When Pat returned with a packet of condoms and a tube of lubricant, the only souvenirs he was glad to keep of Tony's sexual performance in Key West, Terry was sitting on the edge of the bed. He lifted his arms and encircled Pat's neck. "Pat," he looked up, "before we do the other thing, could I suck you? Or at least try? I want … Oh, Pat, I don't really know what I want, but I want to do something that shows you how much I'd like to belong you. If you'd have me."

"You don't have to prove anything to me." Pat sat down and put his arms around Terry's waist. "It's not as if I can have you without you having me. And it's enough for me that you want to be with me at all. I'm not exactly every boy's dream."

"The French boys, you turned them on, didn't you? You didn't say so at Eli's, but it was pretty obvious."

"Well," Pat admitted, "we did have a good time together."

"You made love to both of them?"

"And both of them to me. We did pretty much everything three guys can do together."

"So why would you doubt that you could turn me on, too? You're a really handsome man, Pat, and you have a really amazing cock and I'd really like to suck it. Okay?"

"More than okay. But you have to let me out of your mouth before I come. I'm a one-man man, and for 17 years Spence was that man. Patrice and Jean-Marc said they'd only slept with each other, so we didn't use protection. Still, you can never be sure. I'll get my blood tested, but until then, I don't want you taking any risks."

"But I want to taste you. I'm not scared about that."

"Not scared, but maybe foolish. There'll be other times. At least, I hope this isn't going to be a one-night stand."

Terry buried his face in Pat's shoulder. "That's what I hope, too." His voice was choked. "That's why I'm scared. I want everything to be perfect, and I'm frightened that I'll screw it up." He took his arms from around Pat's neck and slipped out of Pat's embrace so that he knelt by the side of the bed between the older man's knees. "Please," he gave Pat an imploring look, "help me be your lover."

Moved by the mixture of wantonness and fear and longing in Terry's voice and posture, Pat hesitated for an instant. He wanted most of all to kneel by the boy and hold him and caress him and reassure him that he was desirable, lovable, loved. But he also wanted to give himself to Terry, to show both his trust and the sexual excitement that the youth stirred in him. Pat leaned back, bracing himself easily on his forearms and raising his pelvis. "Please," he whispered, his voice gone husky, "please, Terry, love me, suck me, be my love."

The words were just right. Terry responded by lowering his head into Pat's groin, flicking his tongue out to swab the length of the partly engorged penis and softly scooping the heavy testicles into the palm of one hand. Tilting his head and bending it further, he lapped wetly, noisily at Pat's scrotum until it was slick and shiny with saliva. As his fingers stroked lightly up and down Pat's cock, Terry's lips surrounded first one nut and then the other, pulling the firm mass of each into the moist heat of his mouth as Pat's breathing grew faster and louder.

Quickly, the sweet torture became more than Pat could take. "Stop, Terry, please stop!" he begged. "You're too much, baby. Too much for an old man like me. Time out, please."

Terry instantly released the ball he had been sucking and raised a worried pair of eyes to meet Pat's. "I wasn't hurting you was I? I get carried away."

"More like you were blowing me away." Pat put a hand out to caress the boy's cheek. "Terry, that was wonderful, but it was almost too wonderful. You promised to take care of my prick, and if you'd gone on much longer with my nuts, there wouldn't have been any cock left to work on." He reached his hand behind Terry's neck and drew the young man's head up toward him. "Can I kiss you again before you do me in completely?"

Terry responded by kissing his way up Pat's body from crotch to chin, never taking his fingers off Pat's penis, until the two sat side by side. Pat put his hands on Terry's head and attacked his mouth as though he planned to take Terry's tongue prisoner and ravish it. The assault only ended when the two paused to breathe. Still clutching his lover's skull, Pat stared deep into the dark blue pools of Terry's eyes. "What I don't understand," he said at last, "is how something as wonderful as you can be happening to me. Are you real, Terry? Will you be here when I wake up?"

"I don't see how I can escape," Terry smiled. "Apparently, cabs won't come to this neighborhood. Besides, I like it here. I've met this incredibly sexy man, and he's promised to teach me how to make love."

"I don't think you really need instruction, but before you yank my pride and joy off, we could go on to the next lesson. Open your textbook, please, to page 47."

Terry laughed and relaxed his grip on Pat's penis. "Should I take notes?"

"Not now. When we show the training film, if you want." Pat was laughing, too. He hugged Terry to him. "Oh, baby," he exclaimed. "Do you know how long it's been since I laughed in this bed? Since I laughed at all? This is better than sex."

"How do you know?" Terry giggled. "We haven't had sex yet. Unless this is all that you Midwesterners do."

"Just for that, I'm going to show you what we do. Lie down on your back and open real wide."

Terry stretched out on the bed and allowed Pat to straddle him so that the older man's knees locked into his armpits. Pat put a pillow under Terry's head, raised himself and bent forward so that his cock, barely erect, drooped onto Terry's lips. "Go ahead, baby," he whispered, "take it. It's yours. I'm yours."

Terry's tongue flashed out and sought the pink tip of the dangling penis. It coaxed a bead of clear fluid from the slit and, as the organ stiffened and stretched, Terry captured it between his tongue and upper lip, putting subtle but increasing pressure on the ridge of the glans and coating the whole reddening mass with his spit. Tongue strokes against the underside of the corona brought gasps of delight from Pat but also brought his cock to its full, imposing thickness. Terry's lips wrapped around the top of the shaft, but he couldn't do much more than make the front of his mouth a moist, heated sheath. Pat understood his partner's difficulty and accommodated it with short, slow strokes that allowed Terry to apply sweet, wet friction mostly to the cockhead, only now and then to the veined stem.

Pat also twisted slightly and reached backwards to find and ensnare Terry's dick. Gripping it lightly, he fondled and stroked it, bringing stifled moans from Terry. Pat yearned to take the slim, rigid sex in his own mouth, but that would mean stopping everything to rearrange their bodies in new positions, and he was too close to orgasm to want to delay it. He looked down at Terry's face, distorted by the effort of sucking but still beautiful, and felt not only the mounting pressure of his trapped semen but a different, nobler impulse to cherish the youngster. He longed to possess him in spirit as in flesh, to embrace him so closely that their souls merged.

With Patrice and Jean-Marc, he had felt only animal delight, even when the two took turns kissing and caressing him the morning after their orgy. They had woken him with their giggling, woken him to discover that they had tied his wrists and ankles loosely to the brass bedstead and were using a feather to tickle his cock into erection. Pat didn't protest. He liked the idea of being their captive, their plaything, and liked it even more when Patrice mounted him, as he was now mounted on Terry, and instructed him to eat his "petit dejeuner," serving him for "breakfast" first a hairless ballsac and then a formidable prick. And while Pat feasted blissfully on Patrice's genitals, Jean-Marc began licking Pat's nuts, stroking Pat's cock and, with a lubricated finger slipped into Pat's anus, bringing him to a wrenching, wondrous orgasm that Patrice noisily, exultantly matched by coming in Pat's mouth.

They had untied him afterwards, led him to the shower, bathed him and shaved his morning beard. But they had not let him dress, and in the kitchen, as Patrice prepared their real breakfast, Jean-Marc had bent Pat over the butcher-block table, applied a soft pat of butter to his hole and then casually, cheerfully fucked him. Pat loved every minute of it, even the quick, sharp pain of Jean-Marc's entry. He loved the make-believe role of their "boy toy," one of the few English phrases they seemed to know, but what he loved best was that they treated him as though he were sexually alluring. Even as Spence's lover, Pat had not thought of himself as particularly attractive. When Eli nicknamed him the BYT, the label seemed cruel on several levels. But Patrice and Jean-Marc had actually stood him naked in front of a full-length mirror and catalogued his good points - his firm buttocks, flat belly, substantial cock and balls, broad chest, full lips and warm eyes. They stroked him as they praised him until not only was he fully erect but also half-convinced that he was as handsome as they claimed.

And now Terry called him "incredibly sexy," not from playfulness but in earnest. Good sex is not just a matter of massaging the right nerve ends in the right tempo. It is an invasion of the mind, even momentarily, by the miracle of love. Patrice and Jean-Marc had treasured Pat as a playmate. Terry, whose fingers now pressed on the base of Pat's cock, spoke and acted as though he wanted a sheltered and sheltering place in Pat's life. That possibility, as much as the determined sucking and massage, was pushing Pat not just toward orgasm but toward a more lasting emotional release.

"Here it comes," he groaned. "Let me go. Oh, god, let me go!" He freed Terry's organ and arched backwards, wrenching his own penis from the young man's mouth but not from his fingers. As they pumped him fiercely, implacably, Pat lost control and won deliverance. Pointed toward the ceiling, his cock fired several ropy bursts of semen, some of them falling on his chest and belly and some on Terry's face, his chin and forehead. Spent, Pat fell sideways onto the bed, not quite unconscious but so overwhelmed physically and emotionally that he could only whimper.

"Are you okay?" Terry's concerned, smeared face loomed over him. "Pat, Pat, did I hurt you?"

Pat tried to raise his arm to embrace the young man but lacked the muscle control. He managed a lopsided grin. "I'll live," he whispered. "At least, I think I'll live. That was out of this world, sweetheart. You took me out of this world."

Terry looked relieved. He bent to kiss Pat tenderly, and as their lips touched, some of Pat's spunk dripped off Terry's face onto his lover's. Pat was blissfully unaware of the messy exchange and only partly aware of Terry's leaving the bed for the bathroom where he washed and dried his face and returned with a damp cloth to clean Pat's torso.

"That's nice," Pat murmured as he was washed. "That's even nicer," he said, as Terry's arms went around him and Terry's body spooned against his. "Let me just take a little nap, baby," Pat entreated. "Then it's your turn. I promise. I love you." And he was asleep. Terry nuzzled him, kissed his neck, stroked his limbs and, sexually unsatisfied but overflowing with another kind of happiness, dropped off as well.

Pat's "little nap" lasted until well past sunrise. When he woke, the presence of another body in his bed startled him at first. Quickly, though, the feelings of the night before flooded back. The miracle of Terry, of their mutual passion, of the possibility of love left Pat amazed, exultant and terrified. What if it had been just a one-night stand? The boy was so young for his age.

"Why would he give his life to me?" Pat wondered, "to used-up, worn-down Patrick Handly? Last night was a miracle, but miracles don't have second acts," the silent monologue continued. Terry would be a joyful memory to store away, Pat decided, like the boys in Key West, "my snowman and my beach bunnies."

Braced to see the end of what he pretended had never begun, Pat inched his way out of the bed, tiptoed into the bathroom, brushed his teeth and washed just his hands and face. Fearing that running water would wake Terry, he skipped his usual shower, wrapped himself in a terrycloth bathrobe and crept back through the bedroom. When he left the bed, its other occupant was sleeping on his side, one haunch raised and an arm extended. Now, though, Terry lay on his back with his hands over his crotch and his hair a glorious red fan on the pillow. A tiny drop of saliva at the corner of his mouth made him an innocent man-child, a portrait of dreamy youth Pat needed no camera to capture forever.

Downstairs he used the guest bathroom to piss, fed McGonigle his morning ration of kibble, put on a pot of coffee and suddenly, bleakly, realized that there was nothing in the refrigerator to convert into a decent breakfast for a young appetite. Juice, yes. Some milk if the boy liked oat bran cereal. And that was about it. He'd have to go back upstairs, dress and drive to the supermarket through snow that was already melting in bright morning sunshine. But what would Terry want for breakfast? Eggs? Bacon? Donuts? He'd eaten enthusiastically at Eli's but his slim, toned body could be a tribute to routine asceticism or to a metabolism that fiercely consumed food at all hours of the day. "I don't know him at all," Pat's inner voice wailed in his ear, "I love him, and I don't know him. And I'll never get to know him."

Defeated, he leaned on the counter and stared dejectedly at the refrigerator he had not bothered to stock. Just as the coffee began to percolate, calling him back to reality, the wall telephone rang. Pat lunged for it, to silence it before the instrument in the bedroom woke Terry. "Hello," he said.

"Well?" a familiar voice asked.

"Eli?"

"Good morning, Pat. Well?"

"Well, what?"

"Well, has my enticing research assistant solved his logistical problems?"

"What are you talking about, Eli? I just woke up. I don't follow you."

"Pat, your wreck of a car is still sitting in front of my house, lowering property values in the neighborhood by the minute. Terry is not in his hotel. The desk clerk doesn't think he came in last night. Therefore, my keen deductive mind assumes that the two of you are together, and my question is a simple one: will he be living with you from now on, which I think would be ideal all around?"

"He spent the night, Eli. That's all." Pat walked over to the stove and turned the heat off under the coffee. "He's still asleep, I think. When we've had breakfast, we'll come get my car. The battery's dead."

"I assumed as much. I also assumed from the way he was devouring you with his eyes and hanging on every word you said last night that something might have sparked between the two of you. I sort of thought you might find each other kindred spirits."

Pat's brain clicked into gear. "Wait a minute, Eli, wait a minute. You knew all along that he'd be coming for dinner last night, didn't you? And you insisted I come, even with the storm, so that we'd meet. You dreamed all this up, didn't you?"

Silence on the other end of the line. "Eli, Eli," Pat's voice rose, "I'm going to come over there with the jump cables for my car and after I get it started, I'm going to wrap them around your match-making neck. You are the most devious, underhanded, deceitful…" he began to stammer, "wonderful friend I've ever had. Eli, I love you." He hung up, and turned to see Terry standing, grinning bashfully in the doorway.

"I love him, too," the young man said, advancing into the kitchen in bare feet. He wore only his blue jeans and a growing smile, "but not as much as I love you. I couldn't love anyone else that much." He stopped in front of Pat and twined his arms around him. "I've brushed my teeth. Can I kiss you good morning?"

The miracle that Pat couldn't credit as a miracle was going to have a second act. Their lips met and locked, and Pat's hands locked over Terry's spine. Then they drifted under the waistband of his jeans onto bare flesh. Wherever Terry's droopy briefs were, they weren't on his body. Pat broke the kiss.

"Good morning, lover," he said. "Good morning, my beloved." He lowered his head to kiss Terry's throat and brought his hands up to comb through the blaze of Terry's hair. "I haven't been so happy in a long time," he whispered. "Terry, Terry, you make me so happy that I want to cry."

"I am crying," Terry said, and he was. "Let's not strangle Eli. Let's take him to lunch and buy a bottle of champagne."

"His fee? Okay, that's a wonderful, generous idea. Terry, you're wonderful and generous, and I adore you. Even though I don't know you. I don't even know what to make you for breakfast. What do you want for breakfast?"

"You," Terry said, "just you." He undid the belt on Pat's robe and opened it to gaze on his lover's body. "You're all I ever want." He reached into the pocket of his jeans and brought out the condoms they had not used the night before. "See. I came prepared. Do you remember what you said me to last night just before you passed out?"

Pat thought. "I said that I love you, and I do. I do. I do." He unsnapped the catch at Terry's waist.

"You also said that it would be my turn next. And now it is." He pulled the robe off Pat's arms and let it drop to the floor. "Here. Now. Pat, I want you."

Pat had unzipped the jeans and Terry's cock sprang out through the opening. "I want you, too," Pat said, "Now and afterwards and always." He stepped, naked to the kitchen table and started to lower his chest onto it.

"Wait," Terry said. "I forgot the lubricant. I'll just run …"

"No, baby, don't go away. Don't ever go away." Pat stood up. "Take a look in the refrigerator. Something tells me there's butter there, and I can tell you," the memory of Jean-Marc made him smile and stiffen, "in an emergency, butter will do just fine."

The End