Ken entered the classroom.

So, there he was in the flesh to give the class pointers directly. Professor Daniels, of course, was all aglow when Langston told her he'd met one of her students on New Year's Eve, who had told him about the class studying Langston's work and Langston then decided to drop into the class himself. It had all been true. He didn't say that the student had told him all of this while Langston was fucking the shit out of him.

Langston stopped Ken in the hall after class. "I thought I could take you to lunch after class," he said.

"Just lunch?" Ken had asked.

"No, not just lunch," Langston responded. "I want to take you back to Gentleman Jim's. I'm not sure what the arrangement should be. Should I call the agency and sign up for your time? Or should I pay you directly and let you work it out with the agency—or not?"

"If I go with you—after lunch—and don't want it to be for pay. I want it to be because it's what we both want."

"Is it what you want—without being paid for it."

"Yes, it's what I want."

Langston smiled, clearly pleased, and Ken had the sensation that he had passed some sort of test.

So, Ted didn't have to worry about whether Langston had enjoyed Ken's servicing of him on New Year's Eve.

Ken rode Langston's cock at Gentleman Jim's in a cowboy ride and then they made a successful attempt at coming together in a side split.

"It's a detailed outline for a novel," Ken said after picking up the manuscript and looking at it. "The notes relate it to Tom Wolfe. It's a parallel storyline or something."

Langston had stopped at the door to the bathroom and turned, leaning into the doorframe. He looked really good for his age—tall and wiry, his muscles hard but lean, his cock thick and hanging low, projecting out of trimmed auburn-haired pubes that were yet to be touched with the gray on his head, his close-cropped beard, and in the light swirling on his pectorals, descending in a thin line down into his groin. He trimmed his pubes. He made the effort to still look good.

"Yes, yes, it is—a parallel story to Tom Wolfe's early like in Asheville, through the controversy of writing the secrets of his home city, to his success in writing. I've tentatively entitled it 'Homeward Bound.' I'm giving it to you. If you're studying Wolfe in your class, you could get double duty out of it."

"But this is your prospectus."

"Which I don't have time to write. On New Year's Eve you told me that the writing was the easy part for you—and Ellen has shown me some of your writing and it's promising—that your difficulty is in coming up with themes and storylines. When you told me that your class was studying Tom Wolfe this semester and you had to do something about him for a project, I immediately thought of this storyline I've had sitting around, knowing I'd probably never write it up. It doesn't excite me anymore."

"And you need to be excited to write a novel."

"I need to be excited in whatever I do. You excite me."

Ken acknowledged the compliment but went back to talking about the manuscript. "But this is yours. I didn't come up this idea. This would be cheating if I turned this in for a class assignment."

"No one but you and I need ever know it isn't all yours," Langston said. "Nothing is original under the sun anymore. Work on it; make it yours. Do whatever you want with it for the class assignment but also consider it as a first novel idea. Read it. Think of yourself as writing it."

He went into the bathroom. He didn't close the door, though, and he gave Ken a full view of him standing at the toilet, holding that big cock of his out and taking a piss, coming out of the shower, not bothering to wrap the towel around his waist when he'd dried off, and brushing his teeth, combing his hair, and trimming his beard at the basin. This would be what life would be like if they lived together, Ken thought. He wondered if Langston was thinking that too. It was at this point that Ken realized that he was contemplating such a life. Langston was humming and, while working at the basin, he was stroking himself into an erection with one hand. Ken knew their session on the bed wasn't finished.

Ken was right. When Langston came out of the bathroom, he was still fully naked and in erection. Walking over to the bed, he took the manuscript out of Ken's hands and laid it aside. "It's time to thank Daddy," he said, putting an arm around Ken's waist and dragging the young man to the foot of the bed, he put Ken on his knees, grasped the young man's cock with one hand and position his own cock head at Ken's still-open hole with the other hand, mounted and penetrated him, gave him that long, fat cock Ken had melted to, and fucked him to yet another ejaculation.

Yes, Ken thought he could live with this in a permanent arrangement. Daddy would keep him humming and well fucked.

* * * *

Ken found that he liked the "step-and-fetch-it" part time work at Harper and Row. Jason Mason was all business at work and he made the effort to let Ken get a taste of all of the functions at the publishing house while the young man did work that no one else wanted to do. For his part, Ken appreciated the look into real publishing he was getting and was conscientious with his work. Jason Mason had also become so busy with his own work that there were few of the long lunches he'd told Ken about where they would go to Mason's nearby apartment and he would show that a fat whale of a man could orchestra some exotic sex positions that left Ken, who had to go back up town to Columbia University to take in classes after lunch, exhausted and gasping. Among others, the young man found the Standing 69 and Superman positions were interesting and arousing.

Where Mason didn't flirt with Ken at work, another editor, junior to Mason and in his late twenties, still working on building a successful stable of authors, did. Nathan Horowitz, a dark, sultry young man on the make recognized Ken as a submissive quickly and took the young man under his wing, helping him to learn the ways of working publishing house below the level Mason worked at.

Ken, in turn, recognized the nature of Horowitz's basic interest in him and didn't discourage it. For the first few weeks their encounters consisted only of longing and meaningful looks and light touchings as they passed in the corridors of the publishing house. Then one day they both went to a supply room at the same time and kissed and fondled each other. They moved from here to the private bathroom of an absent associate publisher and to a mutual hand job and Horowitz sitting on the toilet, as Ken knelt before him and gave him an expert blow job.

"I want more," Horowitz murmured. "I want to be with and inside you."

"I don't want anything less, either," Ken answered.

"So, you will go with me? You will let me—?"

"Whenever you want."

The next time Mason had to beg off on a scheduled lunch session, Horowitz, whose apartment was no further away from the Harper and Row offices than Mason's was, stepped in with an invitation of his own. Horowitz sat in a dining room chair, naked, and the two did a lip lock as Ken, also naked, sat in his lap, facing him and rose and fell on Horowitz's cock. Horowitz took over the stroking, clutching, squeezing, and separating Ken's buttocks cheeks as he thrust up. Surrendering totally to him, Ken arched back, his torso draping toward the floor, his arms stretching out in a sacrificial stance. "Yes, like that. Breed me. Give me your cum," Ken whispered.

Horowitz did. Ken didn't know if Nathan realized that the sacrificial stance Ken had taken symbolized his total surrender to the other young man—that Horowitz could have him whenever, however he wanted him. But Ken realized that, and it scared him. He had already given himself to Clifford Langston this way. He couldn't afford to give himself to too many men this way.

By that time, Ken had done some work on the Tom Wolfe parallel novel, using the structure Clifford Langston had given him. He thought he'd done enough on it to at least pretend it was his own work. He showed it to Horowitz, who at least pretended to be impressed with it so that he could move Ken from the dining room the next lunchtime they could meet to his bedroom. He promised to do what he could to bring the book into the publishing house. Of course, he was too much in heat the next time they lunched in his apartment to take Ken to his bedroom. He fucked him on the dining table.

On the strength of Nathan Horowitz's expressed interest in his Tom Wolfe manuscript—and genuine interest to be fucked by a man younger than most he was sleeping with—Ken went to the bedroom with Nathan that rainy lunchtime after Nathan did him on the dining table, and, with Ken gripping the top of a standing wardrobe, his body streaming back over the carpet and Nathan standing between his thighs, grasping his hips, and fucking him from the rear, Ken experienced how a younger man than Mason did a Superman position.

Two weeks later, Nathan was busy preparing to be transferred to the London office of the Collins publishing house, which was in the process of merging with Harper and Row to become HarperCollins.

Ken didn't have time to worry about what that meant in terms of his manuscript, though, because there had been a fire in his dormitory at Columbia University and, although there was only a bit of smoke damage in his room, the building was being closed down and he needed to find other accommodations. This was a disaster for someone who lived as close to the financial margins as he did.

It was Clifford Langston to the rescue, though. He was waiting for Ken outside the young man's creative writing classroom the afternoon after the fire. Nathan Horowitz had put Ken up the previous night—and fucked him through the night—but beyond the exhausting prospect of staying with Nathan longer, Nathan was moving to London, so that wasn't an option beyond the near term. Ken did not want to live with Jason Mason for even one night and didn't tell him about the fire.

"Elaine tells me you are out of a home," Langston said when they met in the hallway outside the classroom. They held there while the other students, giving Langston worshipful looks, streamed around them and the hallway cleared.

"I'll find something," Ken said, not all that hopefully.

"The manuscript I gave you and you are working on wasn't lost, was it?"

Ken looked around to make sure no one heard about the manuscript. "No. My room didn't burn. Just some smoke. But they've kicked us all out and closed the building. I'm competing with a couple of hundred other students in finding a room near the university in the middle of the school year."

"I live near Columbia University," Langston said. "I have a brownstone on West 109th Street, near Morningside Park and within walking distance of Columbia. My wife is in Paris and likely to stay there. I have plenty of room."

"You do?" Ken didn't want to ask. He didn't know what he'd have to give up.

"I also need a part time assistant. I know you're doing some work for Harper and Row. And there are your classes. But you could work for me too—and live in the house. The third floor is servant quarters I don't fully use. We could work it out."

"What would I have to do?"

"You know what you'd have to do. I'd have full-access privileges anytime I wanted them—that didn't interfere with your classes and work at the publishing house."

"I work for an escort agency too."

"You'd have to give that up, but you'd have a steady income, enough to live on and go to school. And working for me will give you experience and networking in publishing that the escort agency can't give you."

Ken realized that Langston essentially already had full-access privileges for his ass.

His quarters at the West 109th Brownstown were two rooms on the third floor—a living area where he could do his studying, with a small kitchenette, and a bedroom, reached through that, with a bath attached.

Langston came to his room that first night, laid Ken on the bed, his tail at the foot of the bed, grasped his ankles and spread and raised the young man's legs, moved in between Ken's thighs, and penetrated and fucked him and fucked him and fucked him.

"You can be vocal, if you like," Langston said. "The servants are accustomed to my ways, and I like my young men to be vocal."

I just bet you have it all worked out, Ken said. Langston fucked him hard. Ken was vocal. None of the servants appeared to save him.

Chapter Two: New Year's Eve 1999

Nils Ek, second in command on the Rhine River cruise ship, the Lorelei, led his small band of men off the boat tied up the Frankenwerft river wall near the Cologne Cathedral. The excursion was setting off early so they could be back on board, at the top of the ship, to watch the New Year's fireworks over the river. They would be spectacular this year as they were ringing in a new decade as well as a new year.

Ken Curtain was following close behind the leader, and the big, blond Swede kept looking back to ensure that the very sexy twenty-nine-year-old American novelist was with the group. Ek had been cultivating the American since they had embarked on the Germany Christmas Market river cruise seven days earlier. All did not seem right with the young man and his partner, the best-selling novelist, Clifford Langston, and Nils, always on the hunt for luscious submissives to dominate, thought he could take advantage of that. He almost always found someone worthy of spiking on special gay cruises like this one, and with his body and looks he was in high demand. His interest in Curtain was at the base of his suggestion that they go gay baths cruising in Cologne, where they were tied up for the night, on the evening of New Year's Eve. They would be back before the fireworks display over the river.

The idea had been met with enthusiasm. This was a gay man's cruise and the core group on board were there on business as well as pleasure. The celebrated twenty-four-years young German filmmaker, Klaus Heineman, was making a film of the best-selling novel, Spoils of the Victor, by Clifford Langston, and those two, plus Langston's literary agent, Ted Sullivan; Ted's partner, the set and costume designer, Jeff Malone; and the lead actor contracted for the film, Russ Jackson, were meeting to settle on the film's concept. The usual appendages were along, including the German, Felix Untermeyer, a cameraman Klaus had along to make a gay man's documentary of the meeting cruise, and Ken Curtain, the novelist who had been living with Langston for nearly a decade. Curtain had come along for a last-ditch effort to shore up his relationship with Langston, whose eye, at fifty-three, was straying to younger men than Curtain's twenty-nine. Curtain was laboring over his third novel—again one given to him in outline by Langston—and could work on that anywhere. He knew if he'd let Langston go on this cruise alone, that his one-time lover—they didn't often couple anymore—and mentor would be lost to him.

Noticeably absent, to Ken Curtain's obvious irritation, from the club excursion were Clifford Langston and Klaus Heineman. It had been the evident growing attraction between those two, Klaus being five years younger than Curtain, that had put the young novelist on edge.

Ek, a tall, big-boned, muscular and commanding sunny Swede, took the group, with included a Turkish man of particular satyr appearance and demeanor, Altan Hulugu, to the Roman Baths, on Hohe Strasse, not far from the Cologne Cathedral, and thus the ship, for an early-evening "letting loose," as he put it. It was a special gay men's cruise. Stopping at gay bars and brothels in towns along the Rhine had been on the agenda—and the guests had taken advantage of the opportunities. The Roman Baths were just that—a gay bath house established on the footprint of a Roman bath that originally had been on this spot, the original subterranean pool still in existence. Altan Hulugu, a shipping czar, who was based out of Naples, Italy, had been tagging along close to the movie group since the town of Rudesheim am Rhine, where he had come close to nailing Ken Curtain in a gay club. He wasn't accustomed to not getting his way. He still was intent on nailing Ken Curtain, as was Nils Ek.

That everyone who saw Hulugu thought of him as a satyr at first sight was natural. He had a certain scheming, animal look in his face, which was ugly but arresting. Even in his fifties, he wore his wavy hair long and kept it an auburn brown with two clumps of gray at the temples, resembling horns and adding to his satyr image. He wasn't a tall man, but his muscular torso was long, leaving his legs to be shorter than normal and bowed. He pushed the image by maintaining an auburn brown goatee, and he had a glint in his eyes that achieved both amusement and malevolence. He moved with authority. Those who had lain under him could attest to the appropriateness of the satyr identification. His chest was very muscular, but mostly hairless, shaved. A line of auburn hair began just below the cleft of his pecs, though, and broadened out as it descended to this belly. From there on down, his body—his buttocks and legs—was pelted. Those who saw him in the buff invariably looked down to see the cloven hooves, but he did not have those. What he did have in the vein of a satyr, though, were low-hanging, bulbous balls that, when he had a man under him, pumped cum endlessly, and a thick, long, upcurved cock that was well out of proportion for a man his size.