Three Wrong Turns in the Desert

by Neil S. Plakcy

  Looking directly into Liam’s eyes, Aidan unbuckled his belt and unfastened his shorts and let them drop to the floor. He was already barefoot, so all he was left wearing was his boxers, and his stiff dick was tenting them. Liam reached across, putting one hand on each side of Aidan’s waist, pushing the boxers down as they kissed.

  Both of them were fully hard by then. Aidan resisted the urge to fall into Liam’s arms, instead maneuvering his hips so that his dick slapped against Liam’s. “That’s the way you want to play it?” Liam said, his voice husky.

  It became a sword fight, each of them slapping at the other. Liam grabbed his dick at the root and swung it against Aidan, and they battled until Liam gave in. He grabbed Aidan and pressed him close, lowering his head so they could kiss as they embraced.

  Aidan’s pulse raced at the heat Liam’s body threw off. He loved the way his chest hair feathered against Liam’s smooth skin, the way his hands fastened onto Liam’s shoulder blades. He pressed against Liam so hard, it was like he hoped they could meld into one being.

  “I want you inside me,” Aidan panted into Liam’s chest. “Oh, god, I want you in me so bad.”

  Liam took hold of Aidan’s shoulders and turned him around so that Aidan faced the stone wall. Aidan spread his legs, reached out to the wall, and pressed his cheek to the cold stone. “You’re lucky I was a boy scout, back in Jersey,” Liam said.

  “Always prepared?” Aidan asked.

  “You bet. Our troop leader was my friend Barry’s uncle, and he gave us all kinds of useful advice. Like always have a condom on you, because you never know when you’ll get lucky.”

  “Are you lucky tonight?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Liam said, as Aidan heard a spurt of lube, and felt Liam’s finger, cold and wet, snake into his ass. “And so are you.”

  Liam kissed Aidan’s back, from shoulder blade to shoulder blade, as his index finger explored Aidan’s ass. Aidan was lost in the sensation, loving the contact between their bodies. He’d never felt this sense so strongly before, wanting another man inside him, wanting them to be so connected.

  “Take a deep breath,” Liam said, kissing Aidan’s neck and using his hands to spread Aidan’s ass cheeks wide.

  The pain shot through Aidan’s body as Liam’s dick entered him. He couldn’t help crying out. Blake thought anal sex was too messy, so they’d hardly done it over their ten plus years together, no matter how much Aidan had longed for it. And Blake’s dick had been slimmer than Liam’s, and shorter, too.

  “Sorry,” Liam said. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

  Aidan gritted his teeth and bucked back against Liam. “Oh, god, just fuck me, please.”

  The pain turned to fire as Liam moved slowly in and out of Aidan’s ass. He felt the head of Liam’s dick banging against his prostate, and he began to pant and sweat. He pushed back from the wall, Liam inside him, and then turned to the bed. Liam’s dick popped out as Aidan kneeled on the bed, raising his butt in offering.

  “That is such a sweet ass,” Liam said. He followed Aidan, kneeling behind him on the bed. Holding his dick, he aimed it at Aidan’s hole and bucked into him. He was sweating, too, a fine sheen covering his body as his chest heaved.

  As good as it felt, Aidan thought it could be better. “No, it’s still not right,” he said. “I want to be able to look at you.”

  He pulled away from Liam, feeling a momentary pang of emptiness as Liam’s dick left his ass, and sat back on the bed. He leaned far back against the pillows and opened his legs wide, pulling them back toward his shoulders. “Now,” he said. “Come fuck me.”

  “With pleasure,” Liam said, and he kneeled on the bed in front of Aidan, guiding his dick back toward Aidan’s ass. It took a minute to get the position and the rhythm right, and then their eyes were locked together as Liam pistoned into Aidan’s ass.

  Both of them were panting heavily as Liam grabbed Aidan’s dick and started jerking it, timing his strokes to the movement of his dick in Aidan’s ass. Then Liam couldn’t hold out any longer, and he howled, as his ejaculation shook his body.

  The pressure pushed Aidan over the edge as well, and he shot ribbons of come into Liam’s fist. Aidan grabbed Liam’s shoulders and pulled him down.

  “I’m too heavy for you,” Liam protested, trying to back away.

  “You’re just right,” Aidan said, pressing down to keep Liam in place. “This is just right.”

  20 – Checkpoint

  Wednesday morning, Aidan awoke with a piss hard-on, and tried to creep out of the bed without disturbing Liam. “Where are you going?” the bodyguard asked, grabbing his leg with a strong hand. Then the fingers of that hand moved up Aidan’s leg, tickling his thigh and dancing across his groin.

  He pulled Aidan toward him, taking Aidan’s stiff dick in his mouth, and Aidan’s body was racked with exquisite torture. The piss-proud dick didn’t want to give up its load, and Aidan writhed and gasped until Liam pulled off. “You’ve got me hard now, too,” he said. “Where’s the bathroom in this place?”

  They grabbed shorts and Aidan led the way back to the toilet he’d found the night before. There was just the one, so they shared, standing next to each other and aiming their streams into a trough along the floor. It was a sensual pain, forcing the urine out of their stiff dicks, and as they were finishing Liam leaned over and kissed Aidan.

  Aidan had made love in better places, and worse, but right then he wanted to be nowhere else than in that rudimentary stone bathroom. He leaned down to suck on Liam’s nipple, and the bodyguard arched his back and moaned. “We shouldn’t,” he gasped. “Anyone could...”

  Aidan ignored his protests. He spit in his hand and reached into Liam’s shorts. As he sucked the big man’s nipples, he jerked his cock. “You are such a bad boy,” Liam panted, but he did nothing to stop Aidan. “I’m going to have to punish you.”

  “Really?” Aidan pulled back from sucking, retreated his hand from Liam’s shorts. “How?”

  “Oh, god, don’t stop,” Liam said.

  “Talk to me, then,” Aidan said, grabbing Liam’s dick, slick with saliva and precome. “Tell me what you want to do to me.”

  He bent back to Liam’s dick again. “I should take you over my knee,” Liam said, gasping between words. “Smack that beautiful ass of yours until it’s red. Them smother it with cream and pry apart those round, ruby-colored cheeks so I can fuck you...” He gulped as Aidan bit his nipple. “Fuck you till you scream.”

  With a strangled cry, Liam shot off in Aidan’s mouth.

  Aidan backed away at last. “I might just take you up on that,” he said. Despite the pressure of his dick, stiff to the point of aching, he backed away, then slid out the door of the rest room.

  The shower was in small room next door to the toilet—a nozzle stuck out from the wall, with a drain in the floor. Aidan was standing under the flow, soaping himself, when the door opened and Liam slid in. “I thought I locked that,” Aidan said.

  “Like a lock can keep me out,” the bodyguard said. He was naked but for a towel wrapped around his mid-section. He reached down to Aidan’s belly and grabbed a handful of lather, which he transferred to Liam’s dick. “You’re not the only one who can take charge around here,” he said, leaning down to kiss Aidan.

  He kept his mouth fastened firmly on Aidan’s as he rubbed his hand up and down the length of Aidan’s dick. It didn’t take long before Aidan’s dick was spurting come just a shade darker than the soapy lather around it.

  They finished their shower, then breakfasted on sugar crepes in the restaurant of the Hotel Sidi Driss. As Aidan was checking out, Abbas, the desk clerk, slipped him a piece of paper with four words in Roman script, and what he assumed were the same words in Arabic script. “If you need help in Tataouine,” he said. “My cousin Nailah, she help you.”

  Aidan thanked him. He wanted to say something—that there was a larger world out there, that there were places where Abbas could live more openly—but Liam was waiting im
patiently at the front door, and all Aidan could do was smile and tell Abbas to be happy. He stuffed the paper in the pocket of his windbreaker and forgot about it as he hurried toward Liam.

  The other passengers on the tour had begun to look familiar, and many of them greeted Aidan as he got on the bus. A few minutes later they pulled out for the road to Medenine, where they would make a turn south to Tataouine. The Medenine road led farther east to Libya, and Aidan remembered the border was only a couple of hours away.

  That reminded him of the Libyan intelligence agent who had attacked them in the souk, and chased them in El Jem. Where was he? Would he be able to pick up their trail?

  Looking out at the expanse of sand and scrub, it wasn’t surprising that the tribes could cross these borders so easily. And that meant that the Libyan and his thugs could do the same.

  The Tuareg tribe was out there somewhere, waiting to meet with Charles Carlucci and get access to the bank account that would provide them with a permanent home, schools and computers and other things they would need to succeed in the twenty-first century. Once they delivered the information, Liam and Aidan would return to Tunis.

  Aidan didn’t want to think that far ahead. He looked outside the bus window, reminding himself once again that this was an adventure, that there was a whole world out there to appreciate.

  At a crossroads, they saw kiosks selling plastic jugs of cheap Libyan gasoline, or hanging freshly slaughtered sheep on ceiling hooks. The horizon stretched on for miles, the sky a cloudless light blue. There was not a hint of a breeze to ruffle the fronds of the occasional date palm or the leaves of a wizened olive tree.

  Further south, they reached a police checkpoint. A single officer stood in the middle of the highway, waving the bus to the side of the road. He boarded the bus, speaking with Belghasem and reviewing his paperwork.

  Liam was on alert. “If he compares our passports to the names on that list, we’re in trouble,” he said in a low voice. “Do you still have Carlucci’s passport?”

  “I do. But it’s in a hidden compartment in my backpack,” Aidan said. “I don’t think they’d be able to find it, even if they searched.”

  “You ever been searched by the police?”

  “Yup.”

  He looked at Aidan. “I want to hear about that. Later.”

  In the meantime, the guard and Belghasem were arguing in Arabic, but Liam and Aidan were too far back in the bus for Liam to eavesdrop. Belghasem shrugged, and motioned to all the passengers. “You will all please to get off the bus,” he said. “So that this police officer may talk with you. Please to have your passports available.”

  “Do you think the police know our names?” Aidan asked Liam.

  He shrugged. “Hard to say.” Aidan saw him surveying the area carefully, but beyond the checkpoint were miles of empty desert. There was nowhere to go, even if they could cause enough of a distraction to slip away from the police officer.

  There were twenty passengers in all; Aidan had plenty of time to count as they huddled in the small shade offered by the bus. Liam and Aidan were the youngest, though there were a few couples in their forties. Most of their fellow passengers were older, probably late fifties or sixties. The women outnumbered the men. Only about half were American; the rest were either French, German or Australian. They spent the next ten minutes or so as officer went from person to person, examining documents and comparing them to what Belghasem had given them.

  “What should we do?” Aidan whispered to Liam. “If he doesn’t find our names on that list?”

  Liam shrugged. “There’s nothing that we can do now. We see what happens. Worst case, he calls someone to take us back to Tunis, and we figure out what to from there.”

  That wasn’t the kind of news that reassured Aidan or helped his heart rate return to normal. Sweat began to drip from his forehead and pool under his arms. It was sweltering, even in the shade of the bus and even though it was still relatively early in the morning. There was no breeze, and the only movement of air came from an older American woman fanning herself with a paper flyer.

  “It is not to worry,” Belghasem said to the group. “This police is concerned about your safety. We will be continuing to the ksour very soon."

  When the officer finally came to them, Aidan smiled and handed the officer his passport, as he’d seen everyone else do. The officer scanned it, flipping through the pages, which were mostly empty. Blake and Aidan had taken a couple of overseas trips, mostly to England or the Bahamas. Aidan wasn’t worried about what the policeman would see there—he was worried that the officer wouldn’t be able to match the name on the passport to one on his list.

  And yet, he did. Aidan saw him make a check at the bottom of his page, and he handed the passport back.

  As the officer moved on to Liam, Aidan got a glance at the list. Sure enough, his name and Liam’s had been handwritten at the bottom of the page. By Belghasem? He must have gotten the names from the desk clerk. Somehow, Abbas and Belghasem were working together to help them. Aidan didn’t understand what was going on, but he felt better.

  Aidan was still worried about Liam. Even if he didn’t call himself a soldier of fortune or a mercenary, it was possible that the Tunisian government saw him that way. In any case he was an American living in Tunis, and that was curious enough on its own to warrant additional scrutiny.

  The other passengers stirred restlessly. It was so hot, and they were all eager to get back into the air-conditioned bus. There wasn’t even anything to look at, just miles of empty desert.

  Liam stood impassively as the officer reviewed his passport. The officer said something in Arabic, and Liam shrugged. “I’m sorry, I don’t understand,” he said.

  That was curious. Aidan knew that Liam spoke Arabic; he’d heard him use it enough times. “You live Tunis?” the officer asked in English.

  Liam nodded.

  It was clear the officer wanted to ask Liam more questions, but the language barrier was frustrating him. For a moment Aidan thought the officer might enlist Belghasem as an interpreter, but he shrugged and handed the passport back to Liam.

  Belghasem smiled broadly and said, “We may now continue. Everyone back on the bus, please.”

  Aidan waited until he and Liam were back in their seats and the bus had started off again before he said anything. The air conditioning was a blessed relief after the heat of the desert, and Aidan fanned himself and said, in a low voice, “Our names were on the bottom of his list.”

  “I noticed,” Liam said. “Curious.”

  “Abbas must have done it,” Aidan said. “He’s the only one who saw our passports at the hotel.”

  “Guess your flirting paid off,” Liam said, and grinned.

  21 – Ksar Ouled Soltane

  “So now, tell me about being searched by the police,” Liam said, as the bus rolled forward.

  Aidan shrugged. “It was nothing, though it was scary at the time. I was traveling in France with my friend Alex, right after college. We both had ESL jobs lined up in Nice, and we thought we’d see the country first. We bought France Rail passes in Paris and took off.”

  He looked out the window, remembering that summer. He’d had a massive crush on Alex, who was straight, and he’d spent three weeks in close quarters with the guy, trying not to betray the fact that he had a constant hard-on. “Alex had done a semester abroad at the University of Grenoble, at the edge of the Alps, so we stopped there on our way south.”

  “I know Grenoble,” Liam said. “I spent a couple of weeks there, tailing a guy we thought was a terrorist.”

  “Was he?”

  Liam shook his head. “Nope. But we didn’t know that until we’d watched him for a while.” He poked Aidan in the side. “Get back to your story.”

  “We stayed with this guy named Jean-Pierre, in an apartment in a suburb called St. Martin d’Heres, near the university. We were running short on cash at that point, and he had a scam we played into. We went to this doctor and said t
hat we’d lost our prescription for sleeping pills, and he wrote one out for each of us.”

  “Let me guess. Quaaludes?”

  Aidan nodded. “Jean-Pierre sold them to other college kids by the pill. Alex and I each pocketed a couple hundred bucks, and we were about to leave for Nice when the police swooped in.”

  “Ouch.”

  “Yeah, I said that a couple of times during the cavity search,” Aidan said dryly. “Like I would have stuffed pills up my butt for safekeeping.”

  Liam laughed. “And I thought you liked guys poking around up there.”

  Aidan gave him a look that tried to be a frown, but ended up in a smile. “Only certain guys.” He couldn’t help laughing. “Fortunately there wasn’t anything on the premises, so they let us leave.”

  Once in Nice, Aidan had found a French boyfriend, and he’d distanced himself from Alex, who had set himself up in a flourishing business, recruiting American tourists to get him pills and then sending them up to Jean-Pierre in Grenoble for sale, until he was arrested and deported six months later.

  They looked out the bus window as they passed through Tataouine, a strand of low ochre buildings against the shifting hills of sand. As they drove, Belghasem lectured, telling them that ksar was the singular, and ksour the plural. He pointed out several ksour, which looked like ruined forts on the sides of hills and mountains.

  Aidan’s heart was light when they got off the bus at Ksar Ouled Soultane. He was in an exotic country, sightseeing on a gorgeous day, with a handsome, charming man, and over the last few days he’d had the best sex of his life. What was not to be happy about? They had eluded the Libyans at the souk and the pharmacy. Soon they would meet up with a Tuareg tribe and deliver them a precious gift. The world was full of joy.

  The first courtyard reminded Aidan of the adobe villages outside Taos, New Mexico. Ksar Ouled Soltane was the same color of dried mud, with the same arched doorways and staircases. They followed Belghasem around the corner, then down an alleyway into a remarkable adobe courtyard. To the left and right were vaulted ghorfas - grain storage areas - stacked two or three on top of each other. Adobe stairs suspended in mid-air led up to each ghorfa, while wood beams jutted out at the highest levels, allowing villagers to bring up goods on pulleys.