Cry Down the Mountain

"May I hope you're a player?" he asked, "beyond the roulette table?" and when I answered that, yes, he could, he offered me the fourth drink. I could hold my liquor, though--apparently a lot better than Max had.

"I like to go both ways, but I'm mainly a top," he revealed while I was drinking my fourth beer. "If you don't like the view from the bottom--"

"I like that view just fine," I said and he gave me a broad smile. He named a price he'd pay me. I wondered if he'd paid Max too. I bet he did. I bet that was part of the story Max had left out because he didn't want to share it. I wondered then whether Max had agreed to be beaten and fucked in the Saint Hilarion dungeon for pay.

"I could do that for the exchange of information."

"Like what?" he asked.

"I have a friend, Max Hensen, a Danish soldier. I'm looking for him. Haven't seen him since the day before yesterday. He said he'd be coming here. Any idea where he is?"

I watched him carefully for signs of guilt on anything bad he'd done to Max. Nada. He either didn't know how and where Max had wound up or he was a consummate actor.

"Max? Yes, he was in here yesterday. A handsome fellow. A beautiful Dane, like you. Not nearly as body beautiful as you are, though--and he would only bottom. I would hope you'd be more versatile than that. He came here, yes. We fucked. I took him for dinner in Kyrenia harbor, where a friend of mine, a restaurant owner, took a fancy to Max. The young man was randy and, I must say, a bit in his cups. He was very willing. We took him upstairs to Sami's flat above the restaurant, and I watched Sami fuck him until I needed to return to the casino." It was almost like he knew someone would come looking for Max--that Max would be missing--and that he'd worked out an elaborate story in advance that held he wasn't the last one who had had Max.

"You just watched?"

Ergon smiled. "Let's just say that your friend had room for two."

That was straightforward enough. The story jived with what Max had said and he wasn't revealing any "and I hung him up, whipped him, and left him to die" edges.

"He was a good lay. I think, though, that you will be very much better."

"Shall we find out?" I asked. "Where?"

So, I fucked him, standing, against the wall, in his penthouse apartment at the casino hotel, holding his wrists above his head against the wall and his knees hugging my hips while I spiked him, and then he did me in a missionary on his bed. Afterward, as I was counting out the money he gave me--including a generous tip--I said, "I'd like to meet this restaurant owner in Kyrenia harbor. What's the name of the restaurant?"

"Trypiti," he said. "The food's good there. The owner's name is Sami Akkaya. He's a big-dicked man. Likes to bind his men and fuck them or ride them, depending on his mood. Some say he's a sadist when he's highly aroused."

My antenna went up at the mention of binding and sadism. It sounded like this Akkaya was the man--or, at least, it sounded like Ergon was offering Akkaya up.

"I'll take you there, if you wish. I can't stay, though. I have business to attend to this evening."

"Yes, I'd very much like to meet this man," I said.

"Does that mean you like the rougher play--being on the receiving end of it?"

"Let's just say I'd like to meet this Akkaya guy."

* * * *

Mehmet let me off at the street above the harbor and told me which of the restaurants was Trypiti. He didn't accompany me down to the water. As I walked down the steep hill into the harbor that was surrounded by castle walls on the west and a ring of protecting connected buildings curving around the old harbor as defensive protection, with only three access streets, I wondered how I would get to meet this restaurant owner. I didn't have to worry about that. He zeroed in on me. It transpired that he, like many other Turks, had a fetish for northern European men.

The buildings surrounding the harbor actually fronted on the upslope opposite the water. This is where you would enter the residences. The first or second story, facing the harbor had been storage and shop areas, located where the goods could be directly taken from docked ships into the buildings. Now these were shops and, mostly, restaurants, with interior spaces but mostly utilizing the outdoor stone-laid apron between their doors and the water of the small harbor. There was no balustrade at the edge of the stone terracing, where smaller craft were tied up and directly accessed from the inner harbor road. Here the restaurants had put their tables out so that patrons could eat and drink directly at the harborside. Experienced diners here didn't put their more drunken comrades at the water side of the table.

I had barely sat at a table outside the Trypiti doors and immediately beside the harbor waters when the restaurant owner, Sami Akkaya, started giving me attention. It was easy to recognize him because he was clearly in command of his waiters and he was a beautiful, mature man who moved about his business like a dancer, no movement extraneous to the task at hand.

It was early afternoon on a weekday. There was little demand going for food, but there were some drinkers. I had a table for six to myself, though. I ordered an Efes beer and a mixed grill from a young Turkish waiter. The food was served by an older man, who I identified from Mehmet Ergon's description to be the restaurant owner I was looking for. I'd already been given the beer, which I had tossed off. He brought me another one with the food.

He was in his early fifties, I surmised. He was still very well put together--heavy, but the weight being evenly distributed, and he was muscular. He was a handsome man, with a wavy head of black hair, shot with gray. He was clean-shaven except for a handlebar mustache. He was thick about the waist, but solid, not paunchy, and he wore low-rise tan trousers and an open-neck white shirt, the sleeves turned up to his elbows. The shirt was open almost to his navel. Salt and pepper hair spilled out of the opening. The shirt was of a gauzy material that left nothing of the hirsute, muscular torso behind it to the imagination. I had no doubt that this was purposeful on his part. His chest, his pecs solid and bulgy, was tattooed, as were his arms down to his wrist. Effusive hand gestures went along with his talk.

A gold medallion on a thick chain was nestled in the cleavage between his pecs. Thick hair swirled around his nubs. The shirt wasn't flared to show his nipples, but I could clearly see through the gauzy material that they both had bars pierced in them. He had open-toed sandals on his feet, the toes long and plump and hairy on the top. He had a gold disk earing in his right ear. If that was a signal of what he wanted or what he did, I didn't know what it meant here on Cyprus. He had a jovial "welcome to my restaurant" smile and manner. He was a man in charge.

I had no doubt from the way he'd latched onto my arrival and the looks he gave me that he wanted my body. I didn't know if he wanted to use me or be used, but if he was the man I was looking for, knowing what he had done to Max, it was clear that he was a cruel user. Max was a bottom and a submissive to rough treatment. I knew that; I'd had him myself.

"You will want another beer, I see. You are Scandinavian? You are a solider?" he asked, as he placed my food before me.

"Yes to all of that," I said. "I'm Danish."

"I am Sami. This is my restaurant. You are new to the harbor, I believe, yes?"

"Yes," I lied. I just hadn't been to his restaurant yet. There were many of them here to try.

"In that case the next beer will be a welcome to you. A soldier with the UN, are you?"

"Yes."

"I like that. I very much like Danish men. You are, what can I say, all one would want--a real handful."

Was that a pass already, I wondered. "Do you have many of the Danish UN soldiers stop at your restaurant?" I asked.

"Yes, very, very many," Akkaya answered with a grin. "I give them a good price for their meal and a good time, if they are interested. I like fit Danish men very, very much."

"Do you?" Yes, that definitely was a pass. He was giving me a "special" smile and he touched me on the arm. Another Efes was delivered, Akkaya having snapped his fingers and pointed to my empty beer bottle and the young waiter having scurried for the replacement. There was another bottle of beer, the one Akkaya had brought with the food, so it seemed like the man was pushing booze at me.

"I had a perfect Danish soldier come to the restaurant just yesterday. He was a beautiful young man, very fit, very vigorous. I believe his name was Maximilian. Would you by any means know him?"

"Yes, I know a Max who is one of the Danes," I answered. I wasn't going to take it any further than that in trying to get Akkaya to tell me what he knew, if anything, about Max's disappearance. I knew already that Max had spent some time here at this restaurant before disappearing. Max was pretty openly gay when he wasn't on duty, so I took it that Akkaya mentioned him to gauge my own inclinations.

I looked down at Akkaya's fingers on my forearm just so I knew he put them there and signaled that I wasn't going to shrug them off. He was running along the edge of suggestive conversation too, hiding, I was sure, behind being Turkish and not being able to find a less suggestive word in English. His English was excellent, though, so he didn't fool me.

Fine, I thought, I didn't have a lot of time to get this unraveled. I wouldn't be coy.

"You know Max quite well."

I turned my eyes on him and gave him a "let's not beat around the bush" gaze. "Max and I have fucked. You know, Sevişdik. I have used him hard. We've had fun with a whip. Ben Max üzerinde kırbaç kullanın ve Max zevk alır--I use the whip on Max and Max enjoys it."

"Ah, you speak Turkish very good," the man said, with a smile. No reference at all to what I'd said, but I had little doubt that he understood me.

"Did you fuck him yesterday? Is that the way in which you like Danes?" I asked, pressing in.

The man smiled and sat down at the table across from me. He turned and snapped his fingers to get the young waiter's attention. "Another beer for our Danish soldier friend, Baris. Quickly now."

He had gotten Max drunk yesterday before taking him upstairs in his restaurant and fucking him. Was he trying to do the same with me? Yes, probably. I wouldn't get drunk like Max did, but this man thinking he could do that would move this along nicely.

"Your friend was delightful in bed," he said. "Danish men are lovely. We did it right up there. I live above the restaurant. He was fine with the restraints." He gave me a "would you be fine with restraints too" look.

Ah, the restraints. Max had mentioned that. "Ah, binding. Very sexy," I said.

Akkaya smiled, having been given leave to dip deeper into the fetish. "And he was fine with the whip, which you have mentioned. Tell, me, do you always use the whip or do you sometimes like the whip used on you?" His eyes were slits of lust and he was almost salivating when he asked that.

"Maybe both," I said. "And did you have enough Danish yesterday, or are you hungry for more?" I asked. I wanted to see his upstairs. I wanted to know if Max was there now, tied up somewhere, between uses. Or if there was something else I could learn about where Max was from what I could see upstairs.

"You can never get enough Danish," Akkaya said, with a smile. Sitting in front of me, he pulled the tail ends of his shirt out and flared it more, showing me his muscular chest. His right foot was out of its sandal and he raised his leg, pushing the foot between my thighs. I reached down, took the foot in my hand, and pressed it into my crotch. I hadn't had any trouble starting a hard-on for him. He gasped and smiled. Then he ground the foot into my crotch. I grunted and grimaced, but held, which told him what he wanted to know and made him smile. As far as he now knew, I was into receiving pain.

The waiter delivered another beer, saw where we are in the dance of the mutual seduction, smiled, and moved off. I'm sure that Akkaya had engaged with men like this before at the tables, although perhaps not as blatantly. The waiter would see that we got privacy. I pulled my T-shirt over my head. Akkaya's eyes bugged out and he gasped. It wasn't an unusual gesture for this scene. The sun was hot, this was a seaside holiday town, and any guy with a good chest was baring it. The gasp, I'm sure, is that I'm not just any guy when it came to chest musculature. I'm sure he was getting hard to see that there was some welting on my chest. I didn't tell him that I'd gotten it on a strenuous rope course in recent PT qualifying.

"Am I in good enough shape for you?" I asked.

He licked his lips and murmured, "Superb. You are in magnificent shape."

"As good as Max was?"

"Better. Superb." He reached over and touched one of the raised welt lines on my chest and I let him. "Did you enjoy receiving this?"

"Yes," I said. And I had. I enjoyed going through the PT course. I'd let the man misinterpret what I meant with the "yes." "Max'i siktin ve kırbaçladın mı?--Did you fuck Max and did you whip him?" I asked, trying to keep the tone noncommittal.

He gave me a wary look and then laughed. There wasn't much of a reason to be coy; he was running his toes along the side of my hard-on through the material of my shorts. "Yes."

"Upstairs, above the restaurant?"

"Yes."

"Do you want to fuck me or do you want me to fuck you?"

"Either, as long as you will help me get into the mood."

I rather thought he already was in the mood.

"With a whip?"

"Evet, with a whip."

A man of few words when the other man was offering himself as easily as I was.

We fucked in the attic of the three floors above the restaurant, the restaurant oriented to the harbor and the house above it, opening out onto the street behind and orienting to the town. I asked Akkaya for a brief walkthrough on our way to the attic, him believing I was intrigued by the Byzantine architecture of the building and me looking for signs of Max. There was no evidence of him up to the attic room.

The upper room was a mildly sadomasochist sex chamber. That it looked like a mild version of bondage and rough sex disturbed me a bit. There wasn't anything mild about the chamber up at Saint Hilarion castle. If Akkaya was the man, I would think that this room would be every bit as demanding as the other, and more careful about collateral damage. There was no Saint Andrew cross; there were no splatterings of blood and body fluids on the floor and drop cloths. Conversely, there were implements of the art hanging on the walls--restraints, gags, dildoes, a hand whip, leather straps, leather gloves, harnesses--the bed had restraints at the corners, there was a sling suspended from the ceiling in the corner, and the ceiling over the bed was a mirror. But there was no stained rubber sheeting around. There had been at the castle. If the acts got messy, it would have seemed there was more need for rubber sheeting than at the stone-clad castle ruins.

When I had completed a circuit of the room with my eyes, I turned to find Akkaya standing there, naked, other than his gold medallion on the chain. He was in fine fettle for a heavy man his age--solid, well proportioned, sexy with his hairiness and tattooing. His cock was of respectable size and was in full erection. His balls hung low. There was an almost apologetic little smile on his face. He was holding a dildo in each hand, one big and the other bigger, and gesturing to the bed, with its restraints at the four corners.

"I hope you don't mind a bit of bondage when it's my turn to drive," he said. "It arouses me especially."

"And the toys? The dildoes?"

"Yes, the toys," he said. He now had a hand whip in his hand and was switching it against his leg.

From the elevation and hardness of his cock, I didn't see how he could be any more aroused, but I humored him. That meant I took a chance. To get in the mood, he had me kneel below the bed and he restrained my wrists to the posts at either end of the foot of the bed, which stretched my arms and shoulder muscles out. Then he stood behind me and whipped me on my bare back, and I let him. If it had gotten too rough, I knew I had the strength to pull the bed down and escape the bonds. He didn't put a lot of strength into it, which added to my doubts that he had been the one to whip Max at Saint Hilarion. Max had been used much harder than this.

When Akkaya decided he was sufficiently in lust, he put me on my back on the bed, restraining my wrists at the two ends of the headboard. He worked me over with the dildoes after eating me out and blowing me and he did do some choking breath play while he fucked me in a missionary. After he did me, he did himself, mounting and riding my cock in a cowboy. He had me at his mercy--or thought he did; I was sure that I could break out of the restraints if I really wanted or needed to--and he did nothing else. He didn't use any of his fancy toys other than the whip below the bed and dildoes of two sizes on the bed.

And he was given every reason to think he could have done more, more intensely. It was really a bit of a downer, too restraining. I'd been looking forward to a bit more taxing effort--and therefore the understood permission to work him over in return. Everything stopped short of that and not because he couldn't have pushed it further. This wasn't on the same level as Max had received up at the castle.

When the missionary and cowboy were over, it was over. He let me loose, thanked me, directed me to the shower, and told me he hoped we could do it again. I left thinking that this hardly was the treatment that Max got up at Saint Hilarion, and I hadn't put any breaks on it being so if that's what Akkaya wanted.

"I look forward to using more of your toys and more of your body the next time," I had said in leaving. He'd given me a tight little smile and said something about building up to relationships.

I half expected him to invite me to take a ride--a ride up to Saint Hilarion, whether he told me the purpose of that or not. There was the possibility that he wouldn't engage in the rougher play here at home but would do so up on the mountain. I was pretty sure, though, that he'd enjoyed me enough here that if was into rougher stuff, he'd want to do that with me. But he didn't propose anything rougher.

Thinking of Saint Hilarion, though, I decided that I might as well check that out again. Maybe there was some reason that that was where Max would have gone after leaving my place. I had no idea how he would get there, but maybe he liked what he'd gotten or maybe he wanted the guy who had assaulted him and used him hard to think Max wanted it again and had called for a ride to and repeat experience at the castle.

It was worth a try. There weren't any other good ideas occurring to me. In the back of my mind I was thinking of the cute little Turkish soldier, Errol, too. Akkaya might have been fully satisfied with the session in his attic, but I can't say it completed me. Chances were I wouldn't see Errol again by driving up past what must be his army camp, but it was worth a shot.

* * * *

As I was approaching the turnoff to the road up into the mountains, past the Turkish army camp, and up to Saint Hilarion on the heights of the Kyrenia Mountains ridgetop, a black Mercedes was turning out of the road, headed in the other direction--toward the Merit Park Casino. Mehmet Ergon was at the wheel, and once turned, he was moving like a bat out of hell.

I wasn't surprised at what I found at Saint Hilarion or why Ergon had been so antsy about having someplace he had to go that afternoon that kept him from staying and playing with me more.