Chapter 2 – Chapter 2

I was driving south on Brook toward the heart of Richmond, trying to beat the effects of Hurricane Frederic back to my Monument Avenue townhouse in the Fan District, when I saw him huddled in a bus shelter. I was acquainted with Neal from a new place for gay guys, the Rainbow Connection, being established downtown in a warehouse district where Interstates east-west 64 and north-south 95 converged. I'd served him dinner and played basketball with him a couple of times. I didn't know him well, though, and didn't want to, as I was attracted to him, but I didn't want to have that complication with any of the guys at the shelter. It wasn't a snobbish thing; it was a complicated relationships at a place I'm volunteering thing. So I drove on by.

I thought we'd made eye contact, though. I thought he had recognized me. So, I didn't make it more than two blocks farther on when guilt got to me and I turned around and went back.

I don't know for sure how I'd gotten roped in to helping out at the Rainbow Connection, which was everything I had been trying to avoid when I'd moved back to Richmond from Denver seven months earlier. I did not specifically seek out volunteering there, of course. I'd gone back into the church and one of the young priests there, Father Thomas, had latched onto me, declared I needed to get involved in the community, and had pulled me into the Rainbow Connection. It was sort of a perverse thing for him to do, I thought, as he was the first one to take confession from me since Denver, and I had confessed to my proclivities and about Diego. The penance he had given me was to march into the jaws of the lion.

The priest was young, athletic, modern-thinking, and hyperactive in the community. He also was handsome, with dark, sultry Mediterranean looks, and, like me, had done modeling before he went into the priesthood. That gave us mutual pasts to connect us, but it also made me uncomfortable and antsy. I had regretted that he had been the one to take my confession. Any of the other priests in the church, older and more plodding, would, I assume have accepted that I wanted to escape my sins and was being a recluse for that reason. They wouldn't have pulled me out of the renovation projects I'd steeped myself in in the old Monument Avenue townhouse and forced me to face my demons.

Father Thomas said he'd faced demons too. That didn't make me one bit more comfortable with either what he told me I needed to do or how I reacted to him personally—and as my priest.

The Fan District of Richmond in the late 1970s was deep into urban renewal. The district was named thusly because the streets fanned out west from the state capitol center. Monument Avenue, where I lived, was a promenade with a tree-lined grassy median with a parade of statues of southern Civil War generals and figures running between the two sides of the street. All of the houses were set abutting each other or set close together and most were large piles of brick, many with multistory porches on the front of them. The Fan District had once been the prominent residential center of the city and once more was becoming that as the wealthy moved back in from the suburbs. I had returned in time to know that the value of my property—a three-story, fifteen-room mansion set on an English basement with a separate entrance—would go up exponentially if I did some restoration work.

Since I wanted to work myself to a frazzle to avoid thinking about what I really wanted from life, I'd put every working moment that I wasn't editing a book or zipping off for a photo shoot in bringing the house back to life and health. Father Thomas had cut into that after five months of being the recluse by pulling me into the Rainbow Connection, which included a clinic, a soup kitchen, a shelter, and a recreation center for the city's gay homeless and down and outers.

That's where I'd come into contact with Neal, a young blond guy in his twenties, who availed himself of all of the Rainbow Connection's services and who could always be counted on for a pickup basketball game. In that aspect, the Rainbow Connection was a godsend for me too, as I started counting on getting my exercise there while I was helping out in soup kitchen. I'd played pickup in the church's gym with Father Thomas, and the prospect of better gym facilities as he described them at the Rainbow Connection had been the lure he used to get me involved in his pet community project.

I pulled up beside the bus shelter, crossing to the other side of the street, pointed the wrong way, and rolled down my window. It was only then that I saw the small dog huddled by Neal's leg. Neal was huddled over too, several backpacks around him. It was raining already and the wind was pulling rainwater into the shelter.

"Is that you, Neal?" I called from the window I'd rolled down. I damn well knew it was Neal, and he knew I knew it was. The look he gave me hinted that he'd known I'd passed him by the first time too. "Hurricane's almost here," I said, although, thank god, most of the pizzaz of Hurricane Frederic had been knocked out of it before it got to central Virginia. "You need to get inside. Hop in. I'll drop you off at the shelter."

"Can't go there," Neal answered. "They won't take Petey." he gestured to the small mutt pressed into his leg and trembling.

"What have you done with Petey before when you've stayed at the shelter?" I asked.

"Just got him last week. Or he got me, I guess."

"And you've been sleeping outside since then?"

"Yep."

"Well, get inside the car—both of you—the hurricane's almost on us. There's a motel nearby that will take a dog, I'm sure. I'll treat you to the night. No one should be out in weather like this."

By the time we pulled into the motel lot, a motel that was seedy enough that Neal wouldn't think I was putting myself out too much to stand him a room here, the streets were awash with water the drains couldn't handle and the wind was bracing. There wasn't any trouble in having a dog in the room, as I had hoped there wouldn't be. It wasn't the Ritz, they had the room, and there wasn't any prospect of anyone else dragging in to rent it in this weather. In fact, they probably were pleased to be renting the room for the entire night. It was the kind of motel where rooms usually went by the hour and the biggest charge was for changing the sheets.

I helped Neal and Petey into the room with Neal's backpacks. The wind had come up enough that it was a struggle to get out of the elements. As we entered the room, a tree came down across the motel entrance in back of us. It was obvious I was spending the night too. Fortuitously, I had been driving home from a photo shoot in Washington, D.C., so, after ascertaining from Neal that we'd be OK doubling up—tripling up, if Petey was taken into consideration—I fought my way back to the car and brought my suitcase in. By then I was soaked to the skin, my clothes clinging to me.

Neal gave me an appraising look when I struggled back into the room, making me realize that being soaked to the skin was quite revealing. He'd seen me in the altogether in the locker room before, but here, like this, was much more embarrassing. I excused myself and took my suitcase into the bathroom with me, drying myself off with a threadbare towel that was hopeless at wicking off moisture, and redressing in shorts and a T.

When I came out of the bathroom, Neal had stripped down to his briefs and was sitting on the end of the bed. It hadn't occurred to me, but he, of course, had been soaked as well.

"Finished in the bathroom, if you need to get on something dry," I said, my voice tighter than I wanted it to be. He was a beautiful young man. A bit thinner than he should be, but well-muscled and in perfect proportion. He was blond, with blue eyes, and looked both vulnerable and worldly wise at the same time.

There was only one bed in the room, a double. Neal was sitting on the end of it, his arms outstretched and his fists pushed into the mattress on either side. Petey was nestled up by his bare leg. "So, I owe you thanks from getting me out of that storm," he said, giving me a saucy look.

"As I said, no one should be out in a storm like that. Just sorry that I have to stay here too," I said. I looked around the room, trying to think how we were going to do the sleeping arrangements. Maybe the storm would let up enough that I could check on whether there was another room I could get. Chances on that were slim, though, at the guy in the front office was obviously in the midst of closing up when we checked in.

"I'm not."

"You're not what?" I asked, looking back at him, not entirely on his wavelength, but close enough to be a bit concerned and off center.

"I'm not sorry you have to stay here too. And I don't think you're really sorry either."

Blushing, I cleared my throat and grasped at a change in topic. The only chair in the room was covered with backpacks, so I stood there, probably looking as lost and uncomfortable as I felt. "Do you have any idea what you can do after tonight, if the shelter won't take Petey? Can I make some phone calls to see if there's someplace else that—?"

"Rainbow Connection is convenient to my work," he said.

"You have a job?"

"Yes. I work in construction. We report to a warehouse not far from the rec center and get sent out from there. It's just not enough to pay for room in addition to food—food now for both of us."

"Maybe Petey isn't—"

"Not an option," he said, his face taking on a look of panic. He was very arousing with the vulnerable look. I felt myself hardening up. "I don't have anyone. Now I have Petey. And Petey's got me."

"OK, I can understand and appreciate that. Construction, you say?" Again I was anxious not only to keep a conversation going rather than what I really wanted to do with Neal and snatching at solutions to his problem. The solution dropped into my mind, and, unfortunately, leaped out of my mouth before I could analyze it for danger. "There's an apartment in the basement of my house that's not finished, but it's functional. Better than a shelter certainly. And my house is on Monument, within a walk of where you report to work. Maybe . . . if you're interested . . . you could live there for now . . . until you found someplace else. You could work off any rent by working on the apartment . . . you say you're in construction."

I hoped that didn't sound as suggestive and strained as I felt it was when I said it.

"I think I'd like that," he answered. "So . . ."

I watched in horror—not the least horror because of the effect it had on me—when he rose from the bed and slipped off his briefs. "So, are you going to fuck me now?"

"What?" I said, my voice strangled. "I don't . . . I hope you don't think—"

"That you picked me up and brought me to a motel and have said I can come live in your house . . . that you are nice to me at the Rainbow Connection and play ball with me there . . . and that you shower with me and show off how low you're hanging. That you get hard when you look at me? That you are hard now? With all that, do I think that you want to fuck me? Yeah, I do. And you can fuck me if you want."

"Neal. I didn't . . . I don't . . ."

"It's OK. I want you to fuck me. You got a great body for your age and you got the biggest dong I've seen at the rec center. All of the guys there want you to fuck them. We got a lottery going on who gets you inside them first. Looks like I win—unless you been ballin' some of the other guys and they haven't been boasting about it."

"That's . . . not . . . why . . . I brought you here, Neal. Maybe I should just leave."

We both tuned ourselves into the whistling of the wind outside and the raindrops slamming into the window like missiles.

"You're not going to go out into that tonight," Neal said. "It's OK. I want you to fuck me. I'm hard for you. And you're hard for me too."

Of course I was.

"Is there a sleeping bag in what you brought in, Neal?"

"Yeah, of course."

"Well, you can roll that out on the floor over there, and that's where you'll sleep tonight. I didn't bring you here to fuck you. I'm not offering you a temporary place to sleep in exchange for some construction work to fuck you. This isn't the way I'd do that."

"But you want to fuck me, don't you? I want you to fuck me. What's the problem? You volunteer at the Rainbow Connection to hook up, don't you? That's what the volunteers do. That's what Father Thomas does. Jarid, that big black dude? He fucks Father Thomas. I've heard even Father Thomas talk about the size of your cock and how he'd like to—"

"I . . . don't . . . want to hear this, Neal. I'm going to take a shower now. Then you can. I'll be in bed when you get out of the shower, and you and Petey can sack out over there. Tomorrow, when they've gotten the tree cleared out the parking lot, I'll show you the apartment. If you want to stay there until you make other arrangements, that's fine. No strings attached. I'm making no demands of . . . or moves on . . . you. I want to be very clear about that. We can forget any of this was said."

"But you're a top, aren't you?" he asked. "Maybe you'll do me sometime? It doesn't have to be any tit for tat. I'd like for you to top me."

I was having trouble breathing. I didn't want to answer. But for some reason, I did. He looked a little downcast, like I was rejecting him. Like he wasn't good enough for me. And that wasn't it at all. "Maybe sometime, Neal. Yes, you take my breath away. Yes, I want . . . but I'm going into the bathroom now."

I was in the shower, soaped up, when the power went out. There was a small square of a window, high up on the wall, at the back of the building, so the flashing of light in the fury of the storm kept the room from being totally dark, but the interior lights were out and the air conditioning, such as it was, had kicked off. The water was still running in the shower, though, so I started to rinse off.

But then I wasn't alone. Neal was in the shower cubicle with me, on his knees, taking my half-hard, but quickly filling out, cock in his mouth. Moaning, I leaned back into the tiled wall, widened my stance to give him plenty of room to kneel close in between my legs, and held the unruly blond curls of his head between my hands as he expertly sucked my cock.

He took his mouth off my cock long enough to murmur, "I knew you wanted it."

Yes, I wanted it. Grasping his head between my hands, I pulled his mouth back onto my cock.

When I had pulled him up, turned his back to the wall, and settled his channel on my cock to the sounds of his grunts and groans and his "You're so big; you're splitting me. Yes! Fuck ME!" he hooked his knees on my hips and I pushed his back up and down the soaping tile wall as I fucked him hard and deep.

On the bed, I covered him, doggie style, the palm of one of my hands on his belly, pulling him up to his knees, mounting him, and fucking him hard, while I milked his cock with the other hand. He stayed right with me, thrusting back as I thrust forward, egging me on to "give it to me good." I gave it to him good—the first total, all-out fucking I'd done since Diego in Denver nearly eight months earlier.

I woke in the morning, on my back on the bed, under a sheet, no sounds of a storm coming from outside the room. The sheet was rustling and rising and falling before me. Neal was under the sheet, between my thighs, giving me a blow job. Petey was sitting on his haunches beside the bed, cocking his head back and forward, looking quizzically at the rise and fall of the sheet. Feeling suddenly free and amused by the sight of Petey and wondering what he was thinking, I relaxed and luxuriated in the masterful job Neal's mouth was doing on my cock and on how he was squeezing, rolling, and distending my balls with one of his hands.

It was only after I creamed his tonsils and he started to move up on my body . . . after Petey began to whine when he saw that his master was in the room, coming out from under the sheet . . . and after Neal voiced an "Oh, shit. I know he's got to get out to take a dump" . . . and after I was alone in room, Neal's parting, "When I get back, I want you to fuck the shit out of me again" resonating in my brain, that I was coming back to earth. I knew this wasn't the path I intended to take. I had to return to reality.

When Neal and Petey came back, I'd already packed out of the room and was sitting in the car.

"The IHop OK for breakfast?" I asked, trying to keep my voice cheery. "There's one nearby, and we can get something for Petey too. Then I'll show you the apartment. Deal's still on offer, but last night didn't happen. OK?"

"This morning didn't happen either? I thought you liked the blow job."

"I loved the blow job. Nope, this morning didn't happen either."

"If you want to pretend it didn't," Neal said. Something in his voice, though, told me that he didn't believe that for a moment.

I wasn't sure I believed it, either. But I'd be damned if I would give in so easily. It wasn't the path I needed to be on.