The Secret Tunnel (2 page)

I kissed him deeply, told him I loved him, and left the house. And I did love him, do love him, but as I walked through cold, wet streets toward the station it was not Vince I was thinking of. I was thinking of Boy Morgan, and what we might do together. I was thinking of Boy’s slim hips, his strong shoulders, his long, slender cock twitching in my hand… He would be so glad to see me, and Belinda would be preoccupied with the baby. And Vince—well, Vince had decided not to come with me. I was a free agent. We had made no promises to one another, Vince and I; we were not married, like Morgan and Belinda, we had never said that we would forsake all others. It would not be my fault if Morgan seduced me. And what Vince didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him…

Yes, after so short a period of domestic happiness with
Vince, I had all the adulterer’s self-justifying excuses at my fingertips—and I knew it. Which, more than anything, more than the weather or the crowds or the prospect of traveling alone, explained my foul mood as I stomped into Waverley Station to catch the ten o’clock train to London—the Flying Scotsman.

 

I was so looking forward to taking this legendary journey with Vince that I had splurged on a first-class compartment, thinking of the fun we could have during the eight and a quarter hours between Waverley and Kings Cross. I still had his ticket in my jacket pocket; there had been no time to arrange a refund. Perhaps if I had not been so grumpy last night, or had spent less time fooling around this morning, I might have got my money back, but now it would go to waste.

“Can I help you with that, sir?”

I did not need help, and was about to tell the porter that I was more than capable of carrying a single suitcase—and then I looked at him. He can’t have been more than 18, at least if his smooth chin and fresh complexion were anything to go by, but he had the broad shoulders and sturdy thighs of a man. The cross words died on my tongue, and I put my suitcase down on the ground.

“Going to London, sir?” He had the typical Edinburgh lilt, which I had finally learned to understand after a year of dealing with colleagues and patients, who thought my constantly repeated “Pardon me?”s were a sign of idiocy.

“Yes, I am. Thank you.” It was an idiotic question—where else was I likely to be going?—but I was pleased with the little salute that he gave me, pushing his cap back slightly so I could see his thick brown hair tumbling over his forehead. He swung the case onto his cart, and I watched his shoulders bunching and flexing in his tight little jacket. I allowed him to walk ahead of me so that I could feast my
eyes on his absurdly round butt. He looked around, smiled, and winked.

“Tickets, please.”

The conductor was a mean-looking, surly son of a bitch, one of those to whom a uniform gives an excuse to be a bastard to everyone. When he saw my first-class ticket, his expression changed from generalized contempt to a sort of reluctant deference.

“Thank you,” I snapped, taking the ticket back.

“I take it,” said the porter—which was music to my ears, until he went on—“that you have a carriage reserved?”

“Indeed I do.” I handed him the reservation.

“This way, sir! Let’s get you comfortable.”

“There’s really no need,” I said, as we reached the carriage door. “I think I can manage from here.”

“No trouble, sir.” He had thick eyebrows for a lad of his age, and they were traveling up toward the peak of his cap.

“All right.” If he wanted a large tip, he was going to have to earn it. “Take it away.”

He hefted my case onto his shoulder, held the carriage door open, and followed me up the steps.

“In the rack, sir?”

“Yes, if you can reach.”

“Just about, sir.” He raised himself up on tiptoe—he wasn’t tall, only about five foot five—and managed to get the edge of the case into the steel luggage rack. His jacket rose way up his back, and I was able to appreciate the narrowness of his waist.

“Is that all, sir?” He stood at ease, smiling.

I glanced at my watch, and saw that we had a good quarter of an hour before the train was due to leave. “Actually, I’ve just remembered I need to get a couple of things out for the trip.”

“Yes, sir?”

“So would you mind getting it down again?”

“Certainly, sir. Anything you say.”

He reached up again and grabbed the handle of the suitcase, and then, in pulling it down, lost his balance. He would have fallen had I not place my hands on his hips.

“Oops.”

“Thank you, sir.”

I did not remove my hands. “Just put it down on the seat.”

This necessitated that he lean forward, which of course pressed his ass into my crotch.

There were passengers and railway staff all around us, so any further intimacies were problematic.

“I think you’ll have a very comfortable ride, sir,” he said, turning to face me. “As you can see, there are blinds on all the windows.”

“Ah, indeed. Perhaps you could show me how they work.”

“With pleasure, sir.”

He pulled down buff-colored shades over the external windows, and fastened them at the bottom with a shiny steel button.

“And what about these?” I gestured toward the windows that separated the carriage from the corridor.

“Like so, sir.” Within seconds, he’d obscured the view.

“Very good. Now what else can you show me?”

He turned around and started unbuckling his belt, and soon I was getting a good view of two very handsome hemispheres.

“First class,” I said.

He looked over his shoulder. “Want to fuck me, sir?”

“I’d like nothing better, boy.” My cock was like an iron bar again. “But is it a good idea?”

“Sounds like a good idea to me.”

“Isn’t it a bit…public?”

As if on cue, a whistle blew just yards away. He stood up,
flushed in the face, and pulled up his pants. “Aye. I suppose so.”

“Do you make a habit of seducing passengers like this, boy?”

“No, sir.”

“Only the first-class ones, I suppose, who might pay well.”

He looked crestfallen.

“I don’t blame you. I’d happily pay five pounds to get my cock up your ass.”

“You’re American, aren’t you, sir?”

“Yes, I am.”

“Is it true what they say?”

“What might that be?” I’d heard a lot of folklore about Americans, not least the prevalent notion that we were all multimillionaires.

“That you have really big cocks.”

This sounded so comic, in his Scottish accent, his face red, his eyes shining, that I had to bite the inside of my mouth to stop myself from laughing.

I grabbed his hand and placed it on my crotch. “Why don’t you find out for yourself?”

His eyes grew even wider.

“I… I think it must be true.”

“I guess it is.”

The whistle blew again, and we heard footsteps outside the carriage. The door handle turned, and we sprang apart.

“There you are, Arthur.” It was that mean conductor again. “There are passengers waiting to be attended to.”

“He hasn’t quite finished attending to me yet, thank you. Now, would you mind putting the case back up on the rack?”

“Yes, sir.”

The conductor hung around in the doorway.

“Was there something?” I asked, in my most arrogant Yankee tone.

“No, sir.” Oh, the emphasis on that last word! “Hurry up, Arthur.” He walked away, scowling.

“Thank you, sir.”

“Will I see you again, Arthur?”

“It’s a long way to London.”

“Here.” I pulled out my wallet and gave him a ten-shilling note. “A little payment on account.”

“Thank you, sir. That’s very generous.”

“Don’t worry, Arthur. You’ll earn every penny.”

“What’s your name, sir?”

“Mitchell. Edward Mitchell. But my friends call me Mitch.”

He pocketed the bill and gave my cock a last squeeze. “Thanks, Mitch.” He winked over his shoulder and was gone.

I took a book out of my case—I was greatly looking forward to reading Agatha Christie’s latest novel,
The Big Four
, and had been saving it especially for the trip—hoisted the luggage aloft, and settled into my seat.

At ten o’clock sharp, the Flying Scotsman puffed and jolted its way out of Waverley Station in a great cloud of steam, and as I watched the hills of Edinburgh recede I reflected that this was my second view that morning of Arthur’s Seat.

READERS OF MY PREVIOUS ADVENTURES MAY RECALL THAT, after the completion of studies at Cambridge, I intended to return to my native Boston to pursue a career as a doctor. But plans change—and when an opportunity arose at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, I jumped at it. There were many reasons for this, the main one, of course, being Vincent West, to whom I was devoted and with whom I wanted to live, wherever it may be. We planned to move to America, where, I naively assumed, he would be able to walk into a good job—but, in fact, Uncle Sam was against us, and it would have been easier to get a camel through the eye of a needle than to get Vince through US immigration. When I made the mistake of losing my temper at the American embassy, the officials started asking all sorts of awkward questions about the nature of our friendship, and hinted that the police might be interested. We retired, hurt, and began to consider a future in the United Kingdom, where doctors were in short supply and I could earn enough to keep both of us in reasonable comfort. Vince got a good job
in an Edinburgh publishing house, and we both loved our new Caledonian existence.

But there were other reasons why I was drawn to that rocky city, less romantic but no less real. For it was here in Edinburgh, around 50 years ago, that Arthur Conan Doyle had embarked on his medical and literary careers. Here he had trained at the University, and here he had published his first story. I saw Edinburgh entirely through Conan Doyle’s eyes, scanning its narrow side streets for evidence of crime, hanging around the Castle eyeing what I thought might be suspicious types—and, of course, eyeing the soldiers, who came and went in noisy, bekilted groups. Both Vince and I developed a taste for these rough and ready Scottish lads, and we occasionally invited one of them back to our lodgings for supper. The fact that I was American, and a doctor, seemed to make it easy for them to engage in acts that they might have thought disgusting otherwise. The money didn’t hurt, either.

The only crimes I stumbled across in Edinburgh were, alas, those committed by Vince and myself and our occasional guests in our apartment on Nicolson Street—and we made very sure that there were no snooping “detectives” around when we got down to those particular felonies. That aside, life rolled along without incident; I did well at the hospital, and Vince did well at the publishers, we made some good friends, enjoyed plays and concerts and long walks on weekends. It was an agreeable existence, illuminated by our deepening love for each other, and by our regular, inventive, and extremely athletic sex life.

But once a sleuth, always a sleuth—or so I told myself. My brush with crime in Drekeham Hall, and my brilliant (I thought) methods of discovering the villain, had given me an appetite for amateur detection that was far from satisfied. I slaked it on detective fiction, of which there was no shortage. I devoured every new Agatha Christie as it appeared,
and had become completely obsessed by the personality and methods of her detective hero, Hercule Poirot, the fastidious Belgian with the superfluity of “little grey cells.” I loved, also, Lord Peter Wimsey, the gorgeous aristocratic hero of Dorothy L. Sayers’s novels—and I fantasized, while reading about his deeds, about how this blond athlete might take to a dark-haired, muscular, American assistant with specialized medical knowledge. We could do great things together…

My family kept me supplied with lurid crime magazines, the covers of which adorned our walls. Conan Doyle I still revered and reread, and found all sorts of erotic undertones in his novels and stories which I’m sure would have disgusted him, but which delighted me. Vince said that he half expected to find me masturbating over Sherlock Holmes novels, so intently did I read them—and, although I laughed it off, it was in fact true. I had frequently read between the lines so deeply that I would finger myself just as Holmes and Watson fingered the villain, shooting my load as the police shot their guns. Detection and erection did more than rhyme, in my book.

While my medical career was going according to plan—in another year I’d be fully qualified—my detective career had stalled. Without crime there could be no detection, and Edinburgh seemed to be a sort of crime-free Utopia. I suspected all sorts of villainy, and Vince often accused me, with good reason, of deliberately seeing the worst in people just to feed my own appetite for mystery. However, I have always believed that readiness and preparation are the key to success in life, so I kept my powers of observation and “deductive reasoning,” as Holmes would have it, in good order.

To that end, I found myself studying my fellow passengers as they passed up and down the corridor outside my carriage, settling themselves in for the trip. There was the overdressed dowager type with her mousy traveling companion, bustling along like a glorious galleon with a dingy little dinghy in its
wake. They looked respectable enough, but who knew the truth? The dowager could be a man in women’s clothes—I’d encountered such things, both in life and in fiction—perhaps on the run from the police, or heading to London for some piece of skulduggery. Her companion, shabby as she looked, could be the daughter of an aristocratic family, kidnapped and drugged, brainwashed into a state of semiconscious slavery, a pawn in a daring ransom drama… They passed by, followed by my little porter friend, almost buried under a crazy burden of hatboxes and suitcases. I don’t suppose they’d get to see Arthur’s seat as I had, I thought, rubbing my crotch. How could I get him in a dark corner before we reached London? Perhaps the first-class lavatories would do… There would be room enough in there to bend him over and give him what he wanted, and of course there would be the great advantage of a lock on the door…