Chapter 2 – Chapter 2

"Isn't he gorgeous, Frank?"

"Yes, he's perfect," I said, but Marlee couldn't hear me over the noise in the apartment near Times Square, so I said it louder.

"Yes, he's perfect."

Marlee laughed and said, "Yes that's the word for Lars." Then she squeezed my arm and wafted off in the direction of the young stage actress, Sally Troth. Sally was the toast of the town. She was starring even now in the Judy Holliday role in a revival of the classic romantic comedy The Solid Gold Cadillac on Broadway. The revival timing could not have been any more fortuitous, and it was playing to packed house of cheering audiences. In this play a ditzy blonde, originally played to type by Judy Holliday, but now starring Sally Troth, who was anything but ditzy, bumbles her way onto the board of directors of a corrupt corporation and through basic honesty, perseverance, and innocent misinterpretation of everything being proposed to co-opt her, rose to the position of CEO and set the corporation's house in order to the cheers of the small shareholders. This play had opened the weekend Occupy Wall Street had set up camp on Wall Street to protest the greed of corporations in America. There was little question then that Sally Troth's play would be a sell-out.

When Marlee had approached me at the tree in Rockefeller Center and put her arm through mine, she'd looked up at me with a twinkle in her eye as if she'd scored a visitation with the queen or pope and informed me, "Tonight we are guests of Sally Troth, Frank."

I was happy, yes—but mostly for Marlee. She'd been talking about the charms of Sally Troth for weeks. For me, I would have preferred a more quiet Christmas Eve—a gourmet dinner and then home to revel in the knowledge that we'd made it for twenty years. It was like we were an old, comfortable married couple.

The perfect Lars had been on door duty when we arrived. He was a towering blond Nordic hunk, with good, white, sparkling teeth; a crushing bear paw; and a jovial welcome. He was even wearing a Santa hat. My immediate thought was that he also was the bouncer, but when Marlee introduced him as "Our host, Lars"—no last name—my next thought was to wonder if he was a Troth or if Sally was carrying her stage name beyond the theater.

For the next hour and a half, it was bedlam in the apartment. Marlee was at Sally's side much of the evening and Lars was cruising around and seeing that everyone was having a good time. Several times he winked at me in passing, and each time I'd have to admit I was having a good time—if only because he smiled my way. There were several artists and art collectors there, as Marlee had assured me there would be, and I worked the room.

I was concentrating on business so hard that almost everyone was gone before I realized that the entertainment rooms were thinning out. I looked at my watch. It was very early for calling it quits in New York, but then I realized it was Christmas Eve and could understand that everyone would want to be home to lift a cup to the next day in more privacy.

I realized too that I was near exhaustion and also that I'd had a bit too much to drink, not having counted my drinks while I was working the art crowd. I went over to Marlee and Sally, who were now sitting at the dining room table, with their shoes kicked off, and chatting merrily. I suggested that perhaps it was time we went home too, but Marlee just smiled at me and waved me away.

"Go in the living room and enjoy the tree and the fire," Sally said in a rich contralto that I'm sure enhanced her charm on the stage. "Lars is seeing the last of the other guests out. He'll bring you a Cognac and keep you company. Marlee and I still have much to discuss."

I was happy for Marlee that she had made this connection with the actress. I knew that she had wanted to become friends with her. I fingered the velvet box in my jacket pocket. I wanted to be alone with Marlee to give her her special Christmas gift. But Marlee was enjoying herself. That's what was important. There was plenty of time to give her the gift later.

I took my jacket off and laid it over the back of a nearby straight chair and sat in the sofa facing the fireplace. The Christmas tree, the lights and ornaments of which twinkled invitingly in the glow of the fire, was located to one side of the fireplace.

A maid came through picking up platters and glasses on the coffee and side tables. I heard Sally's rich voice telling her in the other room just to stack the dishes in the kitchen and to go home to her family and enjoy their Christmas.

Left on the coffee table among a few expensive-looking knick-knacks and memorabilia from past plays was a small box, wrapped in gold foil. Also on the table were a few photographs in small frames. Although there was a man or two depicted in these, Lars didn't seem to be among them. Before I could think further on this, a smiling Lars—his full set of white teeth also gleaming in the firelight—was standing beside the sofa with two snifters of golden brown liquid in them.

"Mind if I sit, Frank? It is Frank, isn't it? You're with Marlee Colson, aren't you."

"Right on both counts," I answered. "And of course you can sit. It's your house. I'm sorry that Marlee can't stop gabbing. I'm sure you and your wife want to have the rest of the evening to yourselves."

"Not at all, Frank," Lars said and then he sat on the sofa, very close to me. "Have you seen the present yet, Frank?" he said in a low, hoarse voice when he had sat down.

I was finding the close presence of him intoxicating—more so than the Cognac, which I hadn't the nerve yet to pour on top of the other liquor I'd already had that evening.

"Present? What present?"

"There in the gold wrappings. Right there on the coffee table. It's for you. Did you look at the tag. Isn't that your name? Open it."

"For me?" I asked, confused. I didn't reach for it, so Lars did. He also ripped the wrapping off it as he handed it to me.

Purely out of surprise, my stomach lurched and I thought I would lose all of the rich food I'd eaten at the party. How did they know—whoever they were—I wondered. It was a bound stack of postcard-sized photographs with a cover on it. I recognized the name immediately. Jeff Palmer. A premier photographer of male nudes. There was a title on it: "Beautiful Bondage."

My intake of breath was audible. I had no idea that such photographs existed, especially not by Jeff Palmer, who did in photography what I attempted to achieve with charcoal. And the subject matter. How could they possibly know? The Japanese art of Beautiful Bondage combined my love of Japanese wood-block prints with my sexual fetish—mild bondage—and it raised that combined form to an art. Jeff Palmer had produced this book of postcard photographs bringing the Japanese art to his own technique.

I held the book, unopened, in trembling hands.

Lars moved very close and put an arm around my shoulders and brought me very close into him. His arm went between mine and my chest and he was fingering the buttons on my white silk shirt. His own shirt was red silk and was open almost down to his navel, showing a massive, well-developed chest covered in downy, curly golden hair. His trousers, as I had noticed earlier, were tight and black and almost could be said to be dancer's tights. The bulge could not be ignored.

"Look at the photos, Frank," Lars whispered.

Nonsensically responding to the command, I started leafing through the photographs. They were everything I could hope to have seen in them. My imagination was going wild on the drawings I could do from these. Using both hands, Lars had my shirt unbuttoned and his fingers playing with my nipples before I came back down to earth.

"The women," I murmured through heavy breaths.

"What women?" he asked, and then he gave a low laugh.

I looked toward the dining room. Marlee and Sally were no longer there.

"We're alone, and I know what you like, Frank," Lars whispered.

"Lars," I murmured. I might have resisted, but the women weren't there. It suddenly struck me that Marlee wanted to come to this party because she wanted to be Sally. Well, if Marlee was going to have her fun . . .

"Hush. And relax, Frank. Lars knows what you want. And Lars wants it too. Concentrate on the photographs. I've given you a present. Give me one too."

He had already unzipped my trousers and taken my cock out with one of his big mitts. The hand of the arm encasing me continued to work my nipples, while the other one stroked my cock. I couldn't fool him. I wanted him. My body betrayed me. I moaned and concentrated on the Beautiful Bondage photographs, my mind racing over possibilities for drawing poses.

When I was ready to come for him, Lars lowered his lips to my cock and took the cum inside his mouth. He raised his lips to mine, and I tasted my essence in his kiss.

He sat away from me then and pulled three long silk scarves, one vermillion, one gold, and the other emerald green out of his side pocket.

"It will be a jolly good Christmas," he said. Then he laughed again and turned to me and, with a more serious expression and a more commanding voice, said. "Take off your clothes, please, and go over to the fireplace."

Cowed and confused but still humming from the expert cocksucking I stood and did as he commanded, letting my clothes fall between the sofa and the chair where I had put my jacket. While I did this, Lars had taken a sable throw off the back of an easy chair and laid it out flat in front of the fireplace.

"On your belly on the rug," he said in a calm, but not-to-be denied voice.

I did as he asked. He tied my wrists together with the vermillion scarf, tying off the other end on a sturdy leg of a mahogany library table. My ankles were bound together with the green scarf. The golden one was used to cover my eyes.

I started to breath heavily as I heard the rustling of his clothes as he took them off and let them fall to the floor.

My breathing became more labored and I began to pant as his hands ran over my body, and then his tongue. I gave a little lurch and moaned as I felt his hands part my buttocks cheeks and his tongue start to rim me. I groaned when the tongue began to flick inside my anus and grunted when the lubricated fingers started to open me up.

Neither of us spoke. Lars was hard at work and I was trembling in anticipation and surprise. He straddled my thighs and I felt the heaviness of his engorged cock at the small of my back. I also felt cold hard metal.

He had a heavy cock ring! I shuddered and began to whimper. And then he was entering me in a long, slow slide. He moved his cock head back to where his cock ring rubbed on my prostate, which he sustained until I begged him for the fuck. He dove deep then and started to pump me in earnest. I cried out at the taking—it had been so long since my last one—and moaned and groaned quietly as he lay full length on top of me, holding my legs together with the strength of his knees and the bindings at my ankles, which constricted my channel so that it was a real effort to accommodate the size of him. Once he was saddled and setting a steady rhythm, the memory of how good it could be came back to me. I lifted and set my hips in a rolling motion that gave Lars a good ride and dragged my cock through the fur of the throw underneath me.

Lars laughed and fucked me into Christmas morning.

When he let me free, he pulled me up, and I shuddered again looking down and seeing the size of his cock. He guided me into a back hallway and past a closed door. I could hear moaning inside that room. Two women moaning. If I had felt guilty about letting Lars fuck me before, that was all dispelled now.

I was led into a small room that was almost filled with a twin bed.

I looked skeptical, but Lars laughed and said, "We'll manage."

Then he commanded me to lay on my back on the bed, which I did, looking up at his magnificently toned body. I would do anything he asked at that point.

He opened the closet, in which there was a bureau. Opening the top drawer, he took out two black metallic sets of velvet-lined handcuffs and a long leather strip with wide loops at each end.

I said nothing, just enjoyed every twist and turn of his muscular body, as he cuffed my wrists to the headboard above my head and then pulled the leather sling around my neck and forced my calves into the loops at either end, trussing me up completely to his whims.

Lars came up on the bed between my spread legs and, after sheathing his cock inside my channel again, hovered his torso over mine, the heels of his hands supporting him on the surface of the bed on either side of my chest, and fucked me gloriously for what seemed to be hours.

The Jeff Palmer Beautiful Bondage photographs were racing through my mind as I moaned and whispered how much I was enjoying what Lars was doing to me. Increasingly, the actual photos were replaced in my mind by poses they inspired for my drawings.

I was torn. I was loving the fuck and the bondage experience, but I wanted blank paper and a piece of charcoal in my hand.

When Lars was finished and was releasing me, though, I was too exhausted to do more than cup my body inside his on the narrow bed and drift off to sleep.

When I woke, it was morning and Lars was gone. I found that there was a small bathroom off the bedroom, and I waddled in there, not being able to keep my thighs together, my channel on fire—but a very satisfying "on fire."

I showered and did what I could to look presentable. I couldn't shave, but I decided, looking in the mirror, that I looked quite good with a day's growth of beard. I certainly was smiling and looking well fucked. I looked and felt more relaxed than I had been for months.

I recalled that my clothes were still in the living room, but I found a robe and some slippers behind the bathroom door.

I padded out to the living room and only had time to reach down to retrieve and pull on my briefs, when I heard a woman's voice trilling from the kitchen.

"We're in here, Frank. Come as you are."

I reached into the pocket of my jacket and transferred the velvet gift box to the pocket of the robe, and, not taking any more time to do more than that, walked slowly to the kitchen, wondering if there would be some sort of confrontation this morning for what I'd done—what I'd let Lars do—the previous night. The only excuse I could give was that I was drunk. It was the same excuse I'd given twenty years earlier when I had fumble fucked Marlee, so she should be able to accept it. I knew that Sally should be the one I was worried about. But she'd left me with Lars to have sex with the woman I'd brought to the party. I wasn't the most guilty person in this swap—not by a long shot. Still I couldn't tell them I had been seduced by photographs. They certainly couldn't understand the effect that those Jeff Palmer photographs had on me. Well, Marlee might. She was brilliant that way.

But there was no confrontation. There also was no Lars. What there was was a kitchen that looked like a hurricane had gone through and emptied everything out of the cupboards and onto the counter. I quickly remembered, though, that the maid had been shooed out the previous night before cleanup. What there also was were two women—both only in bathrobes and slippers as far as I could see—with smiles on their faces and purrs on their lips that brought to mind kittens falling into the bowl of cream.

"He's gone," Sally said in terse answer to my question. But she was smiling and there was no tension in her voice, so I didn't think she was angry—or particularly surprised at what might have happened. I couldn't believe that she had the imagination that would be able to grasp what actually happened. I wasn't sure I could grasp what had happened. Why and how? All I knew was that I would do it again in a flash, given the opportunity.

Marlee was sitting at a kitchen table and Sally was flitting around the counters. She quickly produced another cup for me and told me to sit. Then she took a long look at Marlee and me and announced that she was going to go take a shower.

When she was gone, I reached into the pocket of the robe and pulled out the velvet box. I set it on the table, and eyes downcast, still uncertain of my bearings here, said. "Happy Christmas, Marlee. This is for you."

Marlee reached for the box, opened it, exclaimed her delight, threw her arms around my neck, and gave me a sloppy kiss on the cheek. "This is wonderful, Frank," she cried out. "It's the perfect gift."

When I heard her say the word "perfect," it was the first time since I'd dragged myself into the kitchen that I permitted myself to take a deep breath. It would be OK. She thought it was perfect.

"I have a gift for you too, Frank," she said. Then she produced a long, thin, wrapped box that she'd been keeping under the table and I hadn't seen when I entered the kitchen.

"Open it, Frank."

I tore the paper off. It was a drawing pad, and a small box of black charcoal sticks fell out of the box as I opened it and fell to the floor.

"Oh, damn," she exclaimed. "The charcoal will be broken."

"That's OK," I answered, almost absentmindedly. "I break them before I use them anyway. Umm, thanks."

I didn't quite know what to say. I had hundreds of tablets of drawing pads and boxes of charcoal back at the studio. It began to dawn on me then, though. They were back at the studio, not here.

"These aren't your gift, silly," Marlee said, her voice excited. "These are just tools to make use of your gift. Lars was your special Christmas gift. He's an actor. Just a friend of Sally's. But I thought he was what you needed to return your technique to perfection. You can only take so much inspiration from photographs. And, yes, I bought the Jeff Palmer photographs too. You need real-life inspiration too, I think, to attain that perfection in your work again."

"I don't know what to—"

"Say nothing, Frank. I know where your mind is at this moment." She rose and walked to the door into the dining room.

"I think it's time I got into the shower too, Frank. I think Sally must be lonely. And, I almost forgot. This is a gift that will keep on giving—like those flower of the month gifts. Lars is in a club. I'm sure you know what kind. I've signed up for monthly sessions for you with Lars and his friends. I want your art to sell well. You need constant inspiration."

I should have thanked her then, but I didn't really notice that she was gone. I had already opened the drawing pad to the top sheet and my hand, holding a piece of charcoal, was racing across the surface in bold—and what I knew, with assurance, were—perfect strokes.