Trading Partners Ch. 01: A and D

And Dominick was giving Avery more attention now, showing a bit more passion, being more into the fuck. Was it because of what he had suggested? Avery thought. Could Dominick be right? Would a swap now and then invigorate their own coupling? Maybe if the mere thought of it could produce the affection and attention that Dominick was showing now . . .

* * * *

The four of them met at an art gallery on Cary street, in Carytown, Richmond's high-scale Bohemian district, where both Dominick and Kelsey had paintings and where Kelsey worked part time. After seeing several paintings by the two young men, Avery thought Kelsey was the more talented artist of the two and that he had a better sense of color than Dominick did—certainly colors that would go better in Avery's house than Dominick's painting that still was on the floor of the library waiting to be hung on the already-placed hook.

He also found himself comparing Kelsey in visage and manner with Dominick and the aspects of Dominick that had slowly worked to irritate him. With the familiarity of living together. these were beginning to pop out. Of course Kelsey was completely new to Avery. A comparison with Dominick—a basic comparison being easily fallen into as both were handsome, young, Mediterranean-type artists—wasn't fair, Avery knew. Still, when Avery saw Logan and Kelsey side by side, he couldn't help but imaging them undressed and coupling, and he found that the contrasts in size and coloring aroused him. It wasn't lost on Avery that he himself was very much of the Logan build and Nordic blond complexion.

Kelsey seemed shy and almost as reserved about this arrangement as Avery was. In contrast, Dominick and Logan acted like they were raring to go and weren't nearly as interested in the paintings in the gallery as they were in looking at and touching each other. The plan was that they would go to a café down the block for coffee and pastries and chatting to break the ice. It would be nicer in the spring when they could sit out on the café's sidewalk under the green umbrellas, but maybe in early February the café would have a fireplace going inside. Avery had never been inside that café.

Then maybe a movie—if they could agree on one to see—and dinner, followed by a stop at a gay bar to develop a mood, and then back to Avery's house and separate bedrooms to, it was hoped, mutually enjoy the swap arrangement. Having now seen Kelsey, Avery was wavering on the plan, but he still wasn't sold. Perhaps it was his age, he thought—as Dominick had hinted each time Avery had balked at the idea. Or maybe it was the danger of going to a gay bar in Richmond after all of these years of having been able to keep his lives separate. When he was younger, he hadn't thought twice about fucking one or two strangers a night. Maybe he was just getting old and domesticated. He pushed that terrifying thought to the back of his brain.

That was the plan. Dominick had said that they could just break off at any time if it seemed not to be working, and Avery had clutched at that possibility, thinking it would be a probability. He'd voiced reservations about the arrangement for days, which had been met with comments on his age and lack of adventure—which had been enough to propel him to the point of being at the gallery at the start of the planned day and night.

Kelsey had been a pleasant surprise. He was small and olive-skinned, as Avery had eventually remembered him. A Mediterranean type. He had an inviting, shy smile, and Avery was pleased that he seemed as reticent about this arrangement as Avery was. Dominick had been that way at the beginning, if a bit more effeminate than Avery really liked, but he had lost his compliant nature as their relationship had matured and become matter of fact. Avery hadn't thought about it until much later in the relationship, but, from the beginning, Dominick had honed in on the materialistic, commenting incessantly on how expensive everything Avery had looked. Well, it was expensive, and Avery had been flattered at the time. He just hadn't realized until the bloom of their relationship had worn off how shallow the comments were. Here, in the gallery, Kelsey wasn't being like that. He seemed more excited in discussing the artwork on the walls than the price of Avery's silk tie.

Avery was aroused by smaller, cute men, who were boyish, shy, and compliant. Talking with Kelsey now, in the gallery, at the start of what was supposed to be steamy date . . . and if circumstances were different and Avery was actually on the prowl . . . like when he was younger and hungrier and more ready to party and take chances . . . but he wasn't. Maybe Dominick was right. Maybe he was getting to be an old fuddy-duddy, ready to just stop this game—this life—altogether.

He had followed Kelsey around the walls of the gallery for quite some time He was working hard not to look too closely at Kelsey, not to allow himself to be taken up in the allure of the young man. Avery's energy was going to striving to produce comments that wouldn't seem too idiotic. Simultaneously, Kelsey seemed to be nervously straining just as hard to introduce the paintings that Dominick had said both artists had had to study in depth so that they could guide potential buyers around the collection—not just of their own paintings but those of the other artists as well.

He doesn't like this any more than I do, Avery thought. And he's lost in the art; he doesn't seem at all attracted to me. This just isn't going to work. He turned to spot out Dominick to tell him as much, but he didn't see Dominick—or Logan, for that matter.

"Is there another room here?" he asked, realizing too late, with embarrassment, that Kelsey had been talking about one of the paintings and that he had interrupted the artist in midsentence. "The others aren't . . ."

"No, just this gallery," Kelsey said, putting his own head on a swivel to see where Dominick and Logan were. "There's the kitchen and bathrooms and the manager's room at the back, but—"

"Perhaps I should go find them," Avery said. "I'm not really comfortable with this . . . I think that perhaps—"

"Yes, right. I understand," Kelsey said. "I could—"

But Avery was already on the move, toward the back of the gallery. The kitchen area was deserted, although it looked more like a storage area for the canvases than a kitchen. The manager's room, lights off, was similarly deserted and stuffed with stacks of paintings.

Not even any desk space for Dominick's back to rest on, Avery found he was thinking, already steeling himself for what he was likely to find.

Dominick and Logan were in the bathroom. Both were naked from the waist down, with their shirts hanging open. Dominick's butt was perched on the edge of the toilet tank, and Logan was standing in a crouch astride the bowl. Dominick's hands were on Logan's waist. One of his legs was hooked on Logan's hip and the other one ran up Logan's torso, with Dominick's ankle on the big blond's shoulder. Logan was pistoning Dominick's ass with a pride-worthy cock. Pistoning him just like Avery liked to do, Dominick giving Logan deeper moans of passion than he'd given Avery for some time.

Dominick turned his face to Avery at the bathroom door, but his eyes were glazed over and his mouth was in a slack smile. Avery wasn't sure that Dominick even focused on him.

They were fucking like a well-oiled machine. Realization flooded into Avery's mind that the two probably had been fucking for weeks—maybe even before Avery caught them together in the Dillards men's wear department.

Avery turned and walked through the gallery and out onto Cary street. He was already on the street, walking down it, toward a sidewalk café with green umbrellas at the end of the block, before he realized that Kelsey hadn't been in the gallery as he passed through it. Avery felt a little tug of regret. Kelsey probably was even less into this swap idea than Avery was and hadn't been encouraged by the look of Avery when they'd come face to face in the gallery. He had fled at the first opportunity. This really wasn't something for Avery to be doing. This quite possibly was the signaling that he was past it—past being able to get what he wanted, what he needed, from this lifestyle.

Of course it wasn't working out, this crazy little plan of Dominick's—not that it wasn't working out very nicely for Dominick—but it was rather a letdown that a young man like Kelsey was as out of tune with it as Avery was. Maybe Avery had to take a harder look at himself in the mirror. He'd never had trouble getting attention before. Maybe overnight—or while he wasn't paying attention—he had just fallen out of the game altogether.

He negotiated his way between the tables and leaning chairs of the unoccupied tables under the green umbrellas, entered the café's interior, and made a beeline for the fireplace that, indeed, was set with a fire. His eyes spotted a free table, and he blindly stumbled toward it and sat down. A waiter appeared almost instantaneously, and Avery ordered coffee and a pastry. The coffee was set down in front of him almost before he'd finished ordering. As the waiter was wafting off to get the pastry, Avery heard the soft voice from the adjacent table.

"I think they're starting into the busy time around here. Do you really want to be alone, or should we share a table?"

Avery turned his head and saw Kelsey sitting at the next table over. He already had his coffee as well.

"Sorry, I didn't see you there. Yes, by all means. Let's combine. Do you want to . . . or should I . . ." Kelsey was already standing and moving over, though, so he got his answer.

They sat in silence for a few moments, each pretending to be occupied with getting his coffee sugared and creamed to his liking until the waiter had returned with pastries for both of them.

"I guess this was the planned second stop," Avery said, somewhat nervously. "But already, it's just us. And not exactly what—"

"They were in the bathroom, weren't they?" Kelsey asked.

"Yes . . . yes, they were."

"Skipping several stops on the planned itinerary in this fiasco."

"Yes. Yes, indeed they were."

"I'm sorry . . . I . . ." It wasn't just one of them saying this. They both said a variation of it in unison. Then they both gave a nervous little laugh too.

"This wasn't my idea," Avery said.

"I got that part," Kelsey said.

It sounded to Avery like the younger man was a bit wounded by that. "I didn't mean," he quickly said. ". . . I just—"

"I understand," Kelsey said. He stood up from the table. He'd taken his coffee in three big gulps but hadn't touched the pastry.

"I'm really sorry," Avery said. "Please, you don't have to go. I'm just . . . just such an old man. An old, conservative man."

"Not old. Not too old at all," Kelsey said. He leaned down and let his lips brush Avery's, and then, before Avery could recover to think of something to say or do, the young man had turned and walked away.

"Shit," Avery said under his breath. And he was so depressed that he ate both of the pastries, something he'd normally not do as closely as he watched his weight and conditioning.

Not that that matters much anymore, he thought.

* * * *

While managing to keep his two worlds separate and revealing no chink in his armor in his corporate lawyer life, Avery let depression pull him down in his private life over the next week, while Dominick remained his bubbly self. They didn't have sex, at least Avery and Dominick didn't have sex together. Avery more or less assumed that Dominick and Logan were fucking like bunnies. Dominick hadn't come back that first night. He'd returned some time during the morning and slept in a guestroom.

At some point he'd asked how Avery and Kelsey had gotten on, but he'd paid no attention to the evasive nonanswer Avery gave him, and he left for a class soon thereafter.

Avery went out for a long walk. His steps carried him down into the Carytown neighborhood, and he walked down and up the blocks, gazing, without seeing, into the boutique windows. Without consciously doing so, his feet took him to the storefront windows of the gallery he'd been in the previous day. This time he did look inside. Kelsey was there, his back to the front window, working on taking a painting down off the wall.

As if the young man sensed he was being watched, he glanced around and their eyes met. Embarrassed, not knowing what he was doing there, Avery turned and walked briskly away. At the corner, where the café he'd visited the day before, he hesitated, but with a shudder and thinking himself a foolish man, growing older by the minute, he rounded the corner and, at the next street, turned for home.

He moped like this for the next three days, eating dinner alone after working himself so hard at work that he came home exhausted and then retreating to his own bedroom-sitting room suite and watching TV. He wasn't sure what he had watched, and he would have registered surprise if it was pointed out that he had his ears cocked to listen to the front door opening and closing, checking on when—or if—Dominick returned for the night. Two of the nights he did—late—the third night Avery drifted off to sleep, in front of the low-hum of the TV, before he heard Dominick return. But the young man must have returned at some point, because he was perched at the kitchen island on a stool and drinking coffee and chewing on toast when Avery came out, dressed for work.

They exchanged mumbles that could be taken for a "good morning," while studiously not looking at each other. The coffee pot was nearly empty. Avery had filled it and put it on a timer the previous night. He almost said something nasty, but then decided that he really preferred the excuse to stop at Starbucks on the way to work. He'd get something with a gazillion calories in it, but he saw no reason to care about that anymore.

"Tomorrow's Thursday," Dominick said, his voice chipper.

"Why, yes it is," Avery responded.

"And Friday's Valentine's Day."

"Is it?"

"They'll be having something special on that night at Big Tim's." Big Tim's was a gay bar, with a floorshow, on the southern outskirts of Norfolk, on the edge of the Great Dismal Swamp. Avery had been a regular there at one time, dressing down and butching up to match the predominately Navy sailor clientele. His condo on the ocean was enough of a drive to the east in Virginia Beach for anonymity at Big Tim's.

"Will they?"

"I'd like to go to Virginia Beach for the weekend and go over and take in the show at Big Tim's," Dominick said.

"That would be nice, but I have to work Friday," Avery answered. "I'll be bushed when I get home—too bushed for a drive to Virginia Beach and then to Norfolk to party that night. No rest for the wicked . . . or the old and employed." If that was meant to get a rise out of Dominick—and Avery was too weary of the whole situation for it to have been calculated to get something going, Dominick didn't bite.

"I just need the key to the condo," Dominick said. "You wouldn't need to go."

"Logan has fucked you everywhere but my Virginia Beach condo and now he wants to have a go at you there?" Now Avery was aware that he was, in fact, trying to get something started. He'd dreamed much of the night of Logan fucking—not just fucking Dominick but fucking Kelsey as well. It had taken a while for him to realize that the image had switched from Dominick to Kelsey, but it had, and Avery was damned angry that Kelsey had drifted into his dreams. And he was equally angry—as much surprised as angry—to realize that he hadn't cared half as much when the image was of Logan fucking Dominick then when he was a go at Kelsey. Avery had come out of the bedroom knowing that whatever he and Dominick had once had was over.

And worse than that—that whatever dreams Avery had of growing old with someone to hold and fuck in bed most likely were over too. If he'd just stop kidding himself about that.

But knowing it was over with Dominick—all but the moving out and moving on—helped him keep his cool when Dominick so coolly and insensitively asked for the condo key. Other than the nasty retort, of course, which he delivered in a tired voice rather than an angry one. Dominick ignored the thrust of the accusation.

"Logan's not in Richmond," Dominick answered, with a toss of his black curls. "He's down in Florida, fishing with some buddies. I'm going to the beach with Lawrence. We can get a hotel, I guess, if you don't want me using the condo."

"You didn't go fishing with Logan?" Avery didn't want to even get started with who Lawrence was, although, he knew who Lawrence was. Lawrence was an attorney in a competing firm. Built like a tank, black, twenty years younger than Avery. Dominick had been introduced to him when they'd found themselves in adjoining boxes at the horse races at the nearby Colonial Downs. Avery had been nonplussed to brush against someone from his work world when Dominick was with him, and he hadn't liked the looks that Dominick and Lawrence had given each other, but it was only now that he'd realized the significance of those looks. He hadn't, in his wildest notions, pegged Lawrence as gay. That meant he hadn't pegged Lawrence as competition either—until right now.

Dominick was a fast worker, Avery now realized. He already was setting up a new arrangement. Somewhat bitterly Avery wondered why Lawrence didn't have a condo of his own in Virginia Beach. He was up and coming. He was what Avery had been twenty years ago. But black, and built like a tank. More muscular than Avery. Avery knew he was hung too, because they belonged to the same tennis and squash club and passed each other in showers from time to time. But Lawrence wasn't hung like Avery was, despite the legends about black men. Avery wondered if Dominick knew that—and then gave a low laugh, because of course Dominick would already know how well hung Lawrence was.

"I don't fish," Dominick had answered. "I'll hook up with Logan again when he gets back. But Lawrence said he'd like to party with me on Valentine's Day." Avery had almost missed the response as he'd been imagining Lawrence fucking Dominick, which was more than a bit of a turn on for him—in a detached sort of way now.

Oh, yes, you do fish, he thought—and you're a master at it. But Dominick wasn't finished talking—and doing so matter of factly—openly acknowledging what they both knew was happening and doing so without remorse. Avery had known that the flamboyant little artist was shallow, but he only now was appreciating how shallow. And how much of this was his, Avery's, fault anyway, he wondered. Had they ever had any sort of agreement to commitment or monogamy? Dominick was being so off hand about going with other men that maybe any such understanding had been Avery's only. And Avery had agreed to a swap, hadn't he?

The fact remained that Dominick was cute and very, very fuckable—when he chose to be into the fuck. Avery found himself wondering if there was time before his first meeting of the day . . . whether Dominick was up for a farewell fuck this morning. Sure, he would be, at the right price.

"So, the keys to the Virginia Beach condo?" Dominick asked.

"It'll cost you," Avery answered, as he unknotted and removed his tie. If Dominick could be bald and matter of fact about this, so could he. "And Monday morning, you can just push the key through the mail slot—along with your keys to the house and to the Land Rover."

As it turned out, there barely was time, and they had to do it right there on the floor beside the kitchen island, with Dominick rolled onto his shoulders, his butt and legs in the air and dressing gown flared out beside him, while Avery crouched between his thighs, holding them outstretched, and pile-driver fucked down into his channel. To Avery, at least, it was one of the most satisfying fucks he and Dominick had ever had. And he was cruel and demanding this time. And this time Dominick felt the power of him from the very beginning, crying out and moaning, panting, and groaning in the taking, babbling, despite whatever intentions he might have had, about how much bigger Avery's cock was than anyone else's and how much deeper he could reach.