The Personal Manager

"You know what I'd really like to be doing?"

Yeah, Eben thought, you'd really like me to be fucking you. But you're going to dance around the bush before we get there. "No, what?" was what Eben said. He lifted the bar bell from the guy half his age and size with one hand and lowered it back on the stands.

The guy looked good stretched out on the bench below him. He was twenty-four, he said, less than half of Eben's forty-nine. Nice, male-model face, a sunny blond with a great smile. He had a sleek, smooth runner's body. He was just in running shorts and shoes. Nice, tight body, no fat on him. Not bulked up like Eben was but a very nice body. There was a lot Eben could do with a body like that. A lot he would do with Brian's body. The guy was begging for it. If you could stay in body-builder shape even at forty-nine, the possibilities opened up for young men who wanted to take pleasure from your experience.

"It's such a nice day out this evening—practically no humidity—that I'd really rather be running," the young man said. He was full of discussion tonight, like he wanted to keep Eben from drifting off to someone else or somewhere else on the gym floor. Houston's humidity in late June and early July could be oppressive, and, indeed, it was a rare low-humidity day.

Sure, you would, Eben thought, looking down at the sleek runner's body. "I could go for that too," he said. If this was Brian's move to get Eben alone and away from the gym, Eben was all for it.

"You run?" Brian said, looking up at the body-builder's physique that blew him away. A buzz-cut, superbly fit older guy who'd said he'd been an Army Ranger but had spent most of his life abroad in what would be oilfields in remote areas if he said there was oil underground there. What really had Brian's juices going was the man's full-sleeve tattoo covering the left side of his torso and his left arm. A colorful, busy tattoo swirling around from his shoulder blade to cover his bulging left pectoral and running all the way down his arm to his wrist. When you first looked at it it was just a swirl of vibrant colors, but, upon closer inspection, it was a fanciful Oriental dragon, the head resting on the pec. The really arousing aspect to it, though, was the dragon's tail, which dipped down to the man's belly and then even further, under the waistband of Eben's athletic briefs.

The tail carried the eye down Eben's Zeus-like torso to the waist on the left side and then to speculating where it went from there, and inevitably took the eye to the man's bulging basket. Brian needed to get out into the evening breeze to cool himself down. He came to the gym to get laid. Going for Eben would be reaching for the top of the manflesh at the gym. He would have thought it would be someone his own age, but, no, Eben, even in his forties, was sex on a stick.

"Yep, I run," Eben answered. "I've run all over the world. Most places I wind up don't have any other distraction than working out and running up hills—while watching for terrorists." And fucking sleek young men, Eben added in his thoughts.

"You work in oil?" Brian asked.

"Yes. Finding it. Rocks. Knowing what the rocks on the surface tell us about the likelihood there's oil below the surface. How much there is; how far down to you have to go to yank it out of the ground. Rocks." And getting my rocks off with honeys like you, Eben thought.

"Sounds exciting. I'm just a computer nerd—the help desk at Best Buy. Looking for oil. That sounds really interesting. And you were in the army, I hear. A Ranger?"

I don't have to give you my life story to get my dick in you, I hope, Eben thought. Having been raised by a bizarre family of nomads, following the scent of oil across the Middle East and Central Asia, naming their kids weird names like Ebenezer, making them think that a rough, minimalized life in the deserts was the best a kid could ever want, sticking them in the army—two Afghanistan tours—to toughen them up, and with the only result being that the kid could and did live rough, had trouble figuring out civilization, and could, like his dad before him, look at a landscape and know whether there was exploitable oil under it—how much and how far down. Oh, and being with only men and without women for such long stretches of time that he learns to get his rocks off with men—and eventually decides he likes it better that way.

Men's needs and wants were simple. They were complicated like women were—especially if you didn't want entanglements, if you only wanted to get your rocks off and move on.

"You wanta run, let's do some running," he said to Brian, putting it on the line. Did Brian want to move forward with this or not? "There's a loop the gym recommends, mostly through a park."

So, they went out into the early evening shadows of the Houston suburbs and ran, Brian running like a gazelle and Eben like a lion, but the two maintaining a pace they both liked that kept them comfortably close together. They pulled up at a water fountain at a remote clearing along the running path in a wooded park. They hadn't seen anyone else in the park for some time.

Brian was making doe eyes at Eben, which Eben didn't mind and had expected. For some time he wondered which one of them would make the first move. They were both well beyond being surprised that a move would be made—and a deal nonverbally struck, and a fuck completed. He let Brian make the first move.

"Your tattoo. It's magnificent. Such vibrant colors. A fantastic design. Where did you get it?"

"Tashkent. Spent four months there once. Took nearly the full time to get it completed. I knew what I wanted. I always know what I want." He'd matched the last comment with a meaningful look at Brian—and wondered why the dummy didn't pick it up and run with it. "You can touch it if you want."

Brian did want and he ran his fingers over the tattooing. Eben looked into the younger man's face while he did it. His "I'm going to fuck you" expression was not challenged by Brian.

"So artistic and clever. And, I gotta say, sexy. Where does that tail lead? So, provocative." OK, so he is going with it, Eben thought.

Brian traced the design a second time, up from the arm, over the pec—and then the tapering tail, down Eben's chest, to the waistband. He paused there, just long enough that they both knew he was there.

"Go ahead. I know you want to," Eben said.

With a little smile Brian glided his finger down to the root of Eben's cock and said, "It goes down to there, doesn't it?"

"And further," Eben said. He turned his face down and put his hands on Brian's arms, above the elbows, and pulled the younger, smaller man toward him. Brian raised his face, the one to take the initiative, and they kissed. His hand followed his exploratory finger under the waistband and to the older man's core. He sucked in his breath when he wrapped his fingers around the base of the cock and realized how thick Eben was.

Eben pulled away from the kiss, smiled down into Brian's face, and said, "Bingo. That's where the dragon's tail goes."

"Fuck me," Brian whispered. "Let me suck it and then fuck me."

"You never know who will come along in the park," Eben said. "Let's go back to the gym."

The showers at the gym were individual cubicles, but they had curtains on them. The two embraced, chest to chest, under the cascading water, and kissed. Then Brian sank slowly to his knees, following the body, and then the tail of the dragon down Eben's torso with his lips, into the older man's trimmed pubes, the hair kept thin enough not to obscure the tapering of the tail. He encircled the root of the cock, where the end of the tail curled, with a finger and worked on the thick, long, erect cock with his mouth until, with time and effort, his lips were able to touch tail's end.

It was a quite satisfactory blow job.

Eben lifted the young man up to his feet after he'd given the guy his load. They kissed and soaped each other up, maintaining a close embrace, exploring each other with their hands. Brian leaned his torso back, with one of Eben's strong arms wrapped around his waist and panted and groaned as Eben penetrated his ass with two thick fingers, soaping and cleaning him as deep as the two fingers could reach, and stroking Brian's prostate. Brian flinched and came, up Eben's belly. The cum was washed away by the cascading water and Brian pulled his lithe chest up to Eben's. They kissed again.

"Fuck me," Brian whispered. "Put it in me. You're huge. Stretch me. Make me suffer. Fuck me."

"There's an Astro's game on TV in a half hour. Come home with me."

"Yes."

"For the night."

"Yes."

"You might not be able to walk tomorrow morning."

"Walking is overrated."

* * * *

"Nice house. Very nice house."

"The oil companies pay well. Here, we'll go in through the garage." The house was manageable on two nice oil company salaries. He was down to one and some inherited money, but that wasn't his real problem with the house.

"I see a couple of shingles have come down up there."

"That was in that windstorm we had."

"That was two months ago. You really need to get something like that fixed fast. The roof could leak."

"It does. Here we go. The family room is through there. I'll get us a couple of beers."

Brian noticed that a cabinet door was off its hinges as he walked by the kitchen, which was large, but clean. The man was tidy. He just wasn't a Mr. Fixit. The kitchen faucet was dripping too. "This is a pretty big house for just you."

"There was a Mrs. Harrison until three months ago." He didn't specify. He didn't like to think of what Lauren's last couple of minutes were like when her plane went down near Chicago. She'd always been terrified of flying and had avoided travel. As a company headquarters lawyer she hadn't had to do much traveling. She was the homebody, the home manager. Eben was the one who traveled and was gone for extended periods. "I'm doing the home alone thing. I like the house, but I'm gone a lot. And I never learned home maintenance. Here's your beer."

He handed Brian a beer and then turned toward the large-screen TV on the wall facing the sofa. He went from one remote to the other. "Shit, I never could decide which one I needed for what."

"Here, it should be this one." Brian separated out the right remote, turned the TV on, and found the channel running the Houston Astros and Arizona Diamondbacks baseball game. The game was in the second inning. "The beer isn't what I need now, though," he said, as in two smooth moves he'd pulled his T-shirt over his head and stripped his shorts and jock off his legs. He stretched out on his back across the sofa cushions, naked.

Eben went down on his knees on the floor in front of the sofa. He liked giving surprise, so he started off slow and tender, stroking Brian's inner thighs until, sighing, and whispering, "You've got me so fuckin' hot. Fuck me, please fuck me," the young man opened his legs, resting the calf of one on the top of the sofa back and moving the other over Eben's head and hooking it on Eben's shoulder. Eben leaned his head down, took Brian's cock in his mouth, and gave him head.

Brian was sighing and moaning and running the fingers of one hand through the spikes of Eben's salt-and-pepper buzz cut and touching the dragon full-sleeve tattoo here and there and there, when Eben rose from the floor, came down on his knees between Brian's thighs, and grasped the young man's hips between his hands.

Brian exclaimed in surprise and pain as Eben positioned his cock head and both thrust up into Brian's passage and pulled the young man's pelvis onto the cock and began immediately stroking hard and deep. This was the way they did it in the tents out in the barren landscape around Tashkent. Hard, fast, brutal, with little preparation. Eben liked opening a tight channel.

Brian was flopping around on the cock, holding Eben's head for dear life, alternating between trying to push Eben off him and pulling Eben into him, arching his back and crying out "Yes, yes. Like that. Deeper. Oh, shit yes. Fuck, fuck, fuck." Brian hadn't had it like this ever before, but this . . . this was fucking. This was what had attracted Brian to Eben in the first place—the hint of danger and cruelty, the possibility that the man would totally fuck him.

Eben did just that—fuck, fuck, fuck. Houston's Carlos Lee hit a grand-slam homer in the bottom of the third and Eben was right there with him, tensing, jerking, exploding, once, twice, three and four times, filling the bulb of his rubber, Brian gasping and jerking, going all the way over the wall with him.

"You want something to eat? I want something to eat," Eben said, rising from the sofa after both of them had come. Brian just lay there, legs and arms akimbo, on his back on the sofa. He looked up at Eben, towering over him, a huge cock swinging between his legs. The young man's eyes were glazed over. There was a slight smile on his face. He was panting softly and blowing bubbles. He didn't respond to the question. He wasn't ready for that. After a taking like that, there should be some decompression cuddling and hand play, he thought. Eben was so matter-of-fact about sex.

He was still lying there, in that position, when Eben padded back in, naked, body magnificent, cock erect again, from the kitchen. It was in the bottom of the fifth on the TV. It was raining heavily, with wind, outside the house.

Brian gave a small moan and Eben leaned over the sofa and turned the young man onto his belly. Brian mumbled something unintelligible as Eben mounted his ass. He groaned and grunted as Eben slid his cock into the young man's channel, and he panted and moaned as Eben hovered over him, palming Brian's shoulder blades and began riding him hard.

Carlos was up to bat again in the sixth when there was a flash of light outside, a big bang, and the electricity went out. Eben continued fucking Brian to his completion and then sank to his butt between the sofa and the coffee table, raised the can of beer he hadn't touched yet, took a swig and grimaced because the beer was warm, and then took another swig.

"God you give good fuck," Brian whimpered from the sofa.

"We're not done yet."

Brian moaned. "You fuck your wife like this too?"

"Yes . . . well, as much. Maybe not as rough." And he had fucked her a lot. He and Lauren had had a good sex life—when he'd been home. And she was everything else too. There wasn't anything that Lauren wasn't good at. She kept this place in tip-top condition, for instance.

"So, you must have had a crowd of kids."

"No," Eben said, the regret clear in his voice. "We couldn't have any. And we both had careers." He didn't know why they hadn't had any. They'd never tried to find out. Guess he'd never been home long enough to look into that. If Lauren had had herself checked out, she never told him.

"You had it good with your wife, but you fucked guys too? This wasn't a one-off and you aren't new to this."

"I went to some pretty remote places and stayed for a while. There wasn't much to do there, but the conditions could get pretty hairy—dangerous. High tension. There weren't many women. There were a lot of horny guys, though. Tough guys. Guys who could take it hard."

I can believe it, Brian thought. Just the thought of what had just happened to him in the control of Eben made him whimper.

Eben grabbed the words just like Brian had said them, which he hadn't. "It just happened—going with guys as well as my wife. There were no other women than my wife. Just guys. Guys as desperate for it as I was. Guys who recognized it was an animal need and took it that way. It was completely separate from what I had with my wife, though. I was gone from here a lot. With the job. I need another beer and yours will be too warm to drink. I'll get us a couple of more." That was enough of that conversation. He hauled himself up and stumbled his way to the kitchen, knowing pretty much what was where to avoid.

"Lights are back on," Brian said.

"No they're not," Eben said, in a "stating the obvious" voice.

"Everywhere else. I can see lights outside. Are you on a different line from your neighbors?"

"Beats the shit out of me. I'm a rocks and oil guy, not an electricity guy."

"Maybe the lightning flipped a breaker in your box."

"Whatever that means," Eben answered. "The light's out in the refrigerator too."

"That would happen when the electricity is out," Brian said. The smile on his unseen face was obvious. "Where's your breaker box?"

"Beats me. Maybe in Cleveland?"

"House like this, it's probably in the garage—or basement."

"I don't think we have a basement."

"But you don't know?"

"I don't spend much time here."

"Fuck." Brian laughed. "Don't suppose you know if you have a flashlight either."

"Yeah, Keep one right here. My wife insisted on keeping it here. I'd sometimes leave it someplace else and she'd always return it here." A light went on and Brian pulled himself off the sofa and padded toward the kitchen. The beam of light picked out his groin.

"Shit, you've got a great body. I could fuck you right here on the kitchen floor."

"Yes, you could," Brian said as he drew within arms' length of the big man.

So, that's what Eben did. He put Brian on all fours on the kitchen floor, mounted his tail, and fucked him in a doggie. Brian panted for him like a dog and even barked a couple of times.

After they got off the floor, Brian said, "Shit that was hot. You're a fuckin' animal. But what did I come in here for? Oh, yes, flashlight." He took it from Eben and then said, "Breaker box," and went off in the direction of the garage.

"Don't get lost," Eben said. "I don't think we're finished for the night."

"Wouldn't think of it, Stud," Brian said from somewhere other than the kitchen. After a minute the lights came back on. The game was in the last of the eighth inning. Houston was comfortably ahead, the Carlos Lee bag-clearing homer from early in the game still being the margin of the lead.

Brian went through the first-floor rooms, checking to see if everything was back on electricity wise.

"You got a lot of maintenance needs in this house," he said when he came back.

"A lot can deteriorate in three months," Eben said. "I never had to do anything about keeping a house going."

"You need to sign up with a maintenance company."

"Yeah, I do. Not just this minute, though."

Brian laughed. "You're going to do me again, aren't you?"

"Yes, I'm going to do you again. Right this minute."

Brian shivered but he kept talking. "In the study—I think it's your study—the computer was blinking at me."

"Yeah, it's been that way. I don't know what's wrong with it."

"Fixing computers. That's what I do—"

"Other than taking an eight incher?"

Brian laughed. "Yeah, other than that. I fix computers. I'll give it a look." He went back down the hallway to the study and paused at the door there to call out. "Tell me something. That. What you did with . . . to me . . . tonight—on the sofa; on the kitchen floor. That's sort of wild. No, not sort of wild. Really wild."

"You didn't want it that way? You don't want it that way?"

"God, I've never been fucked that good before. But it's intense. How often do you do a guy that way?"

"Not often . . . here in the States. In the oilfields it's how we do it. And I haven't had it in several weeks and you're a real honey. And you were a bit of a tease. I wanted to get right to it. But overseas, in the oilfields. In Saudi Arabia or Tashkent? I tear them apart there—and they love it and come back asking for it again. So, what? I said I'd be doing you again. Yay or nay? You took it. You're well used; you're no fresh innocent. Yay or nay? If I do you again, I won't take any prisoners. This is my wild animal night."