An Idol for Others (8 page)

Harry dropped a hand on his and held it still. “Hey. Don’t Wait till we’re home. Boy, you’ve got me really worked up. I want you to do it. Really do it. The real way. You know what I mean?”

“Sure.” Nobody ever admitted to ignorance about sex.

“I’ve been looking at you a lot recently. I’m sure you’ve got a big one. I can’t wait to get you out of those pants.”

Walter didn’t dare speak so freely, but he supposed it must be perfectly normal to express an interest in another guy’s body. He was beginning to feel possessive about the superb body he was fondling. He wanted to kiss it all over. He was obviously out of his mind.

They turned into a driveway and stopped near an opulent old frame house set under trees in an ample lawn.

“We’re in luck,” Harry said, pulling his clothes together. “Nobody home. Come on.” Out of the car, he raced for the open front door, shirt-tails flying. Walter ran after him. Harry held the screen door open for him and hustled him upstairs and across a hall into a room. He was naked once more almost before he had locked the door behind them. His prodigious erection was a proud permanent fixture. As he reached for Walter their eyes met again, and Walter caught the odd look. It was unmistakably girlish this time. All Harry’s features had softened, and his eyes were filled with a yearning, yielding desire. A shiver ran down Walter’s spine. He knew with a shock of scandalized delight that Harry wouldn’t draw the line at kissing.

In another moment they were in each other’s arms, and Harry’s mouth was open on his. Harry’s tongue thrust between his lips. He opened his mouth and lost all control over his response. For a moment he thought he would go wild with excitement and desire. His clothes were unfastened and torn from him. Hands closed on his sex and moved over it eagerly, measuring and assessing it. Harry drew back and looked down. His lips were parted in a strange, bewitching smile.

“What did I tell you?” His voice crooned strangely. “It’s big, all right. Just what I hoped. Look at us. We’re practically the same.”

Walter saw that it was true. He had supposed all guys were the same until he had seen Harry. The cock he had held in the car had seemed colossal, but his own looked just as big. For the first time he felt a twinge of pride in his body.

Harry dropped down in front of him and lifted first one foot and then the other to disentangle him from socks and trousers. As he did so, he allowed Walter’s cock to play over his face, seeking its touch. Walter uttered a succession of little cries as he saw and felt it touch an eye, slide along a check, brush through the hair over an ear.

When Harry had finished stripping him, he ran his hands over his thighs and closed them over his cock. He held it and put it in his mouth. Walter cried out. His hips jerked convulsively. The moist velvet of the mouth raised goose bumps all over his body. His head swam. His knees almost buckled. Harry relinquished him and stood. Walter steeled himself to look at him as if nothing had happened. It was inconceivable; his god, the school hero, was a cocksucker, a pansy, a pervert. He was everything a vile boy could be. He waited for all of him to rise up in outrage and call a halt to this disgraceful episode.

“I love sucking guys off,” Harry said. He was casual and cheerful, the familiar Harry, radiating health and wholesomeness. “I bet I’m better at it than anyone you know, but with you I want it the real way first. That’s what you want, isn’t it? I’ll get the stuff.”

Walter was trapped by the assumption that he was experienced. He couldn’t tell Harry that he didn’t know what he was talking about, that he had never dreamed that people actually performed these acts. Harry swung away toward the bathroom, and Walter’s eyes roamed over the broad shoulders, down the tapering back, clung to the powerful curve of the buttocks. He felt his sex growing so rigid that it seemed as if it would break. He wanted whatever Harry was planning. There was something about this he hadn’t understood. It was quite simply impossible for a star athlete to be a fairy.

Standing alone with a hard-on made him shy of his body, and he moved toward the bathroom. Harry emerged, a towel over his shoulder, carrying something in his hand. Walter hurried to meet him, instinctively hiding himself against him. Harry put an arm around him and looked at him and chuckled as he put his open mouth once more on Walter’s in the extraordinary way Walter assumed he had invented. His lips were soft and yielding. His darting tongue created an even greater intimacy than their nakedness. Walter flung his arms around him and held him. The surrender he felt in Harry’s body unleashed a great surge of power and passion in him. Once more he lost all control over his responses.

Harry breathed rapidly as he drew back and looked up at Walter from beseeching eyes. “Gosh, Walt. I guess we really go for each other. Come on. I’m ready for you.” He led Walter to the bed. He pulled back covers and spread a towel on the sheet and sat on it. Walter started to drop down beside him, but Harry held him in front of him. He squeezed some ointment from a tube into his palm and began to apply it to Walter’s leaping cock. His mouth was open, and his gaze was spellbound. “Boy. It’s a real honey. This is going to be something.”

Walter thought it was wrong for Harry to be so interested in his cock, but he couldn’t dislike it. Harry’s hands both soothed and aroused him. He hadn’t known that his body was capable of such complete pleasure. Was this the “real way”? A cry was wrung from him.

“Wait,” Harry cried.

His legs were knocked out from under him. He found himself spread-eagled on Harry’s back.

Harry’s powerful hands took charge of him, and his cock slipped into moist, warm confinement. Harry’s hips worked, and he felt himself more deeply engaged. It took him an instant to understand what he was doing, and then he struggled to extricate himself, but Harry’s hands clasped the back of his thighs and pulled him in closer. He made a deep, sliding plunge, and their bodies slammed up against each other. They were both gasping and shouting. He was seized by a frenzy of taking his pleasure, of taking possession. His mind was no longer operating; nature dictated his body’s movements.

He experienced a moment of soaring, triumphant power, and then he felt himself flying apart, his life spurting from him in great jets, drained, shattered, still wrung by the gigantic ejaculation. Harry’s body heaved under him, and their shouts mingled in throes of their shared orgasms.

Walter lay on top of him, taking great gasping gulps of air, and waited for coherent thought to impose some order on the chaos within him. He was damned, doomed. He had performed an act so hideous that he would never be able to face himself in the world, but the sense of soaring power remained. His god had offered him his beautiful body. It was his. He had taken it. His cock was still inside it, establishing his possession of it.

“God, Walt, you’re huge. I’ve never felt anything like it. You can really fuck.”

The four-letter word sent a chill through him. He knew at last what fucking was. He had fucked Harry. There was nothing queer about fucking. He had done nothing very different from what he might have done with a girl. It was Harry who was damned, Harry who liked to suck guys’ cocks and be fucked by them. It was obviously nothing new for him. Now Harry was his. His cock lengthened and hardened, and Harry moaned with pleasure. He had a big cock. Harry had never felt anything like it. He began to drive it into him again, suddenly determined that Harry would never want another. He had taken his first step toward youthful heartbreak. His whole being was dedicated to satisfying the glorious body that he had worshiped from afar. Harry’s ecstatic shouts were as thrilling to him as the orgasms they heralded.

“Gosh, Walt,” Harry gasped. “We’re in love with each other. I knew it. It’s the first time for me. Fuck me, honey. You’re really it.”

Later Harry insisted, “You’re gay, honey. We’re right together. You’ll find out.”

“I know I’m not,” Walter said as he prepared to take his friend in the way that had become as natural to him as breathing. “Even if I could be, I wouldn’t let myself. I’m going to be famous. I couldn’t go running around after guys.”

Harry had been an exception. Sex had turned a schoolboy crush into an agony as intense as any love affair he had ever read about. It couldn’t happen with anybody else. Three years had passed and confirmed this conviction. There were girls, not boys. Why was he letting Philip get under his skin with his insistent inviting eyes, his frail poetic appeal, his undeveloped body? If he let himself look at the boy enough, he would find something repellent in him, something repellent in the thought of wanting him. It was Clara’s fault. He should have picked one of the girls who was ready for sex. Celibacy didn’t suit him. Being a suitor and paying court didn’t suit him. Of course, decent girls didn’t go in much for sex, with rare exceptions like Debby. Maybe that was the trouble; maybe he was oversexed and shouldn’t expect decent girls to pay any attention to him.

At every opportunity, his eyes lingered on the hollow of Philip’s cheeks, on the tilt of his nose, on the way his hair fell around his exquisite ears. The more he looked, the more angelic beauty he discovered. His determination not to make an overt move remained unshaken. Gossip flew around the small community. Trivial scandal was always brewing. He had no intention of being the subject of what could be a major one.

He shared with Clara what little spare time they both had, assuring himself that the progress they were making toward a more relaxed relationship was all the satisfaction his emotional life required. She seemed less inclined to make a test of every moment with him. She might yet give in, to the extent of letting him kiss her and hold her in a restrained form of lovemaking.

The fourth play of the season was to be another prepackaged touring production; and during the week before it arrived, there was a slight slackening off of the pressures of work. Walter was having a cigarette outside the theater during a break in the rehearsal he was running for David when Philip joined him. Their eyes met as usual in an exchange of promise and surmise.

“I’d like to talk to you some time, Mr.… uh … Walter,” Philip said. His expression was habitually grave, and he was economical in his movements. He had no nervous mannerisms; he made an impression of cool composure.

“Sure, about anything in particular?”

“That depends on you.”

“Well, I don’t know what that means, but I’d like to find out. It looks as if we might have a little time off in the next couple of days. We’ll look out for each other. I have to get back inside now.” Their voices bore no relationship to what their eyes were saying. They held for another moment. Walter flicked away his cigarette and returned to the rehearsal with his heart pounding.

He couldn’t concentrate on work. Philip was taking charge. He had to prepare himself for the confrontation the boy was seeking. He felt on the verge of a dreaded revelation about himself, and he rejected it without even defining it in his mind. He couldn’t be what it seemed he might be. What about Debby? What about his attraction to Clara? Perhaps the memory of Harry made him think he wanted more than he did. The thought of being swallowed up into the grotesque, hermetic all-male community he had observed in New York terrified him. The brand. He was safe from Philip so long as he didn’t let himself get caught alone with him.

He lay in bed that night unable to sleep, memories flooding his mind despite the long discipline of keeping them locked away from his consciousness, astonishingly vivid memories, still capable, to his dismay, of giving him an erection. He lay on his back with his cock heavy on his belly and felt Harry’s body against him, heard the sigh of delight in his voice as Walter took him: “Yeah, honey. You’re the best ever. Do it, honey.”

The only friend of his boyhood. His hero, endowed with a physical splendor that might have overturned anybody’s normal controls. That had been the point, the excuse and justification. He had been an innocent, a pushover. His response to Philip was a sex-starved aberration. Physically, he was a mere stripling; it would be like going to bed with a child. Philip offered nothing that he wanted except perhaps a brief meeting of lips to acknowledge the connection that they had made with their eyes.

Walter tossed restlessly in bed, listening to David’s heavy breathing in the next room. His erection plagued him. He was tempted to take it next door and see what David would do with it. Playing around with David would be a more sensible solution than an entanglement with Philip that threatened to engage his emotions. It obviously couldn’t be primarily physical. Emotional entanglements were to be avoided at all costs. That was the wonderful thing about Clara. For the first time, he could imagine being friends with a girl. There was sexual attraction, of course; but she had a character as strong as a man’s. He couldn’t imagine anything happening between them that would give rise to the torments he had childishly allowed to get out of hand with Harry. If only she would yield a little further, acknowledge him as a man who could be important to her, she would give him the direction that would free him from these other cravings. He didn’t have to be lying here alone. His hand inched up onto his belly, and he satisfied his body’s needs, thoughts of Philip overlapping with memories of Harry, and was finally able to sleep.

David left the house at the usual early hour the next morning after asking Walter to stay at home to check some accounts that needed attention. “I’ll pop back later when I see how things are going. You’ll probably have to take rehearsal later on. I can’t postpone that Baldwin business any longer.”

More and more, Walter was becoming the director in all but name. It meant that he had to work to David’s overall concepts, but he was hoping that this restriction would soon be lifted. He went to work on the accounts at David’s desk in the living room.

He had been at it for some time when he heard the car in the drive and the honk of the horn summoning him. He went to the door and saw Philip getting out of the car. His heart leaped, and he took care not to look at the visitor as he went out.