Chapter 4 – Chapter 4

Vandi seemed ever present now, although never in Damien's presence. Damien had branched out in his wants. He decided he wanted male models too. There had been a bit of a dustup when Damien had wanted Vandi to pose for his painting—in the nude just as the women were—and against the backdrop of jungle. Vandi had snorted and said. "Absolutely not; what do you take me for?" which might have been the only rejection that Damien had had for years. After that, I would see Vandi here and there in the house or surrounding forest—and, of course, I also would see Tish nearby. But I wouldn't see Vandi and Damien together. Damien turned then to the Thai houseboy, who refused no one anything, and that situation was saved as far as Damien was concerned.

But that had had a tragedy all its own. Soon after Krit began to pose, Benjamin Wangle, the book agent, was gone from the island—the first one of the house party to desert—but Krit was still here.

I had taken to long walks around the island myself in the morning while Helena and Damien were out golfing. Helena thought I was working at the piano and, in fact, had justified her golf outings on my need for the absence of distractions in the house as much as on her own pleasure at the time with Damien and what she had said was her time to clear her mind and tone her body. The day after Krit had first posed for Damien, I had come back to find Wangle sitting on a chair in the foyer beside his suitcase and weeping. And then he was gone.

I was already a bit off center because that had been the first morning that, during my walk of the island forested paths, I had come across Vandi fucking Tish. It was hardly a surprise or shock. Of course they had been "doing it." But it was such an achingly "right" and primeval scene that I had withdrawn into the foliage and watched them rather than moving on. My envy at their pleasure—unexpected and fascinating to me on Tish's part considering what transpired—knew no bounds. Why couldn't I have the same pleasure and ultimate release when Tish was riding my cock, I wondered. What was going on inside me that I couldn't reach the heights of lust and release that these two did? I suspected I knew—or, rather, knew I knew—but as I had been doing for weeks, I pushed it into the back of my mind.

I knew Tish's naked body, of course. Perfection, but of the kind of fine porcelain, of the first blossom, the talent of exhibiting both sensuality and innocent reserve that had made her a famous model. It was the thinness and the pale perfection of her smooth, supple skin and the flaxen blondness of her long, blonde hair. And more than anything else it was the innocent smile she was able to effect. The gasp she could bring out of me when, laying on her back in the ferns, she opened those long, long legs of hers, pulled Vandi's handsome face down into her V, arched her back, and cried out the incongruity of her innocence and her wanton want as he attacked her clit with his lips and teeth.

And because I knew her body so well—although she certainly didn't perform her rite of first taking each time with me as she did each time after that that I found Vandi fucking her—the focus of my attention went to Vandi's body. He rarely wore much, so the magnificence of his berry-brown musculature already was known to me. But in his nakedness I was able to appreciate the anger that had manifested in Damien that he had not been permitted to capture him with his paint brush. It was Vandi more than Tish, in a fascination I could not deny, who held me riveted to the spot to watch them copulate and that moved my hand to my own cock to participate in the coupling to the only extent I could. Naked, he was a native god. And his erection was magnificent. And as he raised his face from between Tish's thighs and moved up on his knees, hovering over her body, and I saw the thickness and length and upperward curvature of that magnificent staff as his arms went under her and he gathered her up toward him, I nearly called out at how impossible it would be for such a slight woman as Tish, with her delicate slit, to accommodate him.

But as he slid inside her and she arched her back and cried out in passion I nearly choked on my envy of what they had together. Surely this was the meeting on the high plateau of a relationship of the deep, entwined sexual and affection aspects, I thought.

But then Vandi shattered that conception, but in a way that had me panting and stroking and giving up my seed. There was no affection in evidence in this coupling. He took her furiously and brutally, and she flopped around and writhed under him. She raked his shoulders and shoulder blades with her fingernails and yelled obscenities and cried out for a mercy that never came as he pounded, pounded, pounded inside her.

He pulled her up from the ground and her torso hung limply down toward the ground in exhaustion and surrender, her hands brushing against the ferns more from the effect of his brutal pumping inside her than from her own movement, as, holding her pelvis to his, he thrust and thrust and thrust and she shuddered and jerked through orgasm after orgasm. With a cry of victory he ejaculated and let her slide down his legs to lay in a heap at his feet.

I had already ejaculated, but I couldn't take my eyes off the total, primeval taking and remained standing there, hidden, with my cock in my hand and cum dribbling down the legs of my flared shorts. I heard a sigh—probably more than one, in harmony—but I knew that one of the sighs was mine.

But she must be broken and bruised beyond repair. A delicate, brittle body such as hers could not withstand the unexpected thuggish savagery of such an attack. Surely not.

Snapping out of my trance, concern for Tish flooded into me. The young man had brutalized her. Was she hurt? Was she even conscious? But before I could gather my wits and, thrusting the insensitive thug aside, go to her, I saw her rising from the ground, pulling herself up by crawling her hands up Vandi's spread legs as he looked down at her, the grin of victory and mastery still on his lips. When she was on her knees in front of him, she opened her mouth and took his cock in and began to suck him into another erection.

When he had pushed her onto the ground again on her back, slapped her legs apart, and thrust inside her as she arched her back, wrapped her legs around his waist to hold him to her, and started laughing and begging for the second fuck, I silently fled the scene. This might be the height of a sexual relationship, but it certainly wasn't based on affection.

It was in that state of mind that I stumbled upon the issue with Benjamin Wrangel and the Thai houseboy.

I was shaking when I reached the house and entered the front door—completely unprepared to find Wrangel hunched over in a chair in the foyer, rocking back and forth, and crying about having lost Krit.

"He has taken Krit," Wangle whimpered when I asked him what the matter was.

"Krit is just modeling for him," I said.

"No, he has taken Krit to his bed as well."

"His bed?" I asked in disbelief. "But Tish—"

"Hasn't slept with him in two days. She's moved out of his room." This was the first I'd heard about that.

"But Krit."

"Damien sleeps with all of his models. He says all of the masters did, so he must as well. He insists that that was how they were able to pull masterpieces from their subjects—that they knew them intimately. And now he's taken Krit."

My thoughts raced to Vandi. Did he know? Was that why he refused to pose for Damien? It certainly wasn't because he was shy about his body. He had no qualms about displaying his magnificent body for all to see and envy and to dream about. Had Tish told him what modeling for Damien entailed?

I left Wrangel to blubber and went into the lounge and sat at the piano, wanting to lose myself in music. It had been a double blow. It hadn't been the Damien slept with his models—or at least the women, I had thought. I'd heard that rumor before myself. But it was the thought that Damien slept with men as well as women.

There had been an edge to that that this revelation suddenly made clear to me. Damien indeed had been free with his hands—quite friendly—even with me. If I'd known he was bisexual I would have cast an entirely different light on some of the things he'd said to me in the past and the touches. I shuddered. It was exactly what I didn't want to be thinking about on this summer retreat. But possibly worse than that had been the thought that had kept surfacing in my mind from Helena's discussion of the concept for her novel. The thought that, of everyone here this summer, the relationship between Benjamin Wrangel and the Thai houseboy, Krit, had been the closest to the perfect entwining of the affection and the sexual. For some reason, the shattering of that misconception threw me into a depression. I had seen it as hope. Now we were left with the stark one-or-the-other relationships—the sexual or affection, diametrically opposed and in unending conflict with each other.

Even my relationship with Tish was felt now as a disintegration. Before this summer retreat, we had shared being dominated by our separate sibling spouses and there had been something of the relationship of affection between us, a relationship I had enjoyed, and in many cases such as hers valued more highly than the alternative. But now, it was purely a sexual relationship—and as close to a sterile one of those as I could imagine. I could give her an erection and an ejaculation and nothing else, really. And now my eyes were open to the knowledge that she could take—and could seek—far more than that in a copulation. I think I would have preferred the somewhat distant affection we had shared before.

And why couldn't I have both with someone—someone who actually was appropriate—I wondered. Why wasn't one or the other enough for me? It seemed to be enough for everyone else. Everyone, of course, except for Benjamin Wrangel, who had been crushed by losing what he had believed he had.

Krit was inscrutable through it all. He continued to be the pleasant and obedient servant. If he seemed to glow more now than when he was sleeping with Wrangel and if now he wore the typical male Thai sarong skirt around the house without the vest he'd worn with it before and lingered a bit longer near Damien and to the touch than he had before, he didn't flaunt it. But it was clear that Damien was satisfying him in ways that Wrangel hadn't managed.

And now, when Krit cast his eyes on me, was there something else in what he conveyed than there had been before? Or had it been there all along and I'd just been blind—or in denial—to it? Had the departure of Wrangel freed or imprisoned Krit?

It was just as well that Wrangel had left on the tourist boat back to Hilton Head Island that day and hadn't been able to see just how much denial he'd been in to think that his relationship with Krit had been of the combined high affection and sexual quality that both he and I had thought it was.