Chapter 2 – Chapter 2

"It's good, of course," Arthur Brolin said as he handed the typewritten pages back to his pupil, Jules Kincaid. But he wasn't looking at the young man and he offered no further comment.

Jules followed his teacher's gaze out onto the white-sand beach beyond the palm tree line. Sid—their Sumatran houseboy, Sidharto—wearing a gaily colored sarong pulled up and tucked into his waistband to escape the foam of the waves, was casting his net into the turquoise-blue surf of the perfect beach. For his year of writing sabbatical, accompanied by his young protégé, Brolin had settled on this beach paradise, just up the coast from the coastal town of Bengkulu, yet so isolated that few came this way. Here, Arthur Brolin was like a king in his domain—and few knew or cared how what he did in his domain.

Brolin sighed, still gazing intently on the rippling muscles of the lithe, diminutive, yet perfectly formed houseboy, who was focused on catching their dinner. Jules knew what that sigh was about. He'd heard Brolin fucking the houseboy in the dark of the night in their thatch-covered sprawling hut. Jules had no illusions why Brolin had come this far from the American Midwest for his year's sabbatical of writing. And, now, he also had no illusions about why Brolin had volunteered to bring him along and to mix his own writing with developing the young escapee of the Chicago tenements.

"It's good . . . but?" Jules said, waving the pages of his latest attempt at a short story near enough to Brolin's line of sight to break the man's concentration on the fishing houseboy.

"It's good. It's very good . . . ," Brolin answered again, absentmindedly.

"But what?" Jules persisted. Brolin was usually much more communicative than this. But Jules had been writing story after story for two months now in this Dutch colony paradise, and he still hadn't won anything more than lukewarm comments from Brolin.

"But . . . we've discussed this before, Jules," Brolin said as he gave his handsome, eighteen-year-old student his full, undivided attention now. "It's good in a mechanical sense, but it has no passion."

"No passion?" Jules asked. Brolin had put his hand, that hand with the long sensuous fingers, on Jules's wrist and hadn't taken it away. Jules shuddered at the touch, but not wanting Brolin to feel his trembling and misconstrue it, he let the words tumble out.

"What is this about no passion? I write adventure stories. I write of men struggling against the elements and eventually winning out over nature or the cruelties men force on other men, like war. War stories, like the one we just went through. Situations where people like my father struggle against impossible odds. I pour out everything inside me on these. But you say they have no passion?"

"Your writing is very good . . . no, extremely good, Jules, as I said. And there's nothing wrong in the themes you pursue. But they are missing something nonetheless. And I think what they are missing is passion. I'm sure you put everything inside you into your writing. But clearly the problem seems to be that you don't have nearly enough passion inside you to give to your stories—to make them sing with passion, to put them above what any other young writer is producing. I didn't invite you out here to make a competent writer of you. I brought you out here to make an internationally acclaimed writer of you. And I think you have that in you."

Jules had lowered his head and was trying his best to drink in what Brolin was saying to him. But all he could think of were those searing fingers on his wrist, feeling his pulse, no doubt searching for the passion inside him.

"I do. I do feel very passionate about what I'm writing," Jules stammered out in his defense. "I feel . . ."

"You only feel within the limits of your experience, Jules," Brolin said softly. "And your experience is limited. You can't really feel passion as a writer until you've experienced passion. That's what the best writers do. They let themselves go and they experience it all. And it comes out in their writing. You are young, so young. You've experienced . . . nothing . . . really, before now. I could . . ."

"You showed me this picture, this picture of an elk," Jules rushed on, not wanting to hear what Brolin wanted to say to him. You told me to write a story about it, about a majestic animal, about the relations between all that the elk is and my protagonist, Joe. And I did that. I wrote of Joe and an Indian warrior coming upon each other in the wilds of Wyoming and how they fought each other, meaning to do so to the death. And how the appearance of an elk stag on the mountain ridge above them made them both stop and realize how futile their fighting was and then separate and go their own way. I wrote that with passion. Man against the elements, the majesty of nature, the bonding of men in dire straits."

"That wasn't the bonding of men," Brolin said in a voice both soft and full of steel. "Those men fell away from each other when confronted with the majesty of nature, as represented in the elk, Jules. Don't you see? Nature won. That didn't show the strength of your protagonist; it showed his weakness. What I see inside you, what I think you have to give in your writing is showing the ascendance of your protagonist over nature and over other men. The passion in the protagonist's relationship with nature, as symbolized by that elk stag, is not in accommodating or respecting the elk, but in mastering and possessing it. And the same can be said of the man, the Indian warrior."

Brolin's voice had become insistent; he was flooding Jules's mind with the power of his smooth, honey-toned voice and the strength of his storytelling. Jules felt almost as if he was going into a trance. He could feel the pressure of Brolin's grip on his wrist, and now he could feel the palm of Brolin's other hand on his thigh. Jules felt his chest heaving, and, looking at Brolin, he could see that his mentor was similarly affected. They were both bare-chested and in colorful sarongs, just as Sid was. They had gone completely native. Jules felt what was coming next, but the mesmerizing effect of Brolin's voice and Jules's aching need to produce the writing that Brolin wanted, to become the writer that Brolin said he was capable of becoming, possessed the young man, and he made no move to stop his mentor.

"Bonding is important to a writer, Jules," Brolin was saying. "Experiencing bonding and letting the passion of that build and pour down to your fingertips as your fingers sit on the keys of the typewriter, and imbuing your writing with a full, mature knowledge of passion through experience . . ." His eyes were fully intent on Jules now, although Jules was still unable to look up at him, and his hand on Jules's thigh had slipped into a fold in the sarong and rested on the warm, smooth skin inside Jules's thigh, high up. He was lightly stroking the inside of Jules's thigh with his index finger and a thumb, sending ripples of electricity through Jules's body.

"You need to acquire a much deeper and richer experience to even begin to know what the passion is, Jules. Bonding. Bonding. I could . . ."

"Kiai Brolin. Kiai Brolin! Venerable teacher! Look what I've caught." The chestnut brown houseboy, Sid, full of life and laughter and with a smile as broad as his handsome face, was running up the beach toward Jules and Brolin, a big fat fish in his hand. "We eat well tonight, Kiai Brolin. The god's are good to us."

Brolin joined the infectious laughter of his houseboy and also joined in the rejoicing over the catch. When he turned back to Jules, though, his young apprentice was gone and only the scattered sheets of his "only very good" short story and the picture of the majestic elk stag remained where he had been sitting on the pillows beside the low table at the palm-treed verge of the white-sand beach.

Hours later, unable to sleep, burning with the implications of what Brolin had told him, knowing now, instinctively and irrevocably, that Brolin was right—that he would never be able to write with the necessary passion until he had allowed himself to experience passion—Jules crept out of his room in one wing of the thatched hut and quietly moved to the doorway of Brolin's room in the other wing.

They were there. The little Sumatran houseboy was flat on his belly on Brolin's bed, his legs tight together and his hands firmly gripping the brass rods of the headboard above him for dear life as Brolin, nude and crouched above him, encasing the pelvis of the smaller man with his strong thighs, his sensuous fingers wrapped around the Sumatran's wrists, plunged a thick and long cock between the houseboy's pert butt cheeks again and again and again. Sid was whimpering and Brolin was panting hard. Jules stood, transfixed, and moaning slightly to himself as his hand went to his own rising cock and the passion of the moment flooded into him. This, more than anything Brolin had been telling him earlier, demonstrated the majesty and monstrousness of what full, passionate possession meant. Jules's mind started to race and all sorts of sensations and images flooded in. He withdrew from the doorway.

A pen and some paper; he had to find a pen and some paper. He had to write. Now!

* * *

Jules wrote far into the night, feverishly. He knew the writing was better than he had ever accomplished before. But he also knew that it wasn't good enough. His mentor had been right. The experience of the passion was what was missing. What he had seen earlier had transmitted to him in some degree, but that wasn't enough. He knew now what he had to do. He had to have the passion; he had to become the writer he wanted to be.

He was focused so intently on his work that he hadn't noticed the sounds until they had become insistent, close by. Drums and shots and screams.

Jules jumped up from his desk and ran to the window and pushed aside the palm frond matting. The sky was aglow over Bengkulu, lighting up the beach and the pounding surf of the Indian Ocean. Bengkulu was burning. It seemed as if the whole sky to the west was ablaze. A shot rang out nearby, and Jules instinctively fell away from the window.

"Quick. No time. The storage shed," Brolin muttered in a guttural whisper as he lurched into the room and pulled Jules up from the floor. He was completely naked, his firm muscle twitching in the shock of the moment, his manhood and ball sack hanging and swinging low.

"What . . .?" Jules muttered, dazed by the sudden eruption of activity on their peaceful, isolated beach.

"No time. There's a hiding place in the storage shed. And it's concrete. We could be quickly burned out here or plugged by a stray bullet."

"Sid . . .?" Jules said idiotically as he permitted Brolin to pull him toward the back door and the pathway away from the beach toward the storage shed. His sarong went to his ankles and constricted his movement so that he hobbled in a shuffling gait as Brolin propelled him along. Brolin reached down and tore the material off Jules, freeing the young man's movement but making him as naked as his mentor was.

"Sid's PNI," gasped through his pants, and then when the sense of that didn't seem to register with Jules, he spoke again. "He's a member of the communist movement. If they come here, it will be because of him. The Dutch are burning out the resistance movement. If they find we're harboring a PNI member, we'll be burned out too. Sid's gone into hiding away from here."

Both of them were panting heavily when they got to the shed. Looking back toward the beach, Jules could see figures of men with lifted torches and rifles, silhouetted against the glow on the horizon from Bengkulu, coming through the palm tree verge and heading toward their hut. Brolin pulled him roughly into the hut, moved some boxes aside at the back of the small room, pushed Jules roughly down on his back in a narrow space been the back of a wooden-back shelving rack that went nearly to the ceiling and a concrete block wall, and then, after pulling the boxes back to cover the entrance to their hiding place, and sprawled down, full-length, on top of Jules. There was no room in the confined space for him to do otherwise, but Jules was fully aware of his mentor's nakedness, and the hairiness of the very fit man's chest, heart pounding and muscles taut, on top of his own naked chest.

Adrenaline was pumping through both of the men. Brolin couldn't help himself, having wanted to be doing what he then did for the entire two months they had been in Sumatra. And Jules, aroused by what he'd seen Brolin and Sid doing earlier and the sudden awakening to passion couldn't help himself either. The danger and the passion of the moment swept them both up into its clutches, and Brolin was cupping Jules's head in his hands and was kissing him deeply in his full and sensuous lips. At the same time his pelvis was grinding against Jules's. Jules reach down and took possession of Brolin's cock and felt it grown long and thick and hard. His own cock was rising too, and Brolin was left with no doubts about Jules's willingness. Brolin took one of his hands away from Jules's cheek and spit on it and moved it down between Jules's thighs and found his young student's virgin hole.

Jules arched his back and rocked his head back, away from Brolin's lips, and opened his mouth wide, preparing to scream out in surprise and pain as Brolin entered him with his moistened finger. Brolin's strong hand went to Jules's mouth, however, and covered both his mouth and his nose, as his finger continued to probe. Jules was trembling and gasping for air beneath the stifling gag and he was beginning to black out. Brolin released his hand over Jules's air passages, but he replace his hand with his possessing mouth. He was kneeling on his knees now between Jules's thighs and pulling Jules's legs up to his shoulders.

Jules felt the large dick head at his hole as Brolin removed his searching and stretching fingers, and Jules arched his back again and silently screamed around Brolin's probing tongue as the head of the teacher's cock obtained purchase just inside Jules's hole.

They both froze at the sound of voices outside the door to the storage shed. The room was full of light now that blazed over the top of the shelving unit that didn't quite meet the ceiling and through cracks in the backside and around the edges of the case.

Voices. Angry voices. Firing off rapid-fire exclamations in Indonesia, clearly not pleased that they hadn't found any communists to exterminate. Jules knew now that their lives depended on him not screaming. This was a moment such as he'd written about. But the reality was so much more intense than his imagination had been when he was writing. He now fully appreciated what his teacher had been trying to tell him about experiencing being necessary to capture the passion of a story that would lift it head and shoulders above the competition—about danger and what a man had to do in the face of danger to survive and to come out as the master.

Brolin took advantage of the moment of Jules's fear of making any noise to start the plowing of his plump, experienced cock up the young virginal ass canal.

Regardless of the danger of the moment, Jules started to whimper and to struggle underneath Brolin, the hard thick possession of the older man being almost more than Jules could take. Brolin covered Jules's mouth and nose with his hand again, and all of the fight went out of Jules as he began to drift out from oxygen starvation and Brolin's dick continued its throbbing invasion up his canal.

And then the light and the voices were gone, and Brolin had removed his hand and was kissing and sucking and nibbling on young Jules's neck and nipples and the pits under his arms as the master's cock bottomed deep inside the tender canal and began to pump and pump and pump deep inside his student. Harder and faster. Jules was gasping and groaning and moaning now.

Brolin had gathered control of himself enough to murmur that he'd try to stop fucking Jules if the pain was unbearable and that's what the young man wanted, but Jules was too far gone in the experience now. He could only manage and breathless, "No-o-o."

"No, what?" Brolin grunted.

"No . . . don't . . . stop," Jules cried out.

And Brolin fucked on. he had Jules's cock in his fist and he relentlessly stroked him off until Jules ejaculated with a gasp and collapsed back to the floor. But Brolin fucked on and on and on. The passion flooded back into Jules and he moaned and groaned and cried out for the fuck, his mind racing, forming words and images and experience-filled themes to pour out onto the typewriter keys.