Forth into Light (The Peter & Charlie Trilogy) (26 page)

Chunky comfortable-looking outdoor furniture stood about on deck. There was a table with many bottles on it. Judy went to it and took the top off a thermos and looked into it. “There’s ice. I’ve never seen so many different kinds of booze as they have on board. It’ll give you something to ponder while I’m gone.” She drew back as he stepped toward her. “No. Don’t come near me. If we start anything I won’t be able to stop. You’ve already talked me out of one shower today. I’ve got to assert myself while I still can. I won’t be more than five minutes.”

“Are we all right about the big problem?” he asked as a reminder.

“Don’t worry.” She turned from him and disappeared down the companionway.

He poured himself an unadventurous whiskey and wandered over to the rail and looked up at the house. Lights showed in Martha’s windows, but the rest was dark. The warm glow he felt when he thought of the family spread through him. Charlie filled the front of his mind, perhaps asleep already, sprawled out on the bed with his fabulous erection lifting the sheet. Little Pete crowded into the picture, curled into a fetus with his fists clenched. Briefly, he wished he was back with them. It was nice to know that if he ran, he could be back in six minutes flat.

He left the rail and moved forward to the navigational area. There was a wide panel of dials and meters. He saw that it was a twin-engine job, very powerful. It seemed only a moment later when he heard a sound behind him. He turned and his mouth fell open. “Oh, my God,” he murmured.

Her dark hair was combed out softly around her face, which was scrubbed of makeup. She wore a long silk dressing gown under which she was clearly naked. She was barefoot. The reduction in her height sent a surge of protective tenderness through him. He started forward and checked himself as he became aware of boats around them and the openness of the deck where they were standing.

“We’d better get below quickly if we don’t want to do it in front of the whole town.”

Her irresistible lips lifted in the smile that made her look so young and she held out her hand to him as she moved back swiftly to the companionway. He had an arm around her by the time they were at the foot of it and a hand had drawn aside the silken stuff of the gown, uncovering one breast, small, round, firmly lifting as he knew it would, her deep tan fading out to milky white below the jewel of the nipple.

“My God. Beautiful,” he said, holding her and running a finger along infinitely soft flesh.

She put her hand on the top of his trousers and gave a little tug. “In here,” she whispered and broke from him, pulling her dressing gown around her, and led him forward through a short gangway to the master cabin in the bow. Peter unbuttoned his shirt as he followed her and pulled it off as he entered. He kicked off his sandals as she closed the door behind them. He made note of the bed that filled the cabin from bulkhead to bulkhead while he pulled his slacks and undershorts over his feet. He turned to her naked, his sex straining up before him as she dropped her dressing gown. They stood transfixed for an instant as their eyes met and then darted over each other.

“Peter.” It was a little cry of astonishment and admiration. He started toward her, but she made a slight restraining gesture with a hand. “Wait. I want so to look at you. If you touch me, I won’t be able to see you. I want to see what makes me feel like this.”

“Hurry. I don’t know how long I can keep my hands off you. God, you’re gorgeous.” She was, in fact, as close to what he thought of as the ideal woman as any he had ever seen. He knew it wasn’t every man’s ideal. Her breasts were small, her hips rounded but not wide, her legs long and slim. Her pubic hair was trim and sparse (she didn’t look bearded like some women he had seen) so that he could see the way the insides of her thighs flowed into her torso and the little folds of her vagina. It had taken time for him to get used to the female’s secret genitalia but the void had been filled by his knowledge of the excitement he could arouse there. There was an exquisite fragility about her narrow shoulders that moved him deeply. He wanted to hold her gently and stroke her glowing skin.

She approached him slowly, her eyes as intent on him as his on her. “How beautiful you are,” she said wonderingly. “As beautiful as any girl I’ve ever seen. I didn’t know a man could be beautiful like that. Your chest is so lovely without any hair, but hard and powerful. Your behind is beautiful, too. I saw it.” She had moved within reach. Peter laughed and lifted his arms to her. She drew her head back with a little shake. “Just one more minute. This is the most amazing of all.” She put out a hand and ran the back of her fingers along his sex, lifting it slightly. Peter gasped and his hips gave a little forward leap. “There is a lot of it, but it’s so smooth and pale and graceful, not all angry and swollen-looking like the men I’ve seen.” The tips of her fingers brushed his testicles.

“Jesus. If you go on like this, I’ll come, standing right here.”

“Could you? That would be rather thrilling, but I want too much to feel you all over me.”

Peter took a step toward her and they both cried out as their bodies and mouths met and their arms encircled each other. In another moment, they were on the bed, continuing to cry out at the initial exploration of each other’s bodies.

The pleasure Peter found in women was rooted in the pleasure he could give them; giving pleasure excited him sexually. There was a smell, a taste, an ooze of mysterious essences that he knew were supposed to make him lustful but they never had. He had learned to isolate his senses from them and concentrate on the nerve patterns he could play on in erogenous areas. His passion was liberated when he found that her body sent out only very subtly those primeval signals. He made love to her with his hands and mouth. He wanted (he smiled to himself as he thought it) to prove to her that a man could rival a woman as a lover. She shuddered and beat her feet on the mattress and tangled her fingers in his hair as he took her with his tongue. He chuckled to himself and brought her to her first orgasm without bringing his own thrillingly aching sex into play. When he knew she wanted it, he entered her slowly as she directed him with her hands. They rocked together to her rhythm, her hands on his buttocks, working him into her. The duality of his nature was such that an awareness of his own body contributed to his excitement, just as he could share with her the thrill of being entered. A glimpse of his sinewy hand on her tender breast, his long-muscled arm extended to brace himself, his sex springing out from his groin to claim her—all gave him little jolts of pleasure at the splendor of being a man. Identifying with the male-female in her, he let her roll him onto his back and he lay passively and brought her almost immediately to a second climax as she assumed the dominant position and moved her hands down over his belly so that she could hold the base of his sex and use it as if it were her own. His loins tingled with the massive orgasm building up in him which he had so far managed to contain.

He felt something surrender in her, melt under his pressure, and he was once more on top of her, driving harder into her as she urged him on. Her hips lifted to him. She slipped hands between his thrusting buttocks and found his testicles and fondled them. The tension was too great for him to postpone any longer; he felt her wanting him now with all of herself. He took a decisive grip on her and, as if she sensed that the moment had come, she flung her arms back above her head and uttered a great cry of triumph as her body was shaken by another orgasm. She yielded up her body totally to receive him. He felt as if he was being torn apart as everything in him burst and he drove his orgasm into the jubilant welcome of her body. They continued to cry out for some moments, their bodies leaping and thrashing together. They lay still finally for a few more minutes until Peter’s shrinking sex slipped from her and he rolled off her onto his back.

“My goodness,” he sighed. “How glorious.”

She moved in close against him. He lifted an arm to draw her closer. She lay her head in his armpit, her lips just brushing his chest. “Glorious,” she murmured. “Glorious. Glorious. I know at last. You have all the sweetness and tenderness I’ve known with women—and this.” She ran her hand down over his body and rested it on his moist sex. “It has such strength and yet it’s so gentle. It caressed and soothed everything in me until I wanted it to have all of me. I think it’s bigger than the others I’ve known, but it doesn’t bully. That’s what’s extraordinary. Do you know what I mean?”

“Not really. I obviously wouldn’t know anything about heterosexual men, the ones who make a point of being he-men.”

“Yes, well, those are the ones a girl like me is apt to attract. You can’t believe what some of them are like—as you say, proving that they’re he-men. Are we going to do it again?”

“Preliminaries are under way. Any minute now.”

“I feel it happening. Do you know how I’d like it this time? I want you to do it all with this—what shall I call it?”

“What? Oh. Anything but penis. That’s the dirtiest word in the language. As far as I’m concerned, it’s my cock.”

“All right, I want you to put your cock into me again and make me come as often as you can until you’re ready to have another great orgasm in me.” At this, it reared up and escaped her hand. They both laughed. “Take me the way most men do—just fuck me with your cock. When you do it, it’s so marvelous that I can’t imagine wanting anything else. No substitutes. I’ll have to find a man exactly like you and live happily ever after. I wonder if I could, even if I did find him.”

He propped himself on an elbow so that he lay on his side up close against her and they smiled questioningly into each other’s eyes.

“One plain old-fashioned fuck without any trimmings, coming up,” he announced with laughter. “It seems unworthy of your divine body and my exotic skills. Maybe it’ll make a he-man out of me. I may not hold out as long as before.”

“That doesn’t matter. There’re all the other things I want to do later. We have all night, haven’t we?”

They had all night and they spent most of it in various acts of passion. As the sun began to light the sky, they fell into a deep, exhausted, satiated sleep. Neither of them had let drop a word of love.

Mike Cochran stood at the bar waiting to settle the details of his acquisition of Dimitri. The latter was behind the bar, pouring drinks into six glasses on a tray. While he did so he put on a little burlesque show for his famous customer. He flipped his hips when he turned to reach for a bottle; he added ice to a glass with a comically limp wrist; he turned his back and flexed the muscles of his shapely buttocks as he gathered up some paper napkins and looked over his shoulder at Mike and winked. When he had completed his preparations, he put the tray on the bar and swayed close to the older man’s face, finger pertly under his chin, his lips parted, his eyelids lowered.

“So now, Mr. Cochran? What can I give you? Do you want another drink? It is a great honor for you to spend all evening here.”

Mike looked at him without moving, a slight smile on his lips. He had spent the last couple of hours admiring the youth’s physical charms and now he wanted to take possession of them. The seductive body so tantalizingly revealed by the open shirt and tight trousers was as desirable as a boy’s could be. Mike hadn’t indulged his taste for young men until his success was established and the failure of two marriages had convinced him that his relationships with women were probably doomed to be fleeting. He made a point of restraining it except on his travels, when there was less risk of dangerous or embarrassing entanglements, and occasionally in New York or Hollywood when he was with people he could trust absolutely. He had first become aware of this element in his sexual makeup when he had recognized with incredulity the strong current of physical desire in his feelings for George Leighton. While he chased girls with him, making a show of equal enthusiasm, he was tortured by love for his friend.

By the time he had quelled this unwanted passion, he had resolved to make no room in his life for the awkward and unprofitable comedy of love. Experience had quickly demonstrated that humanity could be neatly divided between those who were hurt and those who did the hurting. He was determined to range himself among the latter. Sex was too readily available to allow it to become a tiresome obsession with any one individual.

Dimitri had been busy with his customers all evening, but he had found time to single out Mike for special attention. Mike was used to this; many young men hoped to use him to further their careers, but with Dimitri it obviously wasn’t ambition—he was bed-prone. He radiated desire for what Mike intended to give him. He had whispered at one point that he wasn’t free later, but with so little conviction in his pretty face that Mike had dismissed it as a bargaining point. “Aren’t you going to close up soon?” Mike asked.

“Yes. Very soon. Fifteen minutes, maybe.”

“Good. Will you come to the hotel or do you have a better idea?”

“But I tell you. Not tonight. It’s not possible.” He swayed a little closer and fluttered his eyelids. “Tomorrow all day. Any time you say.”

“I haven’t been hanging around all this time for nothing.” Mike kept his eyes on Dimitri’s and reached into his light jacket for his wallet. He pulled it out and laid it out flat on the bar. He opened it slightly to reveal the bills within it.

Dimitri’s eyes flickered down to it and he drew back with a little mime of indignation. “What are you thinking? Can you believe I take money? I only go with those I like. I like you very much. Why should I take money?”

Mike wished he wouldn’t talk. There was an intrinsic falseness in every word he spoke that was very boring. “I’m sure you don’t take money, but why shouldn’t I give you a present if you have to change your plans for tonight?”

Dimitri dropped his hand and laid it on the bar so that it just brushed against Mike’s and the wallet. He leaned closer and ran the tip of his tongue along his upper lip. “What can I do?” He looked at Mike with bewitching but vacuous eyes. “It is very hard to refuse you, but I have a friend for tonight. He is waiting.”