Chapter 2 – Chapter 2

"I don't know how you can take it out at that beach house of your cousin's," The sheriff said. "Much too quiet. Even the wave noise is muted out there, with the current patterns breaking the waves on the other side of the rocks out in the water there. You're lucky it's unseasonably warm, though. The heating is none too good in any of these beach houses."

"It's just that sort of quiet I came down here to find, Amos," Trent answered. "The beach cottage is basic, but I like its simplicity. There's nothing complicated there. I can think. And we're being blessed by unusually warm weather, apparently. Maggie at the counter over there tells me that these are late spring temperatures. Too cold to go into the ocean but warm enough to sunbathe."

"I wouldn't count on the warm weather holding through your time here, and you'd be brave to sunbathe," the sheriff said in a slow, southern drawl, "but more power to you if you try it. If you do, let me know and I'll come out to watch."

Trent was sitting with the county sheriff, Amos Stallings, in Oyster's only café. Just about everything in Oyster was an "only"—and they were lucky to have what they did have. There couldn't have been more than two hundred residents—permanent residents; there were some folks from further inland with weekend cottages on the beaches—for twenty miles in each direction. Oyster was close to Cape Charles near the southern tip of Virginia's Eastern Shore. If the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel hadn't been put in fifty years earlier, the folks in Oyster would be as remote as folks anywhere in the States could be.

It was this remoteness that Trent had been seeking. It was helping his playwrighting. It wasn't doing a damn thing for his sexual frustration, though—not that he'd admit that he was sexually frustrated. When he was being realistic, though, his thoughts went back to that last barb from Gerhardt—that Kevin had told Gerhardt that Trent needed to be fucked regularly. Trent had to admit that his relationship with Kevin had been a daddy one—Kevin seducing him and then keeping him happy with the cock.

Trent wasn't as oblivious to how needy he looked and felt as he'd like, though. Even the sheriff was looking good to him now, a week after he'd fled Washington, D.C., and Gerhardt Von Hultz. But he shouldn't have thought "even" concerning the sheriff. The man was damn hot for those who liked their men mature but still well conditioned. The perfect image of a state trooper. Tall, heavily muscled but slim waisted and hipped. Solid as a rock. Strong jawed handsome. Walking tall and with confidence; owning the place.

Trent's cousin, Carson, had given him the advice to establish himself with the locals as fast as he could and then they'd fit him right in. He'd found that to be true and no one had been friendlier than Sheriff Stallings. This was the third time in five days they'd met for lunch, and the sheriff seemed genuinely interested in the work of a playwright down here in his little slice of the world. Trent had even been invited to his home because his wife was trying to be a writer and Trent said he'd gladly talk to her about that. And he did so, as their two preteen girls sat in the living room texting their friends, taking side glances at him, and giggling to each other.

Stallings was tall and muscular. Probably pushing forty-five, but he stood straight in his uniform of form-fitting brown shirt and black trousers with a brown cloth strip down each side. His heavy Oxfords were a spit-polished black. He naturally had a buzz cut for a hair style, but the hair was still a dark auburn and also curled out of the neckline of his shirt and covered his muscular forearms. He was a handsome devil, with a rugged face and square jaw. Trent had no doubt he demanded respect and not a small amount of admiration at the gym where he worked out. There was no question that he worked out in a gym regularly.

It disturbed Trent a bit that he was so sexually charged when he was down here in this beach community alone. It could just be that there were so few people about and none as arousing as the sheriff.

But looking out of the café's front window and across to the large green in the center of the town's main collection of commercial buildings, Trent saw that that wasn't true. Someone even more instantly alluring than the sheriff was out there trying to get an impromptu football game going. The guy was much the same age as the sheriff; he was surrounded by a bunch of boisterous younger guys. Trent was surprised that so many young men had shown up for the scratch game, but then he realized that, this being a Saturday afternoon and particularly warm for late February, this was probably an event they came out for whenever possible—probably one these young men looked forward to throughout the week.

The man who caught his attention was probably the organizer of the games. He wasn't tall and he was on the stocky side, but not fat—just solidly built and heavily muscled. He was deeply tanned and was another one who went for the buzz cut hairstyle. But on him, Trent could tell that there was gray at the temples. He didn't look any older than the sheriff was, however. When Trent had first seen him walking past the café window toward the green, he was in shorts and had a white T-shirt on, but he was already in the process of pulling the T over his head. By the time he got to the green, he was shirtless. His skin was hairless and his musculature was plated like the shape of Roman armor. He was one sharply cut specimen. Both he and some of the other young men were wearing heavy hiking boots when they arrived at the green, but they all were barefoot while they played. Trent thought that they seemed to make their men tough down here in this isolated beach community. Tough and well built.

All of the men deferred to the man, who appeared to be the oldest one there by far. The game was rough and tumble, and Trent was drawn outside to watch it more closely after the sheriff had said he needed to get back to work and had shoved off.

As powerfully built as the man was, his team kept giving him the ball and he plowed right down the field with three and four defenders hanging on to him and only bringing him down with difficultly. Mostly they just stopped him dead in progress and he gave up, laughing at their inability to put him on the ground, proudly staying on his beefy legs.

Trent was still loitering there when the game concluded. When they slowly scattered in different directions, the man, his arm around a young blond guy Trent's age or a bit younger, with long, curly hair, passed by Trent. The man looked at Trent in passing and gave him a little smile. Trent shuddered and felt a hot flash go through his body. The man looked dangerous, but in an arousing way. Trent felt like he could look right through him and that all they'd have to do was speak and the man would possess him, would know everything about him and all of his dark secrets. As they passed, Trent looked down and saw that the man was guiding the young blond with a hand on a buttocks cheek. Neither one had pulled his T-shirt back on. They climbed into a Jeep Wrangler with an open top and a roll bar, with the man in the driver's seat. As the Jeep passed Trent again, the man turned a piercing stare at Trent, and Trent shivered.

He went home to his small beach cottage and walked between the rooms—there were only two of them downstairs and two upstairs, besides the bathroom—restless and keyed up. At length, he took his laptop and a beach blanket, stripped down to his bathing suit and flip-flops, and walked out onto the beach and north toward an abandoned cottage that the sea, at some time, had briefly possessed and taken a big bite of at one end.

He decided to work on his play and soak up some rays at the same time. He figured it would stay warm enough for a bathing suit for another hour or so. He felt challenged by the sheriff to be able to tell him he'd managed it without freezing.

As he approached the beach below the abandoned house, he saw the Jeep Wrangler parked up near the dirt road that paralleled the beach and gave all of the properties here access to a paved state road paralleling that further inland. He didn't see any evidence of anyone around the property initially, though, so he went ahead and spread out his blanket, plopped down, and opened his laptop. The light was bad from the angle he thought he'd sit in—facing the ocean—so he turned his body to the north. As he did so, he saw them in the corner of his eye.

The abandoned house had had a porch on this side and there was a bench at one end. The blond with the curly hair was on his back on the bench. His arms were stretched above his head and bound by something to a porch column. The sun glinted off his bindings as he moved, so Trent thought that perhaps he was bound by a pair of handcuffs. He was naked except for the heavy construction boots he was wearing. There was a beach towel under the small of his back, protecting him from the wood splinters from the bench as his body was being moved forward and back by the vigorous fucking of the man Trent had been mesmerized by so recently at the village green. He too was just wearing construction boots.

Both bodies looked beautiful in their dance of the fuck. The blond was tanned, but Trent could tell that his natural skin color was almost alabaster because of the tan lines of the Speedo he obviously wore when he swam. The older man had tan lines as well, but his skin was a light brown where his shorts usually covered and was a darker brown where he had tanned.

The blond was being fucked hard, and now that Trent knew they were there, he could hear the cries of taking above the muted sound of the surf. The tenor of the cries told Trent that the man wasn't under any stress that he didn't want to be under. The blond's near leg was just dangling down toward the sand at the side of the porch. The man was holding the blond's other leg up the line of his chest. Trent thought the man must be long because he was rearing his buttocks back significantly before pounding back in hard. He was stroking fast.

So shocked was he to come upon this tableau that Trent didn't move or turn away for more than a minute. When he was recovering his wits, though, he saw that the man fucking the blond was looking down toward the beach—at him. Embarrassed at being caught watching, Trent gathered up his things and moved in the opposite direction, south on the beach, a couple of hundred feet beyond his cottage. Here he saw that a natural pond had formed in the beach and he could see fish—some of pretty good size—swimming around in it. He had brought his father's rod and tackle box with him. He determined that after dinner, he'd come back down and try his luck.

But for now, he had work to do. Seeing the men fuck had given him a buzz and as he reviewed what he'd written on one of the scenes he was working on, he unconsciously unzipped and pulled his cock out and played with it. For some reason the buzz had energized his brain, and, typing mainly with one hand, he polished the scene up with inspiration he hadn't been able to achieve back in Washington.

He felt more than heard the presence and looked up toward his cottage. The older man was standing there, on a sand dune, in his shorts and the hiking boots now, watching him. When he saw that Trent noticed him, he turned and slowly walked away.

Trent felt a chill running up his spine and he looked down almost in surprise to find himself hard and encased with a hand. But then he laughed. This whole afternoon had been almost too much like a Scandinavian movie, he thought. Long, sweeping vistas of desolate country, solitary figures standing and observing "whatever" for long, pregnant periods, and over everything a heavy silence. Gerhardt would feel vindicated on his characterization of the place even without having seen it. As Trent contemplated this, an inspiration for a new play came to him, and he opened another file in the laptop and, quick as he could, spilled ideas and possible scenarios and sets, props, and characters into his laptop.

It was well onto dinnertime when he felt the evening chill on his body and lifted his head from the computer again. He stood, brushed the sand off his shorts, picked up his laptop and his beach blanket, and trudged back up to the cottage. It had been a good afternoon. The sexual acts—and the innuendo—he'd observed were there in his mind, but in front of those was a solid day's production work. He was pleased with himself. And he had to admit that there might have been something in what Gerhardt had said about needing sexual activity to release the creative juices. Maybe that was why he had been so productive in the Kevin years—because Kevin had kept him well fucked.

After he'd eaten his solitary meal in a silent house, reminding himself to buy a radio or CD player or something when he could find someplace that sold them, he found himself walking from room to room again. And this time he was thinking of that man with the magnificent brown body fucking the blond. It had been a cruel fuck, both because of the bound wrists and the strength of his stroking. Not that the blond sounded like he was complaining. But perhaps that's what Trent found the most arousing part of the memory—the rawness of the tableau, the pulling back of the hips and the cruel thrust forward. The older man beating his fists on the chest of the blond while he was pounding his ass. The handcuffs.

He almost forgot that he had intended to try his hand at fishing after dinner and thus it was getting toward dusk before he managed to get out to the pond with the rod and his tackle box. As he approached the pond, the hinges on the tackle box lid gave way and hit the sand, sending all of the lures scattering. By the time he'd found them all—determined not to lose any, as both the box and the lures had come down from his grandfather to his father and then to him—it was too dark to fish.

He gathered up the gear, wondering where he could get the box fixed—he certainly wasn't going to throw it out and get a new one—and went back to the house.

For the next couple of hours he wandered between the four rooms, stopping here and there for pregnant pauses, and thought long thoughts—brief ones on possible scenarios and nuances for his play and longer ones on images of the fucking he had so briefly watched—and made no noise and steeped himself in the silence—just like in the Scandinavian movies.

"Just like in the fucking Scandinavian movies," he boomed out in a stage voice and then laughed and headed for the trickling shower with the rusted pipes and masturbated as the eyes of his mind roved over the body of the man with the Jeep and wondered what his cock felt like when he was pistoning hard. Kevin had been a pounded in the throes of passion too.