Fridays at Battery Park Books

"Speaking of Julian," Trent said, a chill running up his back because the beefy newspaperman was running his fingers up Trent's forearm, "where is he? He's my ride home."

"He left with Monsignor Antoni," Morgan said. "But if you come over to the newspaper office—just turn right at the bookstore entrance. The Citizen-Times building is just across the street from there—I'll be happy to drive you home when the paper is in bed. I told Julian I would. He didn't abandon your need altogether. And if you bring this black poker chip with you, well, you know."

Trent didn't know, but he didn't want to seem to be a dummy, so he didn't say anything. He picked up the black chip, though, which made Morgan, who rose from his chair smile. "Well, later then," Morgan said, and left.

As he was leaving, Cyril Birch, the community theater artistic director, and the UNC student, Kevin Dundee, were also standing and pairing up to leave together. Dundee was holding Birch's purple poker chip. Haywood had pulled the music hall director, Daniel Park, over to his side of the table to continue their discussion on scaffolding, which only left the novelist, Bernard Raskin, somewhat drunk, sunk into his chair, glowering at Trent.

Trent looked at his watch. It was nearly 7:00, time, he understood, to be moving on, so it was natural that the group was breaking up. The conversation certainly had been stimulating. He'd thought he might be leaving with one of these men, and they all seemed to be worth the spin, but none, other than the bookstore staffer Art, who was working, had made an offer. Oh, well, maybe when he'd become more part of the group. He hadn't been sure he'd come back to the group again, but it had been a fascinating evening. These were really interesting men—and Julian had said that he wouldn't have any trouble being dined and shown around by these guys.

But for tonight it was time to pack it in. The newspaper man—quite a hunk for his age—said he'd drive him home. Trent slipped away from the table and headed down the two flights of stairs to the ground level. On the strip of covered walk outside the entrance door, he found that it was raining harder than when they'd come in, and the rain was mixed with ice. The newspaper office was supposed to be just off to the right and across the street, but Trent wasn't sure his umbrella could withstand even a dash in that direction. It looked like he was going to get soaked. He decided to wait for a few minutes to see if the rain would let up.

A car horn blared and he looked up. A 4x4 truck, with a covered bed, had pulled up to the curb in front of him. The passenger window came down. "You need a ride somewhere?" a voice boomed out.

The delivery man who had given him the leery sneer in the bookstore.

"Someone's giving me a ride home," Trent called out. "But it's raining too hard for me to get to where he is. I'll have to wait for the rain to let up."

"Get in. I'll take you home."

"Thanks, no. I'll wait."

"Fuckin' get in the truck," the man commanded.

Trent was good with taking commands and the black guy was arousing, in a brutish way. He got in the truck.

His name was Gus. Gus Sawyer. He didn't take Trent home. He pulled over into an alley behind a strip of closed shops, turned off the truck's engine, and reach over and pulled Trent to him, his mouth going to Trent's, an arm embracing the young man, and his other hand gripping Trent's piece through the material of his basket. Trent struggled a bit, but not much. He was in need, and Gus, who pulled off Trent's mouth only long enough to laugh, could feel that he was hard.

Gus pulled away from momentarily to pull his T-shirt over his head, unzip and flare the fly of his jeans, and hook the waistband of his briefs under his balls. He was in massive erection, and Trent trembled at the tattooed ebony beauty of the man's torso. Out of the black man's grip, Trent turned to open the passenger door and escape, but Gus reached over and backhanded him on the cheek, sending Trent reeling back against the door and then turned on the safety locks of all four doors.

Trent lay back against the edge of the passenger at the door panel, his eyes wide in surprise, panting, and raising a hand to the bruised cheek. He didn't have long to think about how to react, though, as Gus was pulling his shirt off him, cupping the back of his head, and forcing Trent's face down into his lap. The slap had stung, but Trent had gone hard, aroused by the roughness. Trent took Gus's thick, jet-black cock in his mouth and gave the man good head, not struggling anymore.

Gus pulled Trent's mouth off his cock before he came and lifted the young man's head and stared into his face. The sneery smile was back. "You are hungry for it, ain't you? You done that real well. I'm good and hard now. What will we do with you now?"

"Fuck me. Please fuck me. Put it in me," Trent whined. He encased Gus's shaft with his hand and stroked him.

"In the back," Gus growled, and he lifted and hauled Trent over the tops of the front seats into the backseat of the truck, following him over and landing on top of the young man. Trent struggled to get out from underneath the muscular man, to gain some semblance of control, but Gus backhanded him across the face again, and, whimpering, Trent fell back into the corner of the backseat.

"Don't fight me, baby," Gus growled. "Relax and take it. You want it. You want this dick inside you."

Trent did want it. His want was obvious.

"Tell me you want it," Gus growled.

"I want it."

Trent let himself go limp with Gus crouched over him, a knee planted between Trent's thighs. The black man expertly stripped off Trent's trousers and briefs and was on top of him between the young man's legs.

"Spread 'em and show me your hole."

With a sigh of surrender, Trent spread and bent his legs and raised his pelvis up for Sawyer to penetrate, go deep, and begin to pump him. Trent dug his fingernails in the black man's shoulder blades and rocked his pelvis against the thrusts of the cock, going with the fuck. It was all about getting it off with a muscular man between his legs now—a primeval need to be fucked, to be breeded, to release and to get the man on top of him together, to work together in the fuck. And he was black. Trent had had fantasies about hung black men.

Any sense of denial or struggle was past now. The two men were fucking. Thrust and counterthrust. Heavy breathing. Thrust. "Yes, yes, fuck me," whimpered by Trent. He gasped and flexed and unflexed his fingers on the man's muscular back as the thick black shaft went deep and held, throbbing, in Trent's soft core, Trent's passage muscles rippling over the steel rod. "Fuck me hard. Do it now," Trent hissed. "Come in me."

Gus wasn't sheathed and they were well beyond worrying about that now.

"You want it," the black man growled. "You want my cum."

"Yes, I want it," Trent sobbed. "Oh, shit. FUCK!" he cried out as Gus started to pump him.

Gus was digging his fingernails deep into Trent's butt cheeks, squeezing them, separating them, spreading them to give himself deeper penetration.

"Yes. YES!"

Thrust, thrust, thrust.

Mooaan. The first time under a man since he'd arrived in Asheville. And it wasn't just any man. It was a forceful, muscular, hung, cruel, black stranger.

When he was done, Gus rolled off Trent and pitched himself back over into the front seat, retrieving his clothes and pulling them on. "Where is home? Where do you want me to drive you?"

"I live up near the university campus, on Salem Avenue."

"Fuck, man. I didn't know you lived way up there. I'm not fuckin' going up there tonight. The rain's let up anyway. Where were you going for this other ride?"

"To the Citizen-Times building on OHenry, across the street from the Grove Arcade, where you picked me up."

"Come up here and get dressed and I'll drop you there. And make it snappy or I'll put you out of the truck naked."

Gus dropped Trent in front of the Citizen-Times building and Trent found that the features editor was still there, putting the finishing touches on putting the morning newspaper to bed. Trent's name had been left at the front desk to clear him to be shown where Jerry Morgan's office was.

"Where do you live?" Morgan asked.

"Up by the university, on Salem Avenue. I know it's far, but—"

"No problem. Did you bring the black poker chip?"

"No, I . . . yes, here it is," Trent said. He'd slipped it in his shirt pocket and it hadn't come out when Gus had pulled his clothes off him.

"Splendid," Jerry Morgan said.

Morgan fucked Trent on the young man's own bed in the basement one-bedroom apartment in the house of Salem, within a short walk of the university library.

Morgan was beefy, but solid, stocky, but with a good thick cock. He had been around both the block and the world a couple of times. He knew how to fuck a young man. He was good at it.

He fucked Trent in a missionary, lying between the young man's legs in essentially the same position that the black man, Gus, had fucked Trent in the truck. But this fuck was less hurried and in less cramped quarters. Morgan took his time, preparing Trent first by fondling and running his hands all over the young man's body and by kneeling below him and working Trent's hole with his tongue and teeth while he stroked the young man's cock off. For such a beefy man, with a gruff personality, to work another man's body so sensually before fucking him surprised Trent, especially with what he'd just experienced in Gus Sawyer's truck.

When Trent came, moaning, his throbbing shaft in the grip of Morgan's fist, the older man rose over him, gently spread Trent's thighs wider by gliding his hands up the young man's inner thighs.

"Open for me, baby," Morgan whispered. "You're so nice. Let's make music together."

Trent went with him, sighing and groaning, bending his legs, pressing his feet into the mattress and pushing his pelvis up to receive the long slide of the hard shaft inside him.

Long slide in; then all the way out to the glans resting just inside the hole. Slide in, stretching the channel walls as the muscles there rippled over the iron-hard shaft.

"Yes, baby. So nice. So sweet. You take it like a champ. You're so sweet and tight. We're gonna do this right."

A long, deep sigh from Trent, tightly gripping the butt cheeks of the newspaper editor. Withdrawal. A groan and murmur of loss from the young man. Slide and withdrawal.

"Stay with me, baby. Let's do this."

A more powerful thrust. Then again and again. Faster, harder, deeper. They were going like one, synchronized machine now. Trent's hands went to the man's shoulder blades and dug in, his legs wrapping around the man's buttocks, holding him close. Rocking and bucking. Trent arching his back and his head, crying out to the ceiling in passion, as the stocky man thrust and thrust and thrust.

"Yes. Yes! YESS! Oh, God, you're good. Fuck. Shit. FUCK ME! YESSS!"

Morgan had great stamina. Trent gripped the older man's butt cheeks in his hands, holding Moran close into him and rocking his pelvis hard against Morgan's groin as the beefy newspaper editor thrust and thrust and kept on thrusting . . . and filled the bulb of his condom. Trent exploded again with him.

* * * *

"Oh, did I forget to mention what the colored poker chips were for?" Julian asked the next morning when they ran across each other in the university library. "I saw before I left that you had several in front of you. You got it off last night with one of the men who dropped a poker chip in front of you, didn't you?"

"Yes, but I didn't fully understand the meaning of the poker chips. I probably still don't fully understand that."

"Which one? The newspaper editor? The novelist?"

"Jerry Morgan, the newspaper editor."

"He's good, isn't he?"

"Yes, he's good."

"He feed you dinner before? Take you to a club or something? But, no, he still has work to do in the evenings, doesn't he?"

"No. He gave me a ride home in the rain and then came inside. He left early this morning. No, he didn't take me to dinner. I fixed a pizza between sessions on the bed."

"He has a lot of staying power, doesn't he?"

"He's had you too?"

"Yes. They've all had me. What's important for you, though, is that you get something out of them—a dinner, a movie, drinks at O.Henry's. Not just a ride home in the rain and a ride in the sack."

"It was raining pretty hard, and it's a long way back to the university area. And he gave me a ride. You abandoned me. You left with that old priest, didn't you?"

"Yes, I left with Monsignor Antoni. But don't underestimate him because he's a graybeard. He has the longest one of any of them and he can keep it hard while you dance on it. On the significance of the poker chips, you saw the priest hand me the white poker chip, didn't you? My accepting it meant I'd go with him and lie under him. You had a stack of them in front of you when I left. I assumed that was good from one of them for dinner and a show before landing in bed with him."

"Antoni Skileri is a Catholic priest who fucks young men?"

"And very well," Julian said, with a laugh. "That's why he's an emeritus as his age. He was very important in the church but was headed for trouble for fucking young priests and the Catholic Church is hiding him here. Does that surprise you?"

"No, not really, I guess. I didn't fully understand that was what the poker chips were for," Trent answered, "that accepting one implied a promise."

"But you do now, don't you? Each man a different color. You had the black chip from Jerry Morgan in front of you as well as Raskin's blue one and the Art museum's Haywood's green one. Raskin and Haywood were good for a meal. You'd need the sustenance of a good meal to go under either one of them. You went to get laid, didn't you?"

"Yes, I want to get laid." Trent answered. He didn't say how many times he'd been laid the previous night though—by how many men.

"And now you've figured out how to make the choice of who lays you on a Friday night."

"Yes."

"And you'll go there with me next Friday night, and you'll latch onto someone who will give you a ride home after you've ridden his cock, won't you?"

"Yes," Trent answered.

"All's good, then," Julian said and the two parted and went their own way.

Trent didn't have to wait until the next Friday, though. When he got back to the circulation desk, the novelist, Bernard Raskin, was standing there, obviously waiting for him. He was still glowering and looking sultry and sexy as he had the night before. He was passing the blue poker chip through his fingers like a slight-of-hand artist.

There was no "Hi" or anything. "You left without picking this up last night," he said when Trent had come up to him. "I'm not used to the young men brought to the Friday Group turning my offer down."

He obviously thought he was the catch among the Friday Group, Trent thought. Well, he was the youngest and sexiest looking one of the group who Trent had seen.

"I didn't understand what the poker chips meant when I was there last night," Trent said, avoiding dealing with the issue that he had, eventually, taken the black one and it had been redeemed by the newspaper editor for sex.

"You would take it now, though?" Raskin asked, looking a bit less glowering.

"Yes, of course," Trent said, "and next Friday—"

"I said now," Raskin growled, a bit of the glower returning.

"I'm working this morning."

"But this afternoon? Are you working this afternoon? It's almost this afternoon already."

"No, I'm off this afternoon." It was Saturday.

"Then I will take you and give you a taste of literary Asheville. That's the most important aspect of the city. There are authors and poets associated with Asheville and it is a natural venue for drama and breathtaking scene. There's Thomas Wolfe, of course, who was raised here in a rooming house his mother ran. The rooming house is open and we'll go there. And there's F. Scott Fitzgerald, writing in a perpetual drunken stupor up at the Grove Park Inn while his wife, Zelda, flitted around in a nearby sanatorium. His room is plaqued. We'll see it. Unfortunately, he wrote nothing but drunken trash in that room, and he burned it all. And then we'll drive down to Hendersonville to pay homage to the poet, Carl Sandburg. His house is open to the public. It's unique, as it was built to fully serve his writing. Drinks at O.Henry's. We like to claim him as one of our authors, even though he hails from Greensboro, to the east. You've heard of the club, I imagine."

"Yes, I have," Trent said, but Raskin was already moving on.

"And after dinner, I'll show you a comfortable canopy bed at the Bed of Roses B&B. Very gay. You must experience gay Asheville. Very vibrant. I am writing about it in my novel. Very racy."

He didn't offer up any of this as a matter of choice for Trent, and it's what they did, after Raskin held his hand out with the blue poker chip and Trent accepted the chip.

"You understand what this means now, don't you—accepting the poker chip."

"Yes."

"You give yourself to me for the rest of the day?"

"Yes, I understand."

"And the night?"

"Yes."

They drove in Raskin's tight-fitting navy-blue 1972 Triumph TR6 roadster. First it was up to the Grove Park Inn for a quick in and out to pay homage to F. Scott Fitzgerald's room and then back down into the city, to North Market Street, and the preserved Thomas Wolfe boarding house museum, next to the Asheville Community Theater.

"The novel I'm currently writing, 'Homeward Bound,' is a parallel of the story of how Wolfe rose out of Asheville to prominence—what a struggle that was."

"And was shunned by the city as a result," Trent said.

"Ah, you were listening last evening then," Raskin said. "I will be acclaimed for my book. I know how to avoid upsetting the locals. On to poetry and Carol Sandburg now."

They didn't go directly to Sandburg's house outside of Hendersonville, to the southeast of Asheville, though. They stopped in a seedy motel a mile off Interstate 26 that rented its rooms by the hour, and Raskin used that hour to redeem his blue poker chip and efficiently and totally fuck Trent in a not-so-quick in and out—and in deeper. Raskin was controlling, Trent was writhing. Both of them were naked, Raskin dark, glowering, and hairy and Trent small, blond, willowy, and smooth, and Raskin embracing Trent bent over the foot of the bed from behind after Trent had sucked the hirsute man's cock hard, and thrusting hard and deep up into Trent's passage, as the young man writhed, cried out in passion, and panted hard. The novelist clearly had been hot for sex and conquest. He was a primeval, hairy animal, taking Trent in high rut, slaying the lad, taking no prisoners, laying Trent out totally and ravishing him.

"That's the way Papa Hemingway would do it," Raskin growled as he rose off Trent's trembling, spent body. "I'm sure that's the way he did do it."

Gasping for air, Trent didn't either agree or demure, but he had a little satisfied smile on his lips, a smile that wasn't lost on the novelist. Feeling like Papa after battling and landing a swordfish, Raskin slapped his young conquest hard on the buttocks, laughed, and went to the dripping shower and thread-bare towels in tired-tile motel bathroom.

The discussion on the return to Asheville from the visit to Sandburg's house museum was all about Raskin's current novel. They landed back in the city at O.Henry's for drinks. There, Raskin watched Trent dance on a crowded floor with other gay young men. Then it was to an intimate-atmosphere, gay male--dominated restaurant on Haywood near O.Henry's for diner, followed by a night of fucking at the Bed of Roses B&B, where Raskin showed that he was a demanding, vigorous, and lasting athletic top and Trent showed that he was flexible enough to go with the demand.