“Suck it,” he whispered. “Suck my cock.”
In my mind, I could both feel and see the warm blood surging into his cock, swelling it thickly inside my mouth, but there was no need for me to confine myself to mental images. I took him in my mouth.
He inhaled sharply. “Oh, that feels so good.”
His hips started to move in a slow easy rhythm and with each gentle thrust, his dick hardened and reached deeper and deeper into my mouth. His hands tightened on my shoulders, I cupped my hands under his balls, felt them tightening upward. Inside me, fantastic sensations were swirling and building. “Oh, God!” he cried. His body tensed, his fingers dug hard into my shoulders—then the sweetness of his cum exploded inside my mouth. I felt his cock surging, felt thickness and heat shooting into my mouth. His semen came gushing out, freed from his beautiful body, rushing through his beautiful cock, to flood over my tongue. I swallowed each starchy torrent like a man dying of thirst.
He moaned and leaned over me, breathing heavily, the warmth of his breath tingling against my cheek. “Oh, yeah.” He laughed weakly. “I needed that.” He squeezed my shoulders. “I needed it bad. I was feeling so fucking frustrated all day long, for some reason. I just had to drop a load.”
“You’re welcome.”
He stood up and took a deep breath, then grinned down at me. “How about you?”
“What about me?”
“You didn’t come yet, did you?”
“No.”
“Good. I don’t want you to think this was going to be a one-way street. Let me do you.”
He leaned over me again and gripped my shoulder. His hand moved down my arm and my side, to my leg. He knelt down before me, pushing me none too gently to lean back in the chair. He unfastened my belt, unzipped my trousers and pulled them down. I stared at his face as he concentrated on tugging my shorts down, saw him grin again as my cock flipped up. He tugged my hips forward and his touch was like fire on my buttocks. He leaned his head down. I gasped and closed my eyes as a warm flush spread slowly through me. It was the sweetest, most delicious feeling imaginable.
He took my cock into his mouth slowly, deliberately, as my body flinched and trembled in the chair. He took me inch by inch, until I was in him completely. A hand squeezed my balls and the other gripped one cheek of my ass, his throat started constricting, milking my cock. I raised my butt up on the chair ad his mouth went down even farther. My body convulsed and I came. The molten storm inside me came cascading out of my prick, into him, in one devastating explosion after another, until I collapsed in the chair, my arms like limp cloths dangling at my sides, my body feeling like an inert lump of flesh.
“You needed that, too, didn’t you?” The sound of his voice brought reality back into my mind. I sat up in the chair, running my tongue over the slick residue of his semen still clinging to my teeth and the roof of my mouth. I opened my eyes and saw him, sprawled in a chair, his cock still dangling out of his gaping fly. I looked down at myself, saw my shorts and trousers down around my ankles, my cock limp, shining wet, white semen seeping out from it onto the floor. I stood up quickly and turned my back to him, pulling my shorts and trousers up.
“What’s the rush?” he asked.
“There’s no rush.”
“For a minute, there, you looked like a typical zipless fuck. As though you were going to come and run.”
“It all did happen rather fast. We didn’t even take our clothes off.”
“Yeah, I know. Usually, I like to get comfortable, first. But I have to admit that doing it like this was kind of hot. Hey, do you want a limoncello?”
“Yes, please.”
He stood up and casually tucked his cock back into his jeans, then sauntered over to the refrigerator. I watched him, thinking how beautiful he was, how sexy he was—and how matter-of-fact he seemed to be about what we’d just done together. There didn’t seem to be much point in deluding myself or in getting my hopes up. I was no doubt just another trick to him, and was that necessarily such a bad thing?
What did I want from Rick, anyway? Some sort of an avowal of undying love? Neither of us was exactly the type for that, at least not on such short acquaintance
It wasn’t as though I was free to make any such commitment, even if Rick were to ask it of me. After all, I had Geoff.
Or did I? Internet or no internet, he seemed far away from me, at the moment.
I was confused…to say the least.
Chapter Thirteen
The Temple of Neptune
I went into The Blue Cat for a coffee late one afternoon after a day spent painting, and found Rick hard at work, setting up clean glassware behind the bar.
“Look at you, with paint splattered all over you,” Rick said. “Do you ever take a day off?”
“On occasion. Look at you, slaving away. Do you?”
“Yeah, I’m planning to take one soon, as a matter of fact. This coming Friday.”
Rick explained to me that he had two new visitors staying at the hotel. They were a gay couple, English no less, and Rick had taken them under his wing.
My suspicions were instantly aroused, and no doubt my face betrayed my thoughts.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” he scoffed, before I could say anything. “My interest in them is purely friendly. Wait’ll you meet them. They’re just kids, and they’re obviously devoted to each other. This is sort of a honeymoon for them. It’s kind of cute, actually.”
Both of these English lads were interested in archaeology. They had already been to Pompeii, and now Rick was going to take them on an excursion to Paestum to view the three famous Greek temples at that site. There was a spare seat in his car, if I cared to make it a foursome. Paestum was about fifty kilometres to the south from Positano, and after Salerno the road—or so Rick assured me—was flat, straight and scenic.
I met my two compatriots that evening. Hervey and Will were in their mid-twenties but looked even younger, and as Rick had noted, they were very much in love. There was a boyish enthusiasm about them that was infectious. Everything they saw or experienced in Italy was a source of fascination for them. They seemed to find Rick and me as intriguing as—well, as any of the other local artefacts.
They were from Manchester, where they ran their own business, a wine bar, together. Therefore, they and Rick had something in common and could talk shop. They’d been schoolmates. Each had had a secret crush on the other, without ever suspecting that the object of his desire might be gay. After tricking with lots and lots of blokes and whoring around in general, as Will put it, they’d been shocked when they encountered each other in a gay pub one night. “We went home together, fucked like animals to make up for all of that lost time and we’ve been together ever since,” Hervey said, happily.
I had no idea what kind of vehicle Rick drove and was astonished when on Friday morning he ushered the three of us out of the hotel to see a four-seat convertible with its top , parked at the curb. Its body was the reddest red I’d ever seen and it had the sleek lines of a touring car.
“Good Lord,” I said. “I’ll be riding in that? I feel as though I ought to be carrying a bouquet of flowers and getting ready to wave to the crowd.”
“Don’t be too impressed,” Rick advised me. “Jed and I bought it years ago, cheap, at an estate sale. It had supposedly belonged to the proverbial little old lady who drove it only once a week, to Mass. Mechanically, it’s very sound. They don’t build them this way anymore, that’s for sure.”
“What is it, exactly?” Will wanted to know.
“A Ferrari Mondial Cabriolet. One of the last they ever made, in nineteen-ninety-three.”
I couldn’t help being sceptical about the vehicle’s previous ownership. “This doesn’t look like something a little old lady would drive to Mass—or anywhere else.”
“Okay,” Rick conceded. “I suspect it really belonged to her husband. He probably bought it while he was going through a midlife crisis a
nd drove the car around trying to pick up young girls.”
“This is really traveling in style!” Hervey exclaimed. He and Will got into the back seat and I joined Rick in the front. I might not have had a bouquet of flowers, but I still felt like a celebrity being taken for a spin.
It didn’t take long to leave San Floriano behind and get out into the open countryside. Hervey had a guidebook that he consulted, but our driver proved to be quite knowledgeable about the area. While Rick negotiated with practiced ease the acute contortions of the road, he had interesting things to say about the places of interest that we passed.
There seemed to be dilapidated fortifications on every headland—Saracen towers, the locals called them. During the ninth and tenth centuries, the Saracens were constantly raiding the villages along the coast, carrying off young girls and anything else of value that they could find. The coastal dwellers built these watch towers, and when the plundering ships were sighted, fires would be lit on the flat roofs as signals that danger was nigh.
It was one of these raids that had inspired the annual festa held in Positano on August 14th, a date which. by coincidence, would be coming up during the following week. As the pirates were breaking into the house of one of the girls, she managed to snatch up a small picture of the Madonna of Positano and conceal it in her clothes. After the pirates carried her on board and the ship was moving out to sea, she and the other girls prayed to the Madonna. Suddenly, the wind changed and a strong gale blew them back to shore. There, the local men rallied, attacked the pirates and rescued their women.
So now, on that night of the year, the fishermen of Positano decorate their boats to look like Arab dhows. They black up their faces and put on extravagant costumes. Under the cover of night, the men invade the harbour and pretend to carry away the young girls of the town. The young men of Positano gang up and offer fierce resistance. They set off fireworks to simulate gunfire, then all the inhabitants of the town joined in prayer. The pirates finally have to admit defeat and the girls are rescued. An orgy of eating, drinking and dancing follows, lasting all through the night.
“But is there a special Madonna of Positano?” Will asked.
“Absolutely,” Rick said. “You can see her image in the church there, on display behind a curtain above the altar. She’s the one who gave the name to the village, in fact. You know a lot more about art history than I do, Viscontino. Wasn’t there a time when the Byzantines decided that holy icons were idolatrous, so they tried to suppress them?”
“Yes,” I said. “That was during the eighth century.”
“I figured you would know. Anyway, to prevent the Byzantines from confiscating and destroying it, this particular image of her was smuggled out of the country and when it was on a ship making its way along this coast the weather became stormy and the sailors thought that was the end. Just when they had given up all hope, they heard a voice coming from the picture, saying Posa, posa which means put it down or put it back. So they turned their ship to the shore, the sea became calm and they were able to land safely. And that was the beginning of Positano, which is what they named the spot where they landed.”
We passed one Saracen tower after another.
Rick went on to explain that most of the seaports along the Amalfi coast had their own way of celebrating the August 14th date, usually involving some sort of a nautical event. San Floriano was no exception.
“I’m glad you’ll be here to see it,” Rick told me. “It’s a modest affair, but it’s always a lot of fun.”
Essentially, there was an outdoor party held in the town’s main piazza and on the quay, which went on into the wee hours of the night. To accommodate the celebrants, this was one of the few occasions during the year on which The Blue Cat was open all night. It always did a brisk business, which included a larger breakfast crowd than usual.
San Floriano had its own ritual to commemorate the Saracen invasions. Some of the younger fishermen decorated their boats, dressed themselves up as pirates and went out to sea. They then returned to invade the town and threaten it with destruction unless the inhabitants bought them off with tribute. This consisted of picnic baskets filled with food and wine. The town’s restaurants and cafés donated these baskets and The Blue Cat always participated.
However, the Saracens, who were notorious for their lustfulness, also demanded slaves. Therefore, they sailed away again, carrying with them not only the picnic baskets, but also some of the local girls—whom, of course, the pirates had picked in advance. These girls were less fortunate than the maidens of Positano—they had to make do without divine intercession. The pirates and their captives went for a leisurely nocturnal cruise through the bay and did their own private partying on board the boats with the help of the picnic baskets. In the morning, one by one, the boats returned.
It wasn’t unheard of for a fisherman and his girl, if they were already engaged to be married or had an understanding, to get carried away and indulge in a little lovemaking while out at sea. If they were careless about contraception and a pregnancy resulted, then so did a marriage in due course, so no real harm.
This year, Rick told me, Donato and Tomaso and their friends had invited him to join them as one of the Saracens. “I think it’s the guys’ ways of thanking me for all the grub The Blue Cat has contributed to the festivities over the years.”
“It all does sound like fun,” I said. “I’m looking forward to it. But isn’t there anything I can do to help?”
“We’ve already got everything pretty well organized. But hey, the Saracens were equal-opportunity marauders, you know. They took both men and women captive to sell as slaves. Maybe you’d like to be a slave boy and be carried off?”
“I think I’d enjoy that.”
“I know you would. Consider it a date, then.”
We left it at that. I assumed Rick was teasing me, so I didn’t take him seriously. At the same time, I half-hoped that, when the night of the festival rolled around, I might wrangle a last-minute invitation to join the partying on board Donato’s boat. If not, it sounded as though there’d be plenty of activities going on in town to keep me amused.
Rick knew a farmhouse where we could stop for lunch. It was a beautiful place and the owners remembered him from a previous visit. Their tiny dining room had only four tables, but six more were set up on the patio outside. We decided to sit outdoors. Facing us was a vineyard, and the fence between it and us was overgrown with wild flowers—small rose-tinted gladioli, tawny snapdragons and bunches of honeysuckle. Bees darted among the blossoms, too preoccupied with them to bother us diners.
The food was excellent, and so was the wine.
An hour later, we were back on the road, continuing our journey through tunnels, over bridges and around a succession of loops to Amalfi, Maiore and Minori, each place boasting sparkling beaches with rows of umbrellas and striped bathing huts.
At Vietri, we paid a brief visit to one of its many potteries, which for the most part are small family-owned and operated affairs. In this particular workshop three generations—grandfather, father and son—were all hard at work on their wheels, transforming lumps of clay into vases and dinnerware. Upstairs, other members of the family were decorating the finished clay objects with traditional designs. Will and Hervey couldn’t resist the wares. They bought a few things and arranged to have them shipped to Manchester. I decided I ought to buy Rupert a gift for his house as a token of my appreciation for his hospitality, and I selected a charming little pitcher that would look nice in his kitchen.
Rick was the only member of our group who had buyer resistance. “You’ve seen my apartment,” he reminded me. “The last thing I need is more clutter.”
After Vietri, we passed through Salerno. It was hard to believe that these now serene beaches had witnessed Operation Avalanche, the invasion of Italy by combined British and American forces, beginning on September 3, 1943.
The mountains gradually dropped away, replaced
by low rolling hills, which formed the backdrop to a broad cultivated plain through which the road stretched straight and flat. In places, poplars lined the road, so pollarded that their branches met overhead. We travelled through green tunnels, the air thick with the white fluff of pollen, drifts of which lay like a snowfall on either side.
We stopped first at the local national museum, to see among its other treasures the famous frescoes, which they had moved here from the nearby so-called Tomb of the Diver. These tomb paintings, dating from the first half of the fifth century B.C., include one of the most famous homoerotic images from the ancient world, showing men enjoying themselves at a symposium or banquet.
We proceeded on to the temple site.
There is no hill or acropolis at Paestum. The extraordinary monuments occupy a flat plain, which they still manage to dominate in unobtrusive splendour.
During the seventh century B.C., the Greek colonists then occupying southern Italy founded the city of Poseidonia on the shores of the Gulf of Salerno, naming it in honour of the sea god. Four centuries later, the newly risen power of Rome drove out the Greeks and in their place established the Latin colony of Paestum. Thanks to its trade in the oil and grain produced in the surrounding plains, Paestum flourished for many centuries. But gradually, owing to changes in the level of the coast, here as at Pozzuli and elsewhere, the mouth of the river Salso, on which they had built the town, silted up, and the whole coastal area changed from fertile land to swamp. The swamp brought with it malaria. By the tenth century, the few surviving inhabitants had fled to the mountains, and the deserted city became lost in marsh and forest. Even the memory of its existence perished. Not until the eighteenth century was the site of the city rediscovered.
The Blue Cat Page 22