Forth into Light (The Peter & Charlie Trilogy) (41 page)

At last, he pulled off the unbuttoned shirt and placed Charlie’s hands on the mattress so that he was leaning back, propped on his arms, his legs sprawling, all of his body slack and disengaged so that the sex seemed to stand free with an immense thrusting power of its own. Jeff once more took possession of it with both hands, stroking it slowly with tantalizing adoration, holding it all over, working every possible variation until he found the combination that brought it immediately to the edge of orgasm. Charlie cried out as he felt it coming. Jeff had dropped down so that he was staring up wide-eyed at the point of emission. He let the first jet leap into the air and then scrambled up to draw the rest into his mouth. When it was over, he wiped his face with the back of his hands and gazed up at Charlie from eyes soft with wonder and gratitude. “Charlie,” he murmured.

It brought Charlie forward with his arms out to hold him, touched by his young indifference to the fragility of the love he could offer him. He held his head against his bare chest and kissed his hair. “It was a bit lonely,” he said, “but I’m glad for anything I can give you.”

Jeff pulled back from him and looked him searchingly in the eyes. “Anything? Everything! Don’t you understand what that meant to me? I’ve been waiting for it all my life. It’s the fulfillment of my destiny. So many things have come clear.”

Charlie looked into the face that seemed to grow more beautiful with familiarity, and smiled at the grandiloquent phrases. “I’d like you to tell me later. We’d better pull ourselves together. We’re almost there.”

Charlie dressed again while Jeff put on his jacket and stuffed his tie into a pocket. At the door, Charlie kissed his lips and looked into his eyes. “I wish I could tell you to come right up as soon as you can, but I’ll need a little time. I left things in mild disorder at the house. There’ll be the kids and Martha and so forth to cope with. Come at ten. I’ll be waiting for you in Peter’s room. You know.”

Jeff ran his hand over his crotch. “I’ll find you,” he said.

In the confusion of arrival and debarkation, he clung to Charlie’s side. They were jostled by the crowd and could allow themselves furtive little contacts of their hands. When they were off and headed in toward town, Charlie kept a hand on his shoulder. He passed the steps he usually took up to the house and continued into a tangle of narrow streets. They offered a sense of semiprivacy. Charlie stopped and faced him. “I’ve got to leave you somewhere,” he said. “I guess this is as good a place as any. I’d like to kiss you before I let you go.”

“Why don’t you?”

“Here?”

“The Greeks don’t care. They kiss each other all the time. Nobody else matters.”

“I suppose you’re right.” He laughed and their mouths met. He allowed himself only an instant to savor the eagerly parted lips and then drew hastily back, but doing it in the open, here on home territory, made him realize more vividly what the day had done for him. Life had become an adventure once more. All the stale old patterns had been smashed. Anything could happen. “I’ll be waiting,” he said. He turned abruptly and strode off.

Jeff stood where he was and watched him go, spellbound by the carriage of the masterful body, his mind filled with images of the great phallus. The magnificent figure turned a corner and was gone. Even if he never saw Charlie again, he would always hold him in his mind. He had no need of fantasies any more.

He set off through the familiar streets, scarcely seeing them. He felt as if he had been gone for a long time and had no real sense of returning. He had gone forever, had, in a sense, departed life. There was a new confidence in his body—he was aware of an impulse to flaunt it; it had been so stupendously used and loved—but there was only darkness in his soul.

If anybody could have dispelled it, it was Charlie, but he hadn’t and couldn’t. Mike had shown him the level of his needs. There had been a fierce bestiality in their moments of intimacy that had exposed the extent of what he labeled dispassionately as his depravity. He still longed to sacrifice himself to the limitless cruelty of Mike’s ego. The air he breathed with Charlie was too rarified. He didn’t want the beauty he offered him except for the beauty of his colossal cock taking him. He had come into possession of himself overnight and what he had found filled him with despair. He was in love; he had been broken by his love and couldn’t be mended.

He listened to Charlie’s words as his mind replayed them. Love? The way Charlie said it evoked security and solicitude and devotion. He had gone beyond all such concepts. He was in headlong collision with his destiny. He no longer feared even a meeting with his father.

He found Joe’s courtyard door open. Like all the residents, he didn’t regard this as an invitation to enter. Doors often wouldn’t close. He knocked and waited. When there was no reply, he entered hesitantly and set his bag down inside the door. He heard voices. He was shy of seeing his father with others. He advanced into the seedy courtyard and called “Hello.”

A girl he didn’t know appeared in a window above him. She smiled down at him. “A beautiful boy,” she said in accented English. “Come in, beautiful boy.”

“Is my father here?” he asked. “I mean, is George Leighton here?”

The girl looked down at him and laughed maddeningly. He was spared further communication with her by the appearance of his father at the door. He had to stoop to pass through it. For a moment, his face held an expression of blank astonishment and then brightened with welcome. He approached Jeff, seeming to tower over him as he always had although there was no great difference in height between them now.

“You’re back. What a wonderful surprise. Somebody gave me the impression that you’d left for good.”

“I had.” Jeff saw instantly that his father was drunk, not stumbling drunk, but cheerful drunk. His clothes looked as if he had been sleeping in them for days, but he was more or less freshly shaved and looked clear-eyed and quite capable of dealing with business. “I have something important to talk to you about.”

George put a hand on Jeff’s shoulder and gave him a friendly little shake. “You don’t look any the worse for wear. Did your mother send you?”

“No. Why? When did you go home last?”

“Well, now. Let’s see. You left yesterday? Yes, I was going into Athens this morning, but it turned out there was no need to. Sid pulled my money out of a hat. He won’t tell me where he got it.”

“That’s what I have to talk to you about. Can’t we go somewhere private?”

“Come over here. They won’t bother us.” George took the boy’s arm and led him to a corner of the courtyard where there was a derelict table with the paint peeling from it and a kitchen chair and an upended box. George sat on the box and waved to the chair. Jeff noted it as typical of his unfailing courtesy. It always put him at a disadvantage.

“There,” Jeff said, sitting and putting the envelope containing his statement on the table.

George looked at it. “There what?”

“Read it. No. Don’t bother. It doesn’t tell the whole story. I took your money. I gave it to Dimitri.” He filled out the details less emotionally than he had to Peter, not attempting to exculpate himself any more than he felt the facts justified.

When he had finished, George propped his elbow on the table and rested his forehead in his hand and gave the envelope a little spin with his forefinger. “You’re in love with Dimitri?” he asked.

“I thought I might be.”

George toyed with the envelope for a silent moment. “So now we’re going to have the truth. That’s good. I want to understand. We’re apt to lose our heads when we’re in love. Oh, I don’t mean thinking you could borrow the money for a day. I can see how you were thinking. But not to come to me when you knew an innocent man was in trouble—that’s rotten, Jeff.”

“I know. All I can say is that it got out of control. Dimitri and the police. Mike and the chance to go away with him. I told Sid so he would go on working on Dimitri after I left. At least he succeeded. I’m not pleased with myself.” He pushed the envelope closer to his father. “Peter told me to write it that way. He didn’t see any point involving Dimitri since it was all my idea. So long as Costa is let out, he didn’t think it mattered if I arranged it a bit. He thought I was going away.”

George lifted his head and drew the sheet of paper from the envelope and glanced at it and dropped it. “You have good friends. Forget it. I’ve already told the police I found it in the house. They have let Costa go. I’ve managed to do that much. Why
are
you back? Aren’t you going away with Mike?”

“I thought I was. He left without me this morning.”

“I see. I mean, I don’t see at all. What did the son of a bitch do? Did he lead you on and ditch you? Did he offer you the trip so he could get you into bed with him? I don’t know. I’m just talking. I hope you can tell me.”

“It wasn’t like that.” Jeff averted his face. George could see his Adam’s apple working. “I—he was—he was—in his way, he fell in love with me. I was—I’m in love with him.”

George hunched his shoulders to absorb the blow. He shook his head to clear it. “You’re not making sense. In love with Dimitri? In love with Mike? Don’t you mean you wanted to go to bed with them? You can look me in the eye when you say it.”

“That’s not why——” Jeff flung himself forward and banged the table with clenched fists. “Don’t you understand? It’s tearing me apart. I’ve heard you call guys screaming queens. Well, that’s what I am. It would’ve been all right with Mike. There was something between us that was good for both of us. It’s gone. All right. Now I just want to go to bed with men.”

George reached out and gripped his arm. “Easy. I’m sorry. I was being stupid.” He wished he hadn’t had anything to drink. Although Jeff’s grief was evident, he couldn’t identify with it. He hadn’t experienced anything like it in his youth. There had been the casual affairs and then there had been Sarah and as much happiness as a man could reasonably expect—until recently. Because the very idea of Mike encouraging the boy in any way repelled and outraged him, there was a stoppage of his sympathies. He waited while his son got himself under control.

“
I’m
being stupid,” Jeff said at last. “I know. It’s over. He obviously couldn’t accept what he felt for me. He prides himself on not caring about anybody. I wish that when things are over you could stop feeling them.”

“Yes, that would be convenient. But then I suppose we’d never learn anything.” Something about his attitude toward Sarah shifted profoundly as he spoke. For two days, he had been trying to convince himself that it was over with her. He had even had Lena as an enthusiastic bed partner on several occasions in the last twenty-four hours. Nothing had changed; it was time for him to face it. “You know, you won’t go down in history as the only boy who ever wanted to go to bed with a man. That’s all I meant about looking me in the eye. I was being dim. I thought you were embarrassed. There’s no need to be, of course. I don’t condemn homosexuality. I just don’t understand it. I wish we could find a new word for it. It’s too loaded with opprobrium. There certainly aren’t many people I admire more than Peter and Charlie. If that’s going to be your life, do it as well as they have. The hell with Martha and the children. Those two are complete in each other. I should think it would be awfully difficult, but apparently it can happen.”

Jeff’s cheeks were burning as the colossal phallus rose in his mind’s eye, the network of living veins, the deep backward sweep of the dark flanged head, the thick base from which the great column sprang, of equal monolithic thickness all its length, lifting with such force that it seemed to be in motion, propelling itself toward conquest. Complete in each other. They were, of course. Yet he had held the secret sacred flesh. It had entered deep within him and made him its slave. He had drunk its mysterious leaping fluid. To that extent, for an hour or two, he had partaken of their completeness. Charlie’s arms around him. Peter’s. Peter’s mouth sweet and instructive, Charlie’s passionately healing. He had glimpsed their secret and there was nowhere in him for it to take hold and nourish him.

“I doubt if it can happen to me,” he said with a touch of self-mockery. “I’d have to go back to Plato and renounce the lusts of the flesh. It’s always struck me that Socrates must’ve had an awful lot of boys before he came around to that point of view.”

George was shocked by the jocular note, although he knew he should have been prepared for it. The boy was a mass of contradictions. Somehow, he preferred torment to flippancy. More stupidity on his part. “Well, since we seem to be having some straight talk, maybe you won’t mind telling me more. Have you been leading an active sex life for long?”

A ghost of a smile played across Jeff’s lips. “Since night before last. Yesterday morning, actually.”

“You mean, never before? Not with Dimitri?”

“Never before.”

“And you’re convinced on the basis of twenty-four hours’ experience that that’s the way you’re going to be? You’ve never been faintly attracted to a girl?”

“Never. I’ve always known. Don’t ask my why. Even Charlie and Peter can’t tell me that.”

“You’ve talked to them? I’m glad.”

Their eyes met and neither flinched. George found himself looking into Sarah’s eyes and love overcame his regret and bewilderment. The child in Jeff was dead; they could talk to each other as equals. “I’m sorry you’ve had such a rough start, but love is where most of the suffering comes from, as well as the joy. I couldn’t want you to be spared it. Just remember that this is only the beginning.”

“That’s a pretty horrible thought. No, you’re being very—well, I appreciate it. Don’t worry about me.”

“I do, naturally. But I will a lot less if you’ll talk to me. You’ll have to take the initiative. It’s not for me to put ideas into your head. I respect you for coming clean about the money, even if you should’ve done it sooner.”

“Peter made me.”

“Nobody could make you if you hadn’t known you should. You’re not perfect, but you don’t have to make yourself out worse than you are. It might be a good idea for you to tell the police you hid the money. It makes my story more convincing. Anything to get Costa completely off the hook.”