Essence of Time (5 page)

Jack shrugged. “Yeah. I’m not as brave as you, my brother.  Not even close.” He rose, stretched, and Rob kept his eyes trained outward. He shifted, a low buzzing sound starting in his ears, which he knew could only be remedied by one thing. “Law school for me. Then take over the old man’s construction company. Find a lovely girl. Father some spawn; join the country club. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.” 

Rob sighed and watched Jack wander back into the apartment.  “I am feeling a need.” He called back to his friend. “A need...”

Jack poked his head back out the door, a wicked grin on his face. “Thought you’d never ask. Check this out.” He tossed a device onto Rob’s lap. He picked it up, unfolded it, and realized it was some kind of phone. “Gordon Senior got them for us. Try it.” Rob put it to his ear, and grinned at the sound of a female voice on the other end.

**** 

Rob took another long drag from the joint, let his hand drift down to grip his shaft. He and Jack sat, watching the two girls writhe around each other.  Jack held up his glass of whiskey. Rob clinked it and stood. “Done being a spectator,” he kept his eyes pinned on the women kissing on his bed. “Break it up ladies. Rob needs some attention.” They giggled, and parted, letting him lie down between them. One latched onto his lips, the other one took his throbbing cock in her mouth. He threaded his hands in her hair and closed his eyes. Let himself imagine Christine one last time. After only a few minutes, he pushed one of them away from his face and sat. His need was great, overpowering and he had to do something about it. He could sense Jack’s presence near him. “

You,” Jack’s voice was low, commanding. “Jenna, right?” The dark haired beauty who’d accompanied her friend over to their apartment looked up at him and nodded. “Roll over. My friend needs your ass.” She sighed and did so, nearly making Rob come all over himself at the sight of her sinuous, sexy form stretching and rolling, going up on all fours presenting her ass to him and her mouth to Jack’s waiting erection.

He rolled a condom down over himself, letting the pot and booze numb him to the sight of his friend’s incredible thick cock fucking the girl’s mouth. The other girl was behind him now, kissing and nibbling at his neck, running her hands all over him, pinching his nipples, cupping his balls. She was like a god damned octopus.  The music pulsed through the room. The noise of the partying outside slipped in through the open sliding glass door. The girl slid a finger inside Jenna’s pussy, then pulled it out, put it to Rob’s lips. He tasted her, keeping his eyes trained on Jack as the woman swallowed him again and again.

A tube of lube appeared. He slid it around and inside the girl’s ass, breaching her tight ring of muscles with his finger first, moaning as the other girl kept working his balls and lower. At one point he looked up, a grey fuzziness edging his vision. Jack’s deep blues were on him, his hands buried in the girl’s coal black hair, his hips thrusting. “Fuck her man. Do it now.”

A piercing urgency slanted across his vision, nearly blinding him. The other girl gripped the base of his cock, guided him to Jenna’s waiting ass. He groaned at her tightness, reached around, found the hard nub of her engorged clit, and rubbed as he slipped in further. The other girl’s lips found his. He thrust his tongue into her mouth, tasted pot, beer and something salty and spicy. Jenna cried out as he breached her, buried his cock in her ass. Jack kept whispering to her, still fucking her mouth. Rob tried not to get overwhelmed by what he was doing. The sight of his friend’s slick red shaft going in and out of her mouth, the tight-glove sensation of her body, the other girl reaching back, down his ass, and pressing into him…”Holy fuck!” he yelled and pounded into Jenna.

Jack groaned and closed his eyes. Jenna groaned, arched her back and Rob cried out as he came in an intense, somewhat scary gush.  The other girl gripped his face, kissed him as his hips kept moving, kept fucking as if of their own accord. When he opened his eyes, he met Jack’s, twinkling blue gaze, wicked and satisfied.

Chapter Four

Two Years Later - Paris

Rob tried to focus and lost the battle. All he could see was René. The man’s voice was musical, and his nearly six-foot frame was slight, firm, and graceful. He liked to lean on the stainless steel counters in their classrooms, running his hands through his thick black hair. Rob had kept his head down, tried to concentrate. He’d learned a lot, making it through to the final stages of his degree, now in the master pastry class with one René Guilard. The man who would not stop staring at him.

He’d been living small, in a one-room flat in the sixteenth
arrondissment
. A solid four-mile walk one way to
l’ecole
every day, but he loved it. The anonymity of it soothed him. He learned, he cooked, he walked the Seine and he had avoided pretty much any and all direct human contact for nearly two years. But now, his nerve endings sizzled every time the man looked his way. Those deep brown eyes were unsettling in the extreme.

“Wait.” The man had said to him one evening at the end of class. Rob’s French was rudimentary at best, transactional at worst, but he understood what was being asked of him. He nodded, watching the rest of the class file out of the working gourmet kitchen. His puff pastry had failed, flopped back onto itself like a flaccid, useless dick. He frowned, watching the other, better students fawn around their instructor for about thirty minutes past class time. Finally the room emptied. René fussed around the various examples of pastry perfection, then stared at Rob’s poor, limp excuse of a creation. 

“So,” He flicked at it as if touching road kill. Rob frowned.  He should have gone to medical school. “This thing is what you give me?”

“Yes. Well. I mean, I suppose.” His word echoed through the empty space.  “Never mind. Sorry.” He rose. The man was in his personal space so fast Rob didn’t have time to breathe.

“No, you are overreacting. Typical American.” The man’s presence was overwhelming. Rob tried not to breathe too heavily. “Come.” He walked away as quickly as he had appeared. “We will have wine and discuss.”

They'd enjoyed enough French wine for four men their size and by the end of the night, Rob was dizzy with the compliments and booze. When he felt hands on his shoulders, easing up into his scalp, combined with the easy French of his host, he’d smiled and relaxed. René’s lips touched his neck, making him shiver and his cock get so hard he grunted and leaned forward.

René stopped, came around to face him. “Robert.” His voice rasped lower than usual. “I find I am very drawn to you.”  Rob sighed and looked up at the ceiling.  This was it. The moment of truth. He looked back into René’s dark gaze, put his hand against the other man’s cheek, repressing a groan of happiness at the feel of the rasp against his hand. René smiled. “You are a virgin, no?”

Rob laughed. “No. I’m hardly…” The other man touched his lips to Rob’s then, shutting off everything resembling logic in his brain. The rough feel of the René ‘s skin against his, the hard planes of his body pressed tight as they rose, standing, grasping each other, both of them breathing heavy, groping and reaching out as if for an anchor in a storm.

In seconds they were naked. Rob felt the other man’s hard cock against his, rubbing into him, making him moan with need. “My darling,” René breathed into his ear. “I must have you.”

Rob sighed and gripped René’s flesh, fisting his length, running a thumb along the fluid beading the head. He cradled the man’s face with his other hand, ran his tongue around his full lips.
Dear god what was he doing? Since when did he…holy shit.
René dropped to his knees, cupped Rob’s balls with one hand and slipped his lips over and down Rob’s aching cock. “I’m not gonna last. It’s…been...a while.” Rob gasped and groaned at the sensations of lips, tongue, the finger that caressed him between ass and balls. The orgasm surprised him, made his knees buckle as he gripped René’s dark hair and shoved his cock down the man’s throat. “Oh sweet Jesus.” He moaned and felt himself give, release like he never had before. The sounds René made as he drank him down made it worse, made him want to come all over again.

René rose to his feet, wiping the back of his dark hand across his lips, his eyes sparkling with lust. “Yes,” he rasped, gripping Rob’s neck and pulling him back in for a mind-boggling tangle of lips, tongues and teeth. Rob groaned and pressed his still hard shaft against René’s. “Lovely,” René whispered against Rob’s neck, as he turned him slowly. Rob’s whole body burned with something he could not identify.  He felt empty, cored out like an apple.

“Please.” He sighed as René ran warm hands down his back, waist and hips, tugging him close. Rob arched his back, pressing back against the heat of the man’s hard shaft.  He tilted his hips again, needing more.

“Shh, my love,” René’s voice stayed low, soothing. His hands kept roaming, his fingers running down Robs’ balls and lower. “Must go slow.”

“No.” He grunted, shoving his hips back. “Take me. Now.”

René chuckled and Rob felt an oily warmth coat his ass, sensed a finger at his tightest hole. He tried to relax. But fear ringed the edges of his consciousness. René leaned over his back, licked his neck, turned his face around and kissed him, so soft and gentle Rob relaxed against him. “That’s it my love,” René’s French rolled around in Rob’s brain, combined with the wine and long-buried need. Something breached his ass, firm, painful at first. Rob gasped and tensed.  But René’s lips, his soft words of comfort and that finger that kept working in, and up, reaching high and…

 “Shit!” Rob grunted as his cock jerked. René withdrew his finger slowly, using his other hand on Rob’s hard nipple, then lower, stroking his newly hardened cock. “Mmm hmmm, that’s it. Right there. Now please let me show you.” He sighed into Rob’s ear.

Rob moaned, as the room dimmed.  Something bigger pressed against him, and he arched back. “God, René. Please fuck me. Please!” He reached back, fisted his hands in the man’s silky hair, tried to relax his muscles and let it happen.

Slowly, surely, René eased inside him, using his hand to work Rob’s shaft, his lips to soothe and comfort as Rob gripped the edge of the couch. Finally, he was fulfilled. Now, this was his moment. As René thrust high and hard and cried out Rob felt his cock jerk and release again, coating his belly with warmth. René gripped his shoulders and pounded into him making him grunt with pain and pleasure and the amazing erotic sensation of perfection.

****

One Year Later

“Rob!” The voice demanded.

 He groaned and rolled over, trying to bash the alarm clock that kept calling his name. “God damn it man!” A sudden wetness at his ear, a hand on his hard on, then teeth on his nipple forced his eyes open. Confused, disoriented, as he was pretty much every morning lately. His chest hurt. He put his hand over the pain. Lips covered his. A tongue invaded his mouth. An expert set of hands found his cock. “My love,” the voice muttered against his lips. “You must wake. There is a phone call for you.”

He groaned and sat on the edge of the thin mattress.  His neck and shoulders ached. His head spun from too much rich red wine. But his body buzzed, cock standing to painful attention. He kept his head down trying to process.  Images swirled through his brain. Christine. Jack. The last doctor he met here in Paris on the sly, offering his medical history as if presenting a prison sentence. The specialist's sympathetic eyes. The recent clean PET scan.

“Robert!” The man’s voice startled him. “Take the phone. Now. Emergency.” He looked up at René’s dark eyes and took the phone, not fully awake, and let René kiss him once. Then he stood, trying to focus on the voice coming at him from thousands of miles away.

“Rob! Is that you? Can you hear me?”

“Suzanne?” He ran hand down his face, filled a glass with water and downed it.  His chest tightened. He’d stayed in contact with Jack for a few months using the phones his father had provided them. But Jack had gone deep into the BDSM scene, nearly disappearing while raving about Jenna, “subs” and “Doms,” and all sorts of shit Rob had no frame of reference for. Of course he, in the meantime, had been seduced by a famous male chef.  He tried not to groan too loudly into the phone.

“Rob. Oh honey, it’s Jack.”

“What’s up? Where are you?”

Suzanne had gone to medical school and, last he heard, had found the love her life in the form of one Mitchell Baxter, neurosurgeon to be. She whispered and he could hear the tinny sounds of a busy hospital behind her.  “I’m trying not to screw up my current rotation, thanks. That’s why I’m calling you. Have you heard from him since graduation?”

Rob winced. He’d had every intention of going back to the states for Jack’s law school matriculation. But René had made other plans and they’d ended up in Nice for that week. “No. Did you go?”

“Yeah. But we had to leave that night. Mitchell had to start his residency.” He heard her sigh. “Rob, seriously I’m worried.”

“Why? Isn’t he going back to Ann Arbor?”

“I don’t know. He was so intent on Jenna. Jack was so obsessed with her…crap…hang on.”

Rob waited in the kitchen, smiling when René handed him a strong espresso. The whole Midwest bullshit seemed so incredibly far away. He had guilt about not making it back for his friend’s graduation, but he’d claimed to understand.  Jack’s last words burned a hole in his brain just then, “I’m going to ask her Rob. I want her so badly, all the time. Is this what it feels like? Love?”

Rob recalled laughing, trying to keep his brain from going into overdrive.
Jenna? The girl from graduation night?
He’d tried to keep it light. “Come on man. Remember? We are not doing this. Not yet.”

“Sorry dude.” Jack’s voice had been high, tight, and utterly different. Rob frowned, remembering.  “I’ve found her, I swear. This is it.”

“Okay, well, if you say so,” Rob had remained non-committal. Lame. Some friend he was.

“Rob!” Suzanne’s voice snapped him back. “God dammit! Are you there? I am worried about him. He hasn’t answered his phone for three days. I know he was going to ask her to marry him. We need to find him.”