Royce

Arthur was known throughout the Village as Rex. For years he had taken men who fantasized about being slaves to places they had never before been. Some of them remained there and some returned, preferring where they had always been to the new territory they had just seen.

It was a ferocious nocturnal country he inhabited. To get there you dressed in black leather and you traveled by whips and chains. Nipple clamps, genital restraints, and devices for internal insertion were the passports.

For many who had dreamed of seeing the place, it was too scary when they got there and they booked a quicker return than they had intended, willingly paying the surcharge for leaving, losing something of themselves they had to abandon in order to get away. It was the ransom they paid to get themselves back.

A few knew at once that finally they were home, and never left, and never came back, and said they never had known themselves as well as now. Now they were the people they always had been and never had been able to be and had always longed to meet.

You'd see them on the streets, those who remained, walking beside him, or behind him, sometimes on a chain leash, always collared, waiting for the snap of his fingers. By the look in their shaded eyes it was clear that they were far away, somewhere else.

I had known Royce before he became a bondage slave. I had been with him at Crazy Benny's the night Rex spotted him and put the eye on him. He had just passed his twenty-third birthday. It made my heart sink that he could be attracted to Rex. He knew it, too. He knew it grieved me. And Rex also knew it. He gave me one of his conspiratorial, devilish smiles. It was one cool embodiment of ironic cruelty. Triumph, it said, and fuck you. The more you suffered, the less you were able to resist the need to suffer, the more Rex enjoyed it. His face was handsome and in the rosy bar light, it appeared softer than it really was in daylight.

Royce is a sweet kid, I said to him.

He took me by the scruff of the neck and kissed me, warmly, seductively, friendly, powerfully.

I lost my balance and gripped the bar stool to steady myself.

I know he is, he said. I like them sweet. Remember?

Show some mercy.

As I did for you?

You call that mercy?

I let you go.

I got away.

Not very far.

He grinned.

I knew that Royce was as good as gone. I saw the way he was looking at us. He could see that Rex had power; anybody could. That turned him on. But I knew he had no idea what that power was and how his own cooperation would so greatly enhance it.

What Royce did not understand and would not believe me when I told him is that pain is as addictive as any pleasure. More so, in fact, because it is more powerful than pleasure! Pleasure ingratiates itself. Pain asserts itself despite the resistance of the ego, which it must have the intensity to overpower. When pain goes to work, it takes over and makes sure you pay attention. It is the final authority. It will accept nothing less than mastery.

When Royce finally did believe me it only made him want it more.

Rex was interested in one thing, taking guys one step beyond where they wanted to go, and then one step beyond that.

I don't like melodrama. Love is a quiet thing. And I loved Royce. But the Royce I loved was hardly ever present, hardly ever the one who showed himself. So I loved the other one, the one who did, the one who was there, the one who got in the way, the only one you'd be likely to see, the one I compassionated for not really being Royce, for being his misrepresentation of himself.

What are you hiding from? I asked him that five years ago. We were in the showers in the basement of the gym we went to Wednesday evenings after classes.

I'm not hiding from anything he said, laughing, as he thrust his naked pelvis forward and soaped himself as he said it, as if illustrating its truth that very moment by that very gesture.

I could only smile and when I did, he stepped close to me and rubbed his soapy body against mine and blew on my neck and kissed me.

I like that, I said, as he rubbed our hard soapy cocks together.

I know, he said.

I wish it could be like that always, I said.

You've got to rinse yourself off sometime, captain, he said, as his semen gushed onto the soapy foam slicking my torso.

I knew he meant it, and I wished I had not said anything.

How long were you with Rex? Royce asked arching his left eyebrow as he brought the cup of sweet Turkish coffee to his lips.

A few years, I said, showing my misgiving.

Why do you say it that way?

Because it's nothing that makes me feel go about myself.

You felt go about yourself then, when you were in it.

I thought I did.

You thought you did.

I thought I did.

But^Å

But I didn't.

But you thought you did.

I was deceiving myself.

But it didn't feel like it then?

Why are you so insistent?

Because I want to feel it, and I want you to say it's ok.

It's not ok.

But you did it.

That's how I know. Sorry. I'd rather talk about^Åor really, I'd rather not talk at all and just gaze into the depth of your eyes and feel your eyes doing the same thing, gazing into mine. Just like when we^Å

But Royce frowned, and his eyes went flat and he made the face he makes when he's annoyed.

What am I supposed to do? I said.

His eyes widened. He pursed his lip and shook his head.

I know what I'm going to do, he said.

Rex saw himself in the bathroom mirror, naked muscular torso, arms raised, as he combed his hair and palmed what he combed with the other hand, shaping his thick light brown and trembling hair, unruly with life, into a perfectly lacquered turban, or helmet.

Bruno lay at his feet, like a dog at his feet, each nipple clamped and giving off a steady burning pain.

Rex kicked him.

Tell me why I did that. His voice was charming, warm, inviting, but still, remote and scary.

Because I deserve it, Sir.

Rex stopped his mouth, pressing the big toe of his bare foot against the boy's lips.

Eagerly, gratefully, Bruno kissed it. Then he wrapped his lips around it and gave himself to it in rapture.

Rex stooped and patted his head.

Go, he said, kicking him away as he pulled his toe out of his mouth and swatting his behind. Lay out my clothing for tonight.

It was not a leather night. Afterwards, who could tell? If something^Å.

At forty-five Rex was in his prime, slender and muscled, handsome, roughly handsome. He could change the way he looked. His face was rugged and movie-star masculine, but sometimes it was pretty, and his blue eyes could change to violet.

Rex snapped his fingers and Bruno pulled out the plug that had sealed him and draped himself over the velvet covered horse Rex kept in his dressing room, open to his master's desire.

Hard like a rock and primed by a rush of anger that up-rushing from an inexhaustible pool of anger, fueled his hardness, Rex strapped the boy. Silent tears rushed from Bruno's eyes. His body tensed. Rex entered him, tore his way into him, through him, destroyed him, and left him sobbing in ecstatic gratitude, alone, slumped over the velvet horse, listening to the silent sound of the air hissing and hearing a key turn in the lock..

Guys into all kinds of gear minced or strutted around in Crazy Benny's, gossamer fairies, underwear queens, engravings out of Tom O'Finland, dressed or undressed or partly, but no one came in a tuxedo.

Where have you been? Martin asked.

He was the nearest to an equal Rex had. It was awesome to watch Rex and him when they were together. Each riveted your attention and filled you with admiration. To see them being together was to glimpse a world of balanced power and of a mutual respect that neither of them found anyone else to be a worthy of receiving.

It was then that Rex saw Royce.

Royce had had a long night after a hard day. He had agreed to help his boss's partner take inventory at the antique store where he had worked, which closed after the robbery and his boss's murder. It had left Royce shaken but uninjured. And being in the store today had brought the events of only two weeks ago back.

He had had a few martinis after he got drilled in the eyes by Rex and before we smoked some special stuff in the alley.

He fell into my arms, touched my neck with his lips and said comfort me.

I cradled Royce and kissed him with a father's heart all over his face as I rocked him back and forth.

I don't know what I'll do, he said. I want him so much.

I cradled and rocked him, and did not say I tried to tell you.

I'll be here. That's all I can say. I'm not sure what good it will do.

I'll miss you.

I won't go anywhere.

If you go with Rex, you will.

I'm afraid, he said. And I'm excited,

I know, I said. It comes to be the same thing.

Rex smiled when Royce approached him, but it was at Martin, not at Royce. It was a smile for Martin, acknowledging something they both knew. His magnetism never gave him a moment's rest.

Excuse me, Royce said, but Rex was slow to answer or even to acknowledge someone had addressed him. Royce added, as if the word were the stamp on the letter that would make it deliverable, Sir.

Royce took my hand and looked into my eyes by the exit sign as he followed Rex out into the balmy Manhattan Street.

It was nearly four in the morning. You could stand in the center of the broad Ninth Avenue and look all the way up following the blazing trail of exploding amber lights along the rival sidewalks past midtown, and, if you turned, you could see the bifurcations at Fourteenth Street. The tough, old, queer, meat-market cruising ground, where hooks and trucks and the smell of carcasses came first, had become the illuminated landscape of dreams for men and women in sales and design and law and advertising, fashion pages, and law clerks and junior executives and beginning stock brokers and bond managers, bank tellers and dentists, bit players, athletes, rockers, and fancy bohemians -- glittering hopes on the make.

Royce's eyes were glistering with a coating of tears, happy with a feverish intensity.

It will be alright, he said, assuring me.

I embraced him and still held his hand as we parted.

I looked at his face, at the glowing complexion even at this hour, at the radiant flesh of his shapely arms and the upper part of his delicately sculpted chest. In my mind I saw his skin with bruises.

He let go my hand, turned sharply, walked quickly, caught up to Martin and Rex -- slowed down and took their pace when he was a few steps behind them.

What you see in the symphonies of Beethoven, Martin said, drawing on his pipe and sipping at the cognac Rex had offered him, is the desire of the individual to join with the mass in their mutual joyous declaration of common humanity, of merger and transcendence, whether in dancing, or marching, or in joint worship of the forces that live beyond the stars.

But the twentieth century has shown pretty conclusively, Rex said, holding his cognac glass at the rim between thumb and first finger and perched on the arm of a leather settee, how dangerous that is. By the end of the nineteen-thirties, the idea that the good of the individual was the proper end of collective endeavor had been defeated. Weimar gave way to Berlin, republican Spain to Franco, the Popular Front to Vichy, workers' collectives to gulags. People have lost any belief in the wonder of the multitude, in the joyous communion of separated souls in one grand and overwhelming soul, which shines similarly in each heart and throbs simultaneously in each breast, and whose origin is in an unapproachably distant possibility.

But they have not lost the yearning for it.

No, they have not, Rex smiled.

Royce, come here, he said, signaling with a finger to the boy who had been sitting on the floor by the door to the study, listening wide-eyed to the strange conversation between these two men.

Kneel, Rex said as Royce approached.

Kneel? Royce said.

Kneel, Rex said in a voice more charged with impatience and command. There was no question but he would be immediately obeyed.

Royce obeyed, lowered himself to his knees and knew not further what to do.

You see, Rex said, smiling, to Martin.

He's very pretty, Martin said.

Do you hear that? Rex said, now addressing Royce.

Yes, Sir, Royce said.

What do you say? Rex said, camping.

Thank you, Sir, Royce said, not camping.

You see, looking at Martin, Rex repeated.

Do you know what it means to be one of my slaves?

No, Sir,

But you want to become my slave?

Not become, Sir.

Not become?

I am your slave, already, Royce murmured, bowing his head. My wish is that you accept me as your slave.

Shall I accept him, Martin? What do you think?

May I examine him?

Certainly. Proceed.

Stand up, Royce, he said nicely. We are not going to hurt you now.

Royce stood.

Bare your chest. Take off your shirt.

Royce pulled the black tank-top over his head, revealing a chest whose natural grace had been enhanced by determined and careful carving.

You shave your chest, Royce, Rex said with delight.

Yes, Sir, Royce said.

Come here, Martin said. I want to feel your nipples and see how hard your muscles are.

Rex? he added, checking for permission.

Please, Rex responded.

This time Martin only gestured with a wave of his hand and Royce kneeled before him.

He took him by each nipple and began gently kneading them between his fingers, delighted to see how Royce shivered when he touched him. He began by squeezing and then dug the edges of his finger nails into firm nipple flesh until he led Royce to real, gasping pain. Royce struggled not to squirm and to hold himself tight and feel the authority of the pain coursing through him.

Rex stood up and went over to his mahogany desk, rummaged around the shallow top middle drawer and found two silver clamps.

Here, he said to Martin. Use these.

Martin let go of Royce's nipples and Rex clamped each, causing a sharp intake of breath. But rather than squirming, Royce tightened his body as if he were trying to become stone.

Take off your trousers, Martin said.

Carved like a rock, his ass under the light microfiber of his black mini-boxers clenched him closed. Rex touched his forehead with his thumb. Royce felt a hollow rush up his center. His entrance had dilated with desire as his abs and pecs tightened.

Congratulations, Martin said to Rex, and took him by the shoulder and brought him near. The two men shared a master's kiss together, each exercising his own and doing homage to the other's power. They pulled off their shirts and pressed their torsos together. Hard bodies pressed together, they pulled their trousers off, and then their briefs. Naked thigh to thigh they pressed their proud steely virilities together.

You strip, too Royce, Rex said. The boy complied and obeyed the summons to lie on his back and raise his legs. They broke into him.

Please, Martin, Rex said. You are my guest.

Martin was gentle. He appreciated that Rex was being hospitable, and he did not want to abuse his courtesy.

Rex, however, was not gentle. As was his way with his slaves, he asserted his mastery without concern for consequences. It was only then that he let down his guard and surrendered control, but only to his own passion.

Rex explode inside Royce and set his nerves and muscles on fire.

I passed Royce on the street once, walking beside Rex. He was collared but not on a chain. He saw me and when he asked, Rex gave him permission to stop and say hello to me.

You did it, I said, somehow knowing not to shake his hand or clasp him in a friend's embrace or kiss his cheek.

He bowed his head slightly, almost slightingly.

On the side of his neck, below his left ear, there was a small tattoo of orange flames.

You look terrific, I said, recovering myself.

He did.

I can't stay, he said as Rex watched us. Rex made no sign of greeting to me or even of acknowledging me, although I smiled at him and raised my right palm in a half salute.

That did not bother me. It had changed inside me. I was quits with him.

Good luck, kid, I said.

Royce turned away from me. It seemed he gave me a secret wink as he did. At least, I thought so. But it was gone before I could be sure.

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