Summer Deceptions

After a series of "sometimes I was there and sometimes not" concerts, the band and I went our own ways, although we sometimes crossed paths at Harry's. Bud replaced Keith with the next sound and lighting eighteen-year-old, Sean. There was no question that Bud had popped Sean's cherry too.

I slept around. Sometimes when the band was in town, Manny came over and slapped me around, I opened my legs for him, he fucked me cruelly, and then, after drinking with him, I rode his beer can cock to let him know I would take what he dished out. I sometimes fed him breakfast the next morning. I never said no to him. But nothing more permanent developed there. I was still in love with Bud. At Christmas of 2017, Facebook did a thing on the Bob Hawley fiddler, Bud Taylor, becoming engaged with a black high-fashion model, Marilee, who was so famous in her business that she only had the one name. Rumors were that she was pregnant.

By then even Manny had married a woman and had stopped coming by to show how easily I could be had by a man with a big cock. Then it was basically one-night stands with musicians coming and going at Harry's.

When I had crashed their wedding on the beach just now, and dumped the bucket of ice on Bud, Marilee did, indeed, have a very un-model bulge in her wedding dress.

* * * *

I came off of autopilot when I was passing through the last named blip of a sandy hump of land on highway 12 down the narrow Outer Banks and approaching Hatteras Island, the last call on the road. Once on the island and within a half mile of the current location of the Hatteras Lighthouse, I turned off on Old Lighthouse Road and then onto Tower Circle Road. I pulled up beside the ruins of the old Greenwood Lighthouse. I had no idea why there had been another lighthouse here other than the Hatteras Lighthouse or which came first or why this one had been abandoned, other than it had a slight Tower of Pisa list toward the sea, but I didn't particularly care either. I came here because no one used the perfectly good beach onto the Atlantic nearly at the lighthouse's doorstep.

Looking up into the sky and seeing that it didn't look all that great up there, I put the motorcycle under cover in an open-side wood shed in a copse between the lighthouse and the beach; stripped off to my Speedo, leaving my black shorts, white shirt, and bow tie in the bike's saddle bag and the laces of the high-top boots knotted together, with the boots dangling off the bike's handlebar; and walked deliberately to the beach.

I waded out into the water until it was over my knees and I felt the ledge under me start to drop off. I then dove into the water and, with a good stroke I'd learned on the First Flight High School swim team, started my swim toward Bermuda.

* * * *

Lacking a sense of the melodrama and being much too good a swimmer to keep it short and neat, I thought "Fuck it" far short of Bermuda and did a U-turn in the ocean and swam back to the beach. I'd been in the water a long time, however, and I found the beach wasn't deserted when I got back to it. A beefy black man, just in shorts and boat shoes, was perched on a camp stool in front of an art easel. He was set up on a patch of grass just before a dip down to the top of the beach and was facing the ruins of the Greenwood Lighthouse. He must have been fast with the paints, because the painting was almost finished. And from where I was struggling out of the surf, it looked like a professional job.

My first thought was "Bud," because the man was black, but I quickly dropped that. He was a body-builder type as opposed to Bud's wiry, slender body, he had the tattoo of the wing span of a hawk or some other bird spanning his broad back in bluish-black ink, and his head was in a buzz cut, unlike Bud's dreadlocks.

I walked up behind and to one side of him and looked at the painting of the lighthouse. "That's very good," I said. And it was. It wasn't a Norman Rockwell painted photograph; it was more in the Impressionist style. But there was no question that it was the lighthouse or that it was done well. It even got the tilt of the lighthouse in the observer's mind without it obviously being apparent or leaving the thought that the artist just didn't get the perspective right. Looking at the lighthouse how it had been painted, I noted for the first time how phallic it was, rising in a white, thick cylinder to the cap of the beacon. I wondered if it came across like that now because the sexual magnetism of the man sitting in front of the easel. The sky behind it was almost reminiscent of Van Gogh in its surreal intensity. It was only then that I realized that the sky was really that way—that a storm was bearing down on us from the sea.

"I saw the squall forming and had to get out here and capture it before it hit," the artist said in a rich baritone. "It's a good thing you came out of the sea. You might have drowned."

I didn't note that that had been the general idea. "I was going to swim to Bermuda and then thought 'Fuck it' before I got even half way there."

"So I gathered. That's what really drew me out here, but then I saw you turn around and decided I might as well paint something as long as I was out here."

"Are you a good enough swimmer to make it half way to Bermuda and back?" I asked.

"I'm good at a lot of things. It's starting to rain now, though. It will be pouring and the wind will be strong enough in a few minutes to carry us all the way to Bermuda. Help me get this stuff in."

"In? Where?" I asked.

"The lighthouse. I have a key. It's open. It's where I keep this crap." He stood and when he did so, I saw that he was nearly seven feet tall and built like Zeus. He was a handsome man, of military bearing. He wasn't young—there was gray mixed into the stubble that was his buzz cut and in the more profusive curling on his chest—but he was body-builder young in musculature. He grabbed the painting and I picked up the rest. We barely made it into the lighthouse, which indeed was open, and inside before the sky opened up in a roaring deluge.

The first floor of the lighthouse where we entered was just one circular room with a staircase against the far wall following the curve of the wall. Slit windows were set up near the ceiling at all four points of the compass. They let in enough light even during the storm, reflecting off the creamy white of the concrete walls, ceiling, and floor to enable us to see each other. I couldn't get out of my mind the sense of being inside a giant phallus, and it was making me feel tingly and sexually tense. The man set the easel, with the painting on it, over against the side of the staircase in a fluid, graceful motion and pointed to a curved white-painted bench on the sea side of the room and said, "Sit and make yourself comfortable. We'll ride out the storm here."

After putting his folding camp stool and the small wooden table with the case of paints that had been on top of it on the concrete floor next to the easel, I sat on the bench. I was barefoot and wearing just the Speedo I'd been swimming in.

"I like riding in a storm," he said, with a laugh. "Do you?" He didn't seem to expect a response to that, so I didn't give him one.

The massive god-like black man sat on an identical bench against the curved wall on the landward side.

"So, here we are," He said, giving me a white-toothed smile. He wasn't black black. He was more a creamy chocolate brown and his features were more multimix Jamaican gorgeous than pure African black. Both Bud and Manny were more of the hint-of-American ghetto thug intimidating black, which had led to me jumping when either of them said jump. This man was more military commander in bearing—one that you would jump for because he knew what was better for you and you ached to please him.

"Yes, here we are, I said. The storm shouldn't last long."

"Long enough," he said, enigmatically. "My name is Hal."

"I'm Mike," I said.

"Yes, I know," he said.

I gave him a sharp look.

"I've seen you at Harry's before. I've followed your band."

So, was he signaling that he was actively gay? Harry's was a gay club.

"I know you lay down for men and that you sleep around. I hear you're a pushover for black cock." So, no more speculation on that.

I didn't answer that. I let my eyes do a roam-about in the circular room, although there was very little in here to claim I might have interest in.

"I lay men who sleep around." He was pushing the envelope.

"Do you?" I said, trying to feign disinterest, although my body was indicating it was quite interested.

"And I have a black cock. Does that give you any ideas?" I didn't respond, so he changed tack. "So, you decided not to drown yourself."

I gave him a confused look. How could he possibly know? I would have preferred that he kept talking about laying me.

"So," he repeated, "you decided not to drown yourself—to swim toward Bermuda until you couldn't get back." The voice was more commanding. He was challenging me to answer. As I watched, he slipped his shorts down and off his legs. He leaned back into the wall, pushing his buttocks to the forward edge of the bench. He was in magnificent erection—possibly the biggest one I'd ever seen. It and his balls were darker than the rest of his skin tone, nearly black. He fisted it with a beefy hand. I couldn't look anywhere but at that big black cock. "Do you mind if I jerk myself off to looking at you and wanting you while we wait for the storm to stop?"

"Suit yourself," I said, trying for nonchalant. That was hard to do. He had one magnificent black cock. "That's right, I decided not to drown myself," I answered, going back to the lesser of the two pushy questions.

"It's done with Bud Taylor. Just let it go. Let me fuck you instead."

"Excuse me?" I said, tearing my gaze away from his cock and looking into his eyes. "What do you know about that?"

"I know the you and Bud Taylor were a number for years. I know that Bud Taylor is getting married today on the beach up at Nags Head. You band people are celebrities here. His marriage has been in all the papers. I saw you get off your motorcycle and walk into the sea, I knew it wasn't because you came here to frolic in the surf today. You came here because almost no one uses this beach. This is private property."

"Yeah, well. I didn't drown myself," I answered lamely. OK, so he knows all about it.

"Good, because that would be a waste of prime man flesh. Bud Taylor isn't the only man who can take care of you. Look at it, Mike. Look at my dick. Is it big enough for you? Rumor is that you like big, black cock."

I looked at it again. "Yes," I said almost in a whisper, "It's big enough."

"Are you going to let me put it in you?"

"Maybe."

"That song you wrote, 'Big Black Thing.' Some think it was just provocative lyrics to get the attention it got, but others say it is about Bud Taylor—about your breakup with him. Right?"

"Close enough," I answered.

"A few know it's about just a part of Bud—about his cock and how obsessed by and captive to it you were. That's what the song is really about, isn't it, Mike? Bud's cock."

"Yes," I whispered.

"Is my cock as big and black as Bud Taylor's is?"

"Close enough," I murmured again.

"So, you don't need Bud. You can let him go. You can ride my cock. I said I like to ride in a storm and asked you if you did. Do you?"

"Yes,"

"I'm right here, across the room from you. Stand up and come to me," he commanded in a gruff voice. "Strip off that swimsuit and come over here and sit on this cock. Ride me in the storm."

The ultimate submissive, lost to commands. With a whimper, I stood and slipped the Speedo down my legs. I walked across the cold concrete floor, covering the distance between us in what seemed to be an eternity. The wind was howling outside, the rain beating against the windows at the ceiling line. The light was dimming.

"I hear that Bud fucked you rough, Mike. And that Manuel Gonzalez did too. Is that how you like it, Mike?"

"Sometimes," I admitted.

"Go on your knees to me and give me head." He was asserting control and dominance over me. It was just the right note to take advantage of my total submissive nature—not just to any man, but to a big, hung black bull. So, it wasn't just a black man with a hint of the intimidating thug about him.

Whimpering, I went on my knees between his spread thighs and took him in my mouth. He ran his fingers into my golden curls with one hand and manipulated my head, making sure that I took his cock deep and that gagging alone wasn't good enough to allow me to expel him from my throat.

"That's it, baby. That's nice. Suck it good. We're gonna have fun, you and me."

He leaned over me and ran the other hand down my spine, to my buttocks, and penetrated me with a finger—and then two. I groaned and he gave a deep, dry laugh.

He was an intimidating thug after all.

He put me on the cock, facing him, my feet on the wall behind him, on either side of him, him grasping my wrists, my torso streaming down to the floor between his spread thighs, as I fucked myself on his cock, me using the leverage of my feet, and him pulling and releasing his grip on my wrists.

"Ride me. Ride me in the storm," he called out in his rich baritone voice, and I rode him and rode him.

He turned me on the cock, and I was being held in front of him, one of his hands cupping my chin, the other with a grip in my hair, arching my back cruelly, while, at his command, I leveraged my feet off the wall behind him as before.

"That's it, baby. Take the cock. Ride it." I took the cock. I rode the cock.

He took me up the stairs to a second, smaller level of the lighthouse, where there was a single bed, with restraints at the four corners. He bound me, belly down, spread-eagled there, and rode my ass to our ejaculations. Afterward he released me and held me close and kissed me all over.

"Every Tuesday afternoon when you are in town. Here," he whispered.

I was there every Tuesday for the next six weeks.

When he released me from the lighthouse, the sun was out, but branches of trees were strewn all around. The roof of the wood shed I had parked the Harley in had collapsed, but as the wood stack was higher than the top of the motorcycle, no damage had been done to the cycle.

All the time I was riding back to Nags Head, I was checking myself, physically and emotionally, to see what other damage had been done. As yet I couldn't discern any.

The last thing I did before leaving the lighthouse was to ask Hal why he had come on to me like this and he'd said he realized, from what people at Harry's had told him, that I'd fallen hard for Bud and that Bud hadn't returned the devotion to me.

"I've been watching you and wanting you for some time. I want to share that kind of devotion with you," he said.

Somehow that meant the world to me. I hadn't wanted just sex with Bud. I didn't want just sex with anyone. I wanted more.

* * * *

Hal liked to try new positions with me. We were on the second floor of the Greenwood lighthouse ruins, and Hal, more than a foot taller than I was, a hundred pounds—all muscle—heavier than I was, had me in a full Nelson. I was draped on the front of him as he stood and huffed around the room, bouncing me up and down on his buried cock, and I hugged his thighs with my legs thrown back. He was demonstrating his mastery and power over me. I was surrendering all to him, lying docilely against his chest, moaning softly, every nerve of my body tuned into the cock working inside me.

He maneuvered us over to the bed and laid me down there on my back, raising my arms one after the other over my head and binding my wrists to the headboard. "Spread your legs, feet on the footboard, and raise your pelvis to me," he commanded in a growl. I complied and then arched my head back and my torso up and cried out as he grabbed my hips between his beefy hands, thrust his hard cock up inside my passage and began to vigorously fuck me deep inside my soft core.

Afterward, we lay on the bed in an embrace, listening to each other's breathing as we brought it back under control.

It was the sixth Tuesday we'd met in the afternoon in the lighthouse and fucked like bunnies.

"Hal," I said. "We always do the same thing—different positions, yes, but it's just fucking. Maybe we could do more. Meet at other times, go somewhere, do something together."

"I like it here," he said. "I like this being our place, our time."

Doubt crept in. Was there some reason we couldn't be seen in public together, I wondered. But then we didn't have to be seen in public together. "You could come to my house. I could fix us something to eat. We could watch a game or something on TV. Just do something together once in a while."

"You don't like me fucking you like this, here, in our special place?"

"Yes, of course. But we could do more. I have three bedrooms. We could fuck in each one of them."

"I like it here. I like this being our time, our place." And that's where it ended. Hal rolled me onto my belly. "Go up on your knees. Give me your ass," he commanded. I did as he wanted and he mounted and fucked me again.

A relationship. A shared relationship. That's what I wanted, god damn it. That's what I wanted with Bud too. Hal had said something about there being more. This was a lot. I was well plowed. But I was beginning to wonder if this was enough. I was afraid to get any deeper into it with Hal, though. What if he left me like Bud had done?

He fucked so god damn well.

* * * *

"Very nicely done, isn't it? You know that few people know about that lighthouse? It's quite near the Hatteras lighthouse. No one seems to know why there are two of them there. As rendered, the lighthouse looks powerful, almost phallic."

"Yes, yes it does," I said, with surprise that someone else had seen that in the painting and was comfortable with noting it. "I saw this oil when it was being painted," I added. I turned and looked at the man who was standing behind me in the Buxton art gallery and did a doubletake. "Mr. Manly?" I said. "I didn't know you were still in the area."

"I wasn't for a long time. I had to leave, but I came back. I run this gallery now."

"I'm Mike Evans. I don't know if you remember me. I was one of your students at Final Flight—" "Of course I remember you, Mike. How could I forget you? And I've followed your career since then. You've done very well for yourself in the Bob Hawley Band."

"I left that a couple of years ago," I said. "I'm trying it on my own now."

"Yes, I know. And still performing in The Lost Colony every summer and one of their big donors too. I've seen you in that every summer—even back when you were in high school, and I . . . well, I kept track of you." He looked embarrassed. Actually, he looked very good. He'd kept in shape and he always was good looking. He changed the subject. "You say you watched this painting being done? You know Henry Walsh then?"

"Henry Walsh? No, I don't think so. Doesn't Henry Walsh own Harry's over in Wanchese. Harry's is—"

"Yes, I know what Harry's is. I know it's a gay club. I go there myself," Manly said. "I see you play there whenever I notice that you're on the bill. You didn't flinch when I commented on the lighthouse looking phallic in this painting. I rather hoped—"

"I don't think I've ever seen you in there."

"I stay near the back, and the audience is mostly in the dark. I go there to see you . . . to watch you from afar."

"Surely you go there for other reasons."

"No, just to watch you . . . to keep some sort of connection with you." He lifted a hand as if he wanted to touch me, but then looked embarrassed and withdrew it.

I didn't know what to say. It was a little awkward. I'd had feelings for Mr. Manly in high school—my first flutterings of realizing I was interested in men, not women. What was he trying not to say here but being pretty open and raw about it? I know he gave me special attention in high school and there were times I thought . . . but I had no idea he might be interested in me—in that way. There were those rumors about why he'd suddenly disappeared, and Jim Hodges had said it was something to do with me, but I thought he was just riding me. In fact, I had some fantasies about Jim Hodges riding me at the time. And about Mr. Manly too. But I hadn't done anything. We hadn't done anything. Bud was my first.