The Glass House Ch. 06

Exposed

I didn't know what the argument between Beto and his agent, Riccardo Zaniolo, was all about, but Beto came storming out of the A.S. Roma locker room in high dungeon and growled, "Let's go to dinner. The hotel restaurant." He was a star center-half defender for Rome's football team, which had just defeated AC Milan on their home turf, with Beto a standout in the game, so I don't know what the problem between Beto and his agent was. But as Beto's trainer, bodyguard, and gofor--at least for public consumption, and in actual fact--I followed along behind. Something was strange, though, and something had been strange with Beto for a couple of days. He usually wasn't in a perpetual mad like he'd been for a week and we never ate meals together in public. We didn't do anything together, as anything like equals, in public.

What was between Beto and me was a very private matter. Beto had always insisted on that. He had a macho man public image to maintain.

I was Canadian, so not really part of this Italian world. I had the build of a bodyguard and the training of a physical trainer, so we'd always managed to bring it off, this image of handsome and sexy Beto as the macho international soccer star, who played the field and wasn't going to let any woman pin him down. To the world I was just his shadow, walking beyond him, outside of his spotlight. He worked hard at playing the field of models and other beautiful women, but, by nature, I was his top and he was my bottom.

That had always been very hush hush, and, going straight from Milan's Stadio Giuseppi Meazza football stadium to the Aurora Restaurant in our hotel, the Meliá Milano, and entering the restaurant together was a completely new thing for us.

"I can eat later, Beto," I said.

"Sit," he growled, so I sat there, at the table, across from him, with him giving a "just dare to ask or comment" look to those he caught giving him a curious look. This was almost everyone in the restaurant, as he was a celebrity here. As we ate, I asked him what was wrong and he wouldn't say what it was other than "life" and "snooping" and his agent, Zaniolo. I knew not to press him when he was in this mood.

As I feared, he was spotted by someone from the media in the restaurant and a flash bulb went off. I made a move to go after the photographer, but Beto placed his hand on my arm, which caused another flash to go off, and said, "Fuck it. Sit and enjoy your meal, Jack. Tell me what you thought about the game against Milan. Was I robbed of a goal there at the end, or not?"

After we were done eating, I said, "You go ahead. I'll settle the bill and go to my room. Call me there if and when you want me to come to you. I've put a key card under your napkin in case you want to come to me tonight. Room 1126."

"I'll wait until you pay for us and then we'll go up together--to my room," he answered. "I want you now. I'm keyed up."

"Go on and I'll follow," I said. I looked around to see if the photographer was still there. This wouldn't do. This wouldn't do at all. We'd been so careful.

"We'll go together," he declared. Beto had a junior suite at the hotel and I was booked in a distant single I probably wouldn't be spending much time in. We had never gone to the elevators together to go to our rooms, though. This time we did. More flashes from cameras went off as we stood at the elevators, and, once again, Beto put a hand on my forearm intimately and leaned in to kiss me on the neck before the elevator doors opened.

What in the hell was going on here, I wondered. We had very carefully avoided showing anything like this in the year I'd been working for and spiking the international soccer star on the sly. I may be the boss on the bed, but, in public, I was just a smear on the wall.

* * * *

Usually I played traditional Japanese wife with Beto in public. I followed a good six feet behind, eyes lowered unless I was on the lookout for threats to Beto, usually in the form of adoring female fans. That was my personal body guard role in public. In private, though, when it was just the two of us, Beto was the one who played wifey--and a very needy wifey indeed. Although trim and well-muscled enough, he had the height and build of a classic soccer player, built for speed and maneuverability, not the height and weight to compete with a bodybuilder like me. He was strong enough, but I had him by forty pounds of hard muscle and by three inches in height. He liked to be subdued and then ravished. That was fine with me.

Beto liked it that way. When we were alone and stripped, he worshipped my body and was a total submissive to me. He knew, intimately, every square inch of my muscular frame with his hands and his lips. I was hung and he wasn't and he danced and writhed on my cock, lying under me, docilely, wanting me to take him hard. I did. His fans just wouldn't have understood his need or that a man fulfilled it. He often said that it was me his women fans should pursued rather than him because I could give them what they wanted from him better than he could.

It was no different that day, other than we went, boldly and openly, straight to his room, rather than me stealing there from mine sometime later in the night. We always did have sex after one of his soccer matches, the sex wilder when he'd had a win, but he seemed extra desperate this night, stripping me, pushing me down on my back on his bed, making love to every square inch of my body, and then me turning him, slapping his legs apart, mounting and thrust up inside him, and pounding, pounding, pounding, as he wrapped his legs around my waist, dug his fingernails into my shoulder blades, and rocked hard against my pelvis to take me deep. On this night, after we'd both fired off, I made to roll off him, but he clutched at me.

"No, no. Stay inside me. Fuck me again." And so I did.

It wasn't like him--not having sex--but in having it like there may be no tomorrow, no following night of sex. I was worried about what was worrying him, but he wasn't telling me and I wasn't really in charge here. I had to wait for him to name it--if he ever was going to.

Afterward, after strong-finish seconds, as we lay side by side on the bed, panting, he merely said. "We're going up to Lake Como for a few days. Have you ever been there?"

"No, I haven't," I said. "I've heard about it, though. Some movies were filmed there, weren't there?"

"Yes," he said. "It's a good place for fantasy and make believe, although I want to go in the other direction. I think you'll like it there. I've rented a house on the lake. A house completely open to the world. I think that's appropriate. It has its secrets, but we are going there to dispense with those."

I might have asked him more, but by the time he'd stopped speaking, he was drowsy and had dozed off. He had exhausted himself--partly because he'd played so hard on the soccer field, partly because he'd taken my cock so hard, but mostly, I think, because he had exhausted himself with whatever was eating him and that he was refusing to let out.

At some point, he'd tell me--and I was afraid it was something I didn't want to hear. I'd become more than fond of him and happy with our arrangement.

* * * *

The house on Lake Como that Beto drove me to was fantastic, but it wasn't anything like what I expected. It was a two-story glass cube set on the very edge of the lake, seeming to jut out over the lake and sitting on a rock-walled ground floor that disappeared into a hillside mound to the left of the driveway over a car garage. The hill blocked a full view of the house from the SS36 rim road around the lake, although you could see enough of the glass cube from the road to be intrigued by it. The two-story glass cube of the house was all glass--and I mean all glass. Beto took me directly from the ground-floor rock walled, floored, and ceilinged entrance foyer, up the open glass-tread spiral staircase into the transparent cube. All of the exterior and interior walls were made of glass, and the floor and even the ceiling when I looked up on the second floor were made out of transparent acrylic. The glass in the walls to the two bathrooms off the bedrooms were glass block, but they were still glass and only diffused the shadows of what was inside. They didn't obliterate them.

This was the most open-to-the-world's gaze structure I'd ever seen. Beto couldn't have found a place with less privacy. This was the opposite of how he and I had lived for the past year.

All of the furnishings were white and sleek and low-slung, leaving the impression of living in an iceberg--one that was completely open to the world. No secrets, no hidden agendas. Beto told me that wasn't really true about the house but that it wasn't something that needed to concern us--that he'd taken care of that. I was too fascinated with the place to pursue that point.

This was downright fantastic and nothing like any of the classical Beaux-Arts and Italianate architecture of the lakeside buildings I'd seen on the lake shore as we drove northeast from where we hit the lake at Lecco. It also was in no way reflective of the hidden relationship Beto and I had been in for a year.

"I know," Beto said when I asked him about that. "This is so open. I want a break from the past. That's what I thought of when the agency told me this was for rent."

"It's all very grand," I said. "But it leaves us exposed. I don't see that there are any blinds or anything. At night this will be a lantern, exposed to anyone out on the lake or across on the other shore. We aren't far from the other side."

"Yes, there are blinds within the walls, but I have no intention of using them."

"Well, that's fine for you, but what if I want more privacy? Where will I sleep? Even in the second bedroom, it will look like I am in here with you."

"There's another bedroom on the first floor, behind the garage, under the hill," Beto said "But I picked this precisely because it's exposed. You will sleep in here, with me, on the master bed, of course. We will make wild love here that can be seen for miles up and down the lake. There is a system to screen the glass, but we won't use it unless we find the glare at some time during the day is too much." He walked over to a nightstand attached to one side of the bed and flipped a switch. Immediately, the wall of glass toward the lake became opaque, swirls of cloudy material rising between the panes of glass. It didn't shut out the light, but it glazed over what could be seen from the outside in much the same way that the glass blocks did for the bathroom walls.

"This isn't like you, Beto. Tell me what's wrong."

"Come, let's walk into Colico for a drink at a café, and I'll tell you what you want to hear."

This sounded strangely like a "kiss off" line to me--like, after a year, I was being dismissed when I thought we had so much going for us. It wasn't the first time I'd been wrong about my love life, though. That gave me pause. I hadn't thought about our relationship being a love life. We were two men--macho men I liked to think. We didn't do "love." We did sex. Maybe I should have given that more thought. For now, I could hold it back until we had taken that walk into the nearby lakeside town and I'd gotten the bad news.

When we got back down into the foyer on the ground floor, I saw that there were four doors other than the front entry off the room.

"Where do those doors go?" I asked. "If one of them is to that bedroom you say is down here, maybe this is where I should sleep."

"This one on the wall toward the hill is to the garage," he said. "The other one on that wall is to the bedroom and the one across the foyer from that is into a room under the glass cube. Those two doors are locked. There isn't anything in there we need. The one at the back is locked too. It goes out to a sunken patio cut into the hillside behind the bedroom and to stairs up to the pool terrace at the back of the house, accessible off the first floor of the glass cube. This is called The Glass House, by the way."

"Locked doors?" I asked.

"Yes. That isn't any part of what is us."

And what is "us"? I thought, but I didn't say anything.

Shortly after we settled at a small table in the outdoor seating area of a café just beyond the pedestrian pathway on the shore of the lake and had ordered our drinks, Beto suddenly leaned over the table and kissed me on the lips. Shocked as I was at that, I was even more shocked to see a photographer fire off a couple of shots of the kiss. As I had done at the Milan hotel, I started to rise to go after him--I was, after all Beto's bodyguard and charged with protecting his privacy--but, as in the hotel restaurant, Beto grabbed my arm and said, "Let it be, Jack. I'll explain."

And then, after our drinks arrived, he did.

"You've no doubt noticed I've been on edge recently."

"No doubt," I said, showing a bit of exasperation.

He gave me a little smile. "I've known for a while that Undici, the sports magazine, is preparing an exposé--of me, and, I guess of you too, of us."

"So, that's it--you... we... are being outed." And here it comes, I thought. This is why I'm being shown the door. He had to do something drastic to counter the article--to establish the claim that he was straight. I wondered what international model or movie actress Beto's agent had lined up to lie for him.

"Yes," Beto said. "But I'm glad about that. It's time. It's time to stop pretending about that. I want to come out, and I want to be with you in the open."

"What?" This wasn't at all what I expected. "You want us to be in the open? You want to be exposed? Do you have any idea what this might do to your career?"

"Riccardo Zaniolo has been making quite clear to me what it will mean for my career."

"Your agent knows? He knows about us?" I knew he did, but we'd been in denial for so long--and that included what Zaniolo knew.

"Of course, he knows about us, and he's the one who learned about the magazine article from Undici."

"And that's what the two of you were arguing about at the stadium yesterday?"

"Yes. Riccardo wants me to stonewall it--to deny everything. He wants me to get married--to dismiss you. He already has an actress lined up who wants the publicity of having my baby, even when I said he'd have to find someone else to put the baby in her. He wasn't fazed by that; he said that could be arranged."

"It does sound the sensible approach to take," I said, it being the very last thing in the world I wanted to say, but it was what Beto needed to do if he wanted to have a chance to preserve his career.

"It's too late for that even if I had any intention of doing it, which I don't," Beto said. "I've been thinking of coming out for some time. I can't really do so boldly, though, and have any hope of playing again. I think I'm good enough to be kept in the game even if I'm outed. Times are changing with that. But I can't take the step publicly myself. There's a dismissal clause in my contracts with both Zaniolo and A.S. Roma if I declare myself."

"So, that's why you encouraged those photos and we're in an all-glass house. You're letting Undici do the outing for you."

"Precisely. There's just one aspect of this that I've been remiss about. I should have included you in on this long before now. You may not want to be outed as well--or to wind up with me. I haven't said anything to you until now because I've been afraid you'd leave me. If you don't want to be taken up with this, you can take the car and go back to Milan. Someone can pick me up here. Maybe you haven't noticed, but all of the photos I've let be taken of us identify who I am, but not you. I haven't let the photos clearly show your face yet. You'll be named in the article, but there's room for you to deny it. It's not too late for you to back out and leave. I have an agreement with Undici on that. I may even be able to get them to claim they couldn't identify the other man or that it's someone else in exchange for some headline-exclusive quotes from me."

He looked at me, expectantly, and extended a hand to lay on my forearm on the table. I heard another series of camera clicks.

* * * *

On the way back to The Glass House, Beto said, "I really was afraid you'd not want to be identified with this--that you wouldn't want to join me in being outed and connected with me in a high-profile outing. That's why I've been putting off talking with you about this. I've been afraid I'd lose you."

"I don't give a fuck about being outed," I said. "I was afraid that you were getting around to dumping me."

"When we get back, there's something I want you to do," he said.

"What?"

"I want you to come upstairs with me and fuck me hard in front of the glass wall overlooking the lake."

I laughed. "I'm fine with fucking you, but I don't think Undici is going to print a photo of that."

"I don't give a fuck for what Undici does with the story now. It's just symbolic, maybe, but when I found out about this house and how open it is to the world, I knew I wanted to make a statement to the world here--with you. It doesn't matter if the world is watching or not. It's the statement that counts."

So, that's what we did. We got naked in the master bedroom, and I made Beto take the "perp" stance on the glass wall, his face showing to the world, his arms and legs spread, his palms against the glass, and his butt jutted back. I knelt behind him and ate him out while snaking my hand through his thighs, lacing my fingers through his balls and distending them, and milking his cock. Then I stood, grasped his hips, mounted and penetrated him, and fucked him to a mutual ejaculation.

The world--or at least the small part of the world we were currently in did notice. Boats gathered and paused on the lake and as we reached climax, they let their fog horns go wild. Probably no one out there actually knew it was the international soccer star, Beto Alonso, being royally fucked by a man and declaring his preference to the world, but Beto knew that he'd declared and that, with me, he was taking on a whole new, more honest, public persona, win or lose.