It may be that the strange course events took at that fantasy camp in Arizona stemmed from a single comparatively minor incident. It is hindsight that suggested this possibility to me and neither logic nor a careful consideration of what evidence is available has excluded it. More than anything, I think I am recording what happened then in an attempt to make it make sense to myself.

It happened on the last day. The day after my spectacular base hit and even more spectacular gaffe.

As we were filing off the field I noticed a stray ball lying half-smothered in the grass. I bent down to pick it up, and Mr. Peters, who had been walking directly behind, bumped into me, his crotch making contact with my rear.

For a moment both of us froze. There was an audible gulping sound, but I could not tell, such was the roaring in my ears, from whom it came.

My clawed hand hovered over the ball, and a firm lump itself not unlike a ball lodged between my buttocks, a hot pressure directly over my sphincter. As the moment stretched, this lump seemed, slightly but perceptibly, to grow.

This jolted me into action. I collected myself, and the ball, and straightened up and turned around (as I did so the lump slid between my cheeks in a way that sent hot shivers circling around my perianal area and up my spine).

I mumbled an apology, my eyes still on the grass. When Mr. Peters said nothing, I lifted them to meet his gaze. His face was more than usually red and his eyes were wide, his mouth slightly ajar. At the time I thought this rather an overreaction. After all, my stooping to pick up the ball was a perfectly innocuous and indeed necessary action. How was I to have known he would come up behind me like that?

Possibly, I reflected, he was offended at being so abruptly presented with my backside, which, I will admit, had swelled somewhat in middle age (my wife likes to tease me that I am acquiring a feminine weight distribution).

There was also the awkward phenomenon whereby the thin white material of certain brands of baseball knickers, though not quite so revealing as some of those worn by footballers, causes them to become all but translucent under bright sunshine when soaked through with perspiration from the exertion of the sport. It was only upon returning to my room to change that I noticed this had happened to my uniform. What was more, underneath I was wearing white underwear, which had become similarly see-through, leaving me practically naked below the waist, from my thighs to my buttocks to my genitals. Needless to say this exacerbated my embarrassment to the nth degree, and also helped me to understand why Mr. Peters, in the immediate aftermath of our accidental collision, stood stammering for some moments.

`Hey, well, uh, sorry there pal, didn't, uh...didn't see you, uh, there...' When this feeble flow had petered out, he cleared his throat and tugged his cap down over his eyes and brushed past me, making a home run for the locker room.

I followed more slowly. I was, I will admit, rather red of face myself. The fact that he had evidently decided to shoulder the embarrassment, as it were, for my latest faux pas alleviated my own somewhat, but only somewhat. I remembered his action in breaking the awkward silence in the locker room the previous day and was simultaneously grateful to him for coming to my aid and resentful that I should require it.

 

Resentment had decidedly won out over gratitude by the time Mr. Peters appeared at the door of my hotel that night, with his evening's entertainment swaying on his arm in a shiny strapless dress.

It was after his rambling ritual of humiliation had stumbled to a drunken halt that Mr Peters made his second proposition of the evening, and this one I had on no account anticipated.

`Say, Abbot, me and this fine dame were about to head back to my suite for a little fun. Why don't you join us?'

I stood in the doorway in my linen pyjamas, head cocked to one side, struggling to picture Eugene Peters's idea of a `little fun' and struggling even more to picture myself involved in it.

`Come on, Apple, live a little. For once.'

It was hard to tell through the alcoholic slur, but these last two words, muttered in a lower tone, seemed to have a tinge of malice, or perhaps reproach.

`Sugar, come on. He doesn't want to.' The lady tugged at his arm again.

Peters, all too obviously, did want to. One hand was orbiting his crotch as he spoke and occasionally dipping in to caress the large swollen mound that distended the front of his business slacks. I eyed the bulge with disdain. As much alcohol as he had imbibed, it had evidently not been in sufficient quantities to counteract the effect the whore's presence had on him.

At that moment a memory was thrust forcefully into my skull, a memory of the time in my life when the size of Eugene Peters's genitals had been a cause of proportionally enormous embarrassment to me. Although the inconvenient erection is the bane of many a teenage boy's social life, the sheer scale of the affair in Eugene's case meant it was impossible to hide with such tricks as the hand in the pocket or the head-tuck under the waistband. To be coarse, he had a habit of continually popping boners in both private and public places, often leading me to temporarily desert his presence out of shame. This happened not only when it might have been expected, such as when we were engaging in conversation with a pair of girls by the lockers or the ice-skating rink (or, more accurately, when they were engaging him in conversation, I being for the most part an onlooker) but also on quite unexpected occasions such as when we were swimming together in one of our identical pools, or sitting together on one of our identical beds doing homework. I will admit that a part of the acuteness of my mortification came from the curious contagious effect these involuntary exhibitions seemed to have on my own anatomy, producing more modest but still noticeable hard-ons of my own.

There was actually a discernible wetness at the tip. As I watched, it formed a dewy drop outside the dark fabric of his pants, like a string of spit, only cloudier and more gelatinous. It drooled down toward the floor, wobbled for a moment as the shape in his trousers shifted and jerked. Peters let out a sigh. Then the string broke and fell to the floor—splashing across my bare foot. My mouth opened in a silent gasp. It was warm.

My throat was suddenly too tight. There was a tightness all over me, as if my skin were shrivelling, a tightness all over, but especially, strange to report, about my testes and around my anus—inside my anus, as if something were stuck up there. Or wanted to be.

That made no sense. I tried to shut the door, my politeness at a definite end, deal or no deal, but Peters moved forward, blocking the door with his arm and lodging his thigh against my groin.

`Honey, baby, come on', the lady said. `Just leave him alone.'

Mr Peters did not look at her. For a moment he stared at me, his eyes suddenly clear, as if seeing me for the first time. Then quite abruptly he growled, 'Go to hell', and shoved her off down the hall.

Before either she or I could react to this he had barged forward into the room, sending me stumbling back. He kicked the door shut behind him, drowning the room in darkness once more.

I backed away from him, not knowing what kind of outburst of drunken violence I should expect to be visited on my person. I wondered whether I should call the hotel staff. But Eugene Peters only stood, squinting futilely around him at the dim room, rubbing one hand through his hair and the other over the mound of his crotch. When he turned to face me again, what he came out with was not a clumsy swing, or even more taunting, but a question, and from what I could tell a sincere one, though utterly out of left field. `Do you remember that time you jerked me off in my car at the lookout? You know, the make-out spot, in high school. `

As a matter of strict fact, I had not remembered it till that moment. I had hardly time to remember, to wonder why Eugene was bringing it up now, of all times and of all things to recall from our childhood, when he started walking toward me.

I automatically backed up as he advanced, but slowly. I wasn't afraid of him. Astonished, but not afraid. The fluid from his penis was cooling on my foot and for some reason it was running through my head on a progressively louder loop that that stuff had come directly from his testicles and now my pores were just drinking it down and it was in my bloodstream and part of my too. There seemed to be a lingering light about his silhouette or maybe it was just that strange magnetism that kept me fixed on his face, his voice, unable to look away, let alone run. He sounded much more sober now than he had been only moments before in the hallway. His voice was much clearer, and I thought calmer, though there was an underlying note of strain.

`Do you remember that? Cause I—' he stretched out his hands in a helpless, almost lost gesture, and his tone turned rueful. `I can't fuckin forget it.'

`Eugene, what—' Just then the back of my legs hit the bed-frame and I started to fold over at the knees like an inflatable doll. He grabbed for my arms. I fell backward onto the bed and Eugene Peters fell on top of me, winding me with his weight. Everything was eclipsed by him. As I sucked in air, trying to get my breath back, struggling blindly and uselessly to dislodge him, I caught a lungful of his scent. Booze and sweat and that indefinable but unmistakeable musk of male arousal. And perfume. I could still smell her on him, mingled with the alcohol, like a flower garden with a tang of decaying undergrowth. Somehow that irritated me more than being summarily crushed by his inebriated bulk.

I shoved at him and he grunted, but Eugene Peters did not seem inclined to move. His manner had shifted once again. Now it was almost pleading. `How come you never—how come we never—'

Whether it was merely the drink or something else, Eugene Peters seemed unable to complete this sentence. His hands spoke for him. They fumbled underneath me and then, unexpectedly, groped at my backside, slipping inside the loose elastic waistband of my pajama bottoms. I confess I yelped aloud at the feeling of his strong fingers gripping into my buttocks, digging in almost to the point of causing pain.

Eugene Peters leaned in close, blowing boozy breath down into my eyes. My nose wrinkled but out of courtesy I refrained from mentioning it. I also refrained from socking him in the jaw as those uninvited fingers wormed their way toward my asshole and probed at the tightly-puckered rim. As bizarre as his behaviour was, I could not forget the meeting we had tomorrow, the deal that might finally cinch my career.

`Eugene, just what do you think—'

His voice was hoarse now, like he'd been knocking back thumbtacks downstairs, not cocktails. `Do you have any idea what that uniform does to your ass? Should be fuckin illegal. Dowdy lil fuck like you.' There was real venom in his voice, but desperation in how he tore at my pyjamas.

At such a near proximity I could not help noticing how well the years had treated him in more ways than one. Instead of crumpling or sagging, or coarsening like Mr Mays's, his features had solidified over time, hardening into the kind of craggy good looks that would make even a movie star jealous. Only around his eyes did the fine web of wrinkles, like hairline cracks in pink marble, disclose his true age.

They were a stark contrast to my own (I harbour no illusions in this regard) entirely bland and forgettable features, which do not even have the distinction, like my daughter Naomi's, of being classically Semitic. Mr. Peters's face was cut from a more Northerly cloth, rather, now I thought of it, like my wife. It was not a comparison that had ever occurred to me before.

`Eugene, please, get off—'

`Oh, I'm fuckin gonna', he said and the next sounds were of his belt clinking as he fumbled with his pants and pulled out his cock. Which, I'd had no choice but to notice as he sprawled across me, was harder than ever.

Like all the rest of him it was only a vague shadow in the lighter dark of the room, but somehow even though I couldn't see it, I could feel it. Feel its hardness and its heat, feel its pulsing throbbing hugeness and eagerness, its readiness to—to what?

He ripped my pajama pants down to my ankles and settled his other hand on my belly. He was fixing me in place, ready to...

To fuck me.

Please understand it is a word I am loath to use, a word I never use out loud, not even in private. I try to avoid it even in thought. Such vulgarity is beneath one of my profession, my standing in society. Maybe for a man like Mr. Peters such obscenities may pass his lips without a second thought, but it is entirely unfitting for a chartered accountant at a respectable firm, a married man with three children and an at least semi-observant Jew, to use such coarse language. But in this case it is the only word that will do. Eugene Peters was going to FUCK me. FUCK me right in the ASS, right there on that bed. Shove his HARD COCK right up into my ASSHOLE and probably SPUNK inside me as well.

Even after all that has transpired I cannot believe those words as they stare at me from the page where I have just put them down. They thrill and terrify me in ways I still cannot explain. I can only imagine how my boyhood self would react to reading them. I am glad I am alone as I am writing this.

The end of the mattress fell into two deep divots like sinkholes as he knelt, straddling my legs, his penis bobbing between his thighs, swaying a little but anchored steady by its own butt-breaking firmness, aiming straight for my poor virgin hole. `Now you just lay there', Eugene husked, voice gusting low amid heavy eager breaths, an animal in the heat of rut. `You jus lay there like a good lil boy and let me give that hot lil cunt of yours what it was begging for out on that field.'

He was speaking to me in the most outrageous, the most obscene terms, terms no man worth the name would stand for. What he was about to do to me was outrageous, obscene beyond belief. I ought to have cursed him to Kingdom come, thrown him off the bed and kicked his ass, or at least attempted to. I might even have been able to take him, drunk as he was. But instead I obeyed him and let him take me. I lay on my back like a good little boy more than forty years old and let him spread my legs to receive his cock.

I obeyed, governed now by an impulse I could not name—that old, dark side of me that craved everything my life was not. It could only have been this impulse that kept from crying out, much less fighting back, that made me gather the sheets into two huge fistfuls like wads of Kleenex, made me turn my head to bite the corner of the pillow as the head of Eugene's penis, moistened only by a thick line of whiskey-tainted spit, nudged at the entrance of my rectal cavity, which was pulsing in time with my heartbeat, and drove abruptly in.

I will disclose at this point that I had imbibed one or two beverages of my own before retiring, purely in the spirit of conviviality. I was thankful for them then, for they seemed sufficient to dull what must otherwise have been an eviscerating pain. I can only assume it would have been, having, I must emphasise, no experience of such matters whatsoever till that night.

I do not know whether Eugene Peters intended to give the strumpet the same treatment as he was now giving me. If so, I hope she receives a very generous compensation for her services, for she certainly deserves it. There was no preparation, no `warming up'. He was in, and once he was in, he was determined to get as far in as he could get, without rupturing a vital organ; bullying me open with his pinkiron then hauling back out again for a brief second before stabbing in once more with redoubled ferocity. It was not intercourse as I had ever known it. Possibly if I had taken advantage of certain pay-to-view TV channels which I am told hotels typically offer. But I had not. I had never made love to anyone but my wife, and that, though passionate (at least in the beginning) had been a tender, protracted affair. This was more like a bludgeoning, an internal beating, some kind of cruel and unusual punishment—punishment for what I still could not imagine. If anyone should have been seeking revenge, it would be me. Didn't he have everything already? Why did he need this as well?

I only wish I could say that my body was as repulsed by the affair as my mind. Alas, my penis, that treacherous and mercenary organ, after wilting initially under the brutality of Eugene Peters's onslaught, had sprung back to perky life. As the bed bounced, and Eugene bounced me on it, the head of my member tapped against the heel of his hand, which was still planted on my belly, anchoring me in place. I wondered if he could feel his cockhead banging up against his palm. It felt like he was that far in me.

`After everything', he said, panting as he approached what I could only surmise was orgasm, `after fuckin everything, how is it I'm still stuck on the fact that I never got past third base with you.'

`What', I panted back, `on earth are you talking about?'

Eugene did not reply but thrust in harder and deeper, opening up some hitherto uncharted region of my interior to the violent colonisation of his cock. I could feel his ball-hairs itchy against my taint. All of me seemed to be clenched around his girth and I couldn't breathe, chest heaving as I dragged in short gasps that went nowhere and filled nothing. Nothing filled me but his dick. It was like he was so big, lodged so far inside, he was working the machine of my body on my behalf, pistoning his prick into me and jiving my limp form into motion, pumping my lungs like bellows with each meaty slam of his tumescent girth, for all I knew pumping my blood as well, pulping and pulverising it out of my heart like juice from a sponge each time that hard hammering dong smashed into it. I didn't know what it was I was feeling but it was so much.

Was he trying to hurt me? Punish me in a bizarre fashion for an unguessable offence? Or merely to put me in my place? Perhaps he was jealous of my performance on the pitch, and this was his compensation. Perhaps he knew deep down that sock should have been mine.

My wife's words echoed in my ears. He's trying to humiliate you, and you don't even see it.

I hadn't understood then but I understood now. All at once I understood everything. I was not the oblivious fool he evidently thought me. I knew exactly what he was trying to do. Scheherazade was right. As wise as her namesake. Well, I would not be humiliated. Not even by this unconventional new tactic.

So I gritted my teeth and met his grunts with grunts of my own, pushing back against his thrusts, buttocks slapping against his pelvis, sinking my fingers deep into the mattress, determined not to become the squealing whorish wreck he was trying to make me, determined to maintain my composure. Determined not to give him the satisfaction of seeing me come undone, as was so obviously his aim. Determined not to let him win.

Eugene responded to this defiance with a renewed assault. His eyes lit up and—well, apparently it was possible for him to fuck me harder, since that is precisely what he commenced to do. Though if you'd told me that five seconds before I wouldn't have believed it.

He was laying into me so hard now my whole ass was aching, and everything above had dissolved into a kind of sweltering numbness. He had climbed fully on top of me, mounting me properly, trapping me against the bed, one hand pinning my ankle up by my ear while the other kept my hips tilted up so he could drill his prick right down into me. He ended up pushing me across and halfway off the bed with the force of his lunges, and my shoulder jived against the nightstand, scattering the bowl of complimentary chocolates. But he just kept on fucking, like his life, or at least his bowling arm, depended on it.

My whole body seemed to rise up to meet his inward driving thrusts, as if it yearned for the hot vicious pressure of his penis against my prostate and bladder, the friction and tingling electricity that was damn near short-circuiting the nerve-conduits between my pelvis and my brain. It was less pain now than intensity (though I could already tell that whatever mild hangover I had in the morning would be nothing to what my poor posterior would suffer), an overload of sensation that left me almost catatonic. I couldn't think, was hardly conscious of anything except his presence, our mingled scents, his sweaty skin sticking to mine, the bristles on his nuts scrubbing up my ass-crack—the fact that his thrusts were slowing down, were stilling, had stopped.

That he was coming. That, without receiving any more stimulation than having my penis slapped against my belly each time he jammed into me, so was I.

With one final groan that was nearer a roar, Eugene collapsed onto me, the last of my spendings squeezed out against the flats of his abdomen.

`Goddamnit, Roth.' Now it was he who sounded winded. For myself, to speak would have required more air than I had in store. Now with all his weight fully smothering me, I thought I might pass out. It was not so alarming a prospect as one might suppose. I was suffused with a rare bliss, not unlike, I imagine, the altered states of consciousness that may be produced with certain proscribed substances, in which Mr. Peters, though, needless to say, never I, had been known to dabble in youth.

For a while he lay on top of me, huffing against my neck, the wall of his chest heaving against mine, his erection stickily softening in my rectum, my own, though likewise spent, kept fat and flushed by the vice of our two overheated bodies. It was not a comfortable position, on the whole, yet I felt no particular urgency to alter it. I now wondered whether, if this was indeed his regular performance, it was not Mr. Peters who should have been receiving remuneration for his services.

He levered himself up a little on one elbow and moved so his face was hovering directly over mine. We were so close that each time he exhaled I could taste liquor on my tongue. My glasses were so fogged up I was unable to discern his expression but there was something in his voice as he began to speak that made me take notice. Something I had not heard in almost forty years.

`Abba?' His speech was soft and hesitant, sounding almost confused.

`Yes?' For my part I tried to keep my tone absolutely even, to betray no sign that the preceding events had had any effect on me. Granted, this was rather futile when he had my semen smeared all over his shirt. But though the flesh was weak, I would prove to him that my spirit was unshakeable.

`Goddamnit.' This seemed to be his favourite utterance of late. ` Can't get my fuckin head—I can't—Abba, you have to know. I—'

There was a series of knocks on the door. `Eugene? You in there?'

The disappointment I felt then had no conceivable rational cause. What was I missing out on—more inane ramblings of a melancholic drunk? Nonetheless, it was acute. It was the premonition of having missed something vital that had visited me at several crucial junctures of my life, both professional and purposeful. Like the ghost of a murdered future passing me by.

At this point I expected Mr. Peters to depart in short order—to abandon his misguided venture in psychological warfare and return to the amusement he had paid for, and which was no doubt awaiting him in his suite even as he sodomised me.

Instead the knock on the door spurred him into renewed action. He pushed himself up on his arms, hauled me back up so I was fully on the bed, not dangling off the side and pumped his rapidly re-inflating organ through my passage until the friction of my inner walls stroked it back to its full steely strength.

The mattress bouncing on its springs had never sounded more like a quacking duck, Eugene's moans had never sounded so deep and unmistakeably masculine, or my own, for all I tried to restrain them, so wanton and loud; the fwhap of his pelvis colliding with my buttocks, of his penis filling my rectum up to the root, that inimitable sloppy squelching slap that can be only either a mallet pounding wet dough, or a firm fucktool reaming out a gaping orifice, so unambiguously sexual. He was lighting me up from the inside out, so fiery fast I wondered that weren't sparks flying off the rims of my glasses, that I wasn't watching the world through two burning rings of fire.

I was floppy as a ragdoll, my body limp, limbs tangled uselessly in the sheets. I didn't even care who was at the door or what on earth they'd think. I just wanted, needed, Eugene to blaze me up toward that single peak of glory.

Just as the knocks commenced once more Eugene groaned as if to drown them out and unleashed a flurry of final, desperate hunches, so fast they blurred into one continuous blow, like a pile-driver hammering against the spot inside my rectal cavity which I learnt in short order worked more efficiently than any pill to stiffen my own member and send me careening toward a breathless, helpless second climax.

Out of nowhere he put both hands on my neck, cinching them around my throat. I do not believe he was attempting to strangle me, yet the gesture was so innately violent, so innately dominant, it alarmed, yet I must confess it aroused me also. I swallowed just to feel the pressure, the strength his hands still held and when he tightened his grip in time with his thrusts it was like he was squeezing blood into my cock, squeezing the sperm directly out of my balls, I came so hard so fast.

While my penis was still twitching he took his hands away and collapsed on top of me again. He hissed a parting orgasm into my ear, then disengaged himself with remarkable, and for my overworked sphincter, rather painful, swiftness, jerking himself out of me with a curse and stuffing his soggy length back inside his pants. He strode over to the door, zipping himself up as he went. He opened the door onto a rectangle of yellow light from the hotel hallway.

`Hey, isn't this Roth's room? What the hell you doing in here? Is the girl in there with you?'

I could see someone, maybe Mr. Forbes, himself trying to peer round Mr Peters's bulk to see into the room, which fortunately had remained dark as I fumbled to cover my sweaty, sperm-soaked body with the sheets. Mr Peters stepped through the door and closed it behind him. Whatever answer he gave was muffled and indistinct. He had not looked back.

After a while the sprinklers started up again. I twisted in the bed, discomfited. Both the rhythmic juddering sound they made as they turned, like a man hitting a block of wood with the handle of an axe, and the action they performed, now suggested to me novel and lurid associations, related to the actions Mr Peters had only just desisted from inflicting upon me and the clammy viscous fluid that was slowly, helplessly leaking from my ass.

I thought about stuffing tissues down there to staunch the flow but then, I reasoned, the damage was already done. I wouldn't have to wear the pyjamas again before we got home (and I could slip them into the washing machine without Scheherazade seeing them) and the hotel staff would take care of the sheets. They would surely have plenty in a similar state to deal with before morning.

Besides, though I did not admit this to myself, even in my own head, yet I will now record it to my shame, a part of me liked the feeling. That impulse for uproar and disorder that Mr. Peters had so vigorously rubbed off on me, or rather, in me, had not faded yet. My head was filled with strange music, music I had never heard before and could attribute to no known composer, not quite Berlioz, not quite Beethoven; something in-between the two, yet beyond either. It is only in retrospect that I realise it was the music I might have composed, had my life taken a different tack.

Several thoughts of that kind passed across the slowly settling surface of my mind that night, cycling with the rhythm of the sprinklers outside. Alien thoughts, unnatural thoughts, thoughts which would never have occurred to the Abba Roth of the daylight world, and which would have been incomprehensible to him.

Nonetheless, it was not until several hours later, as I lay slowly cooling between the ruffled and rank sheets, Eugene Peter's seed cold and slimy between my buttocks and thighs, striving vainly after a slumbrousness that seemed to have vanished along with my anal virginity, that it occurred to me that the bolt of distaste that had struck me earlier on hearing Eugene Peters carousing with the harlot in the hall, was not distaste at all, but jealousy.

 

In the morning we had our meeting. I had not been waiting long, sitting on the fold-out sofa, fingering Willie Mays's legging, before the sound began again, the giggling and then that other, lower sound, which I could not help but recognise thanks to my experience of the night before and which I could not help acknowledging came from the adjoining bedroom, came from Eugene Peters and the woman who was evidently still with him. What they were doing in there I could imagine only too well, though I strove not to.

This become impossible when there was a thud like furniture being moved and then a loud moan, female. Then a series of harsher, masculine grunts and more feminine moans and—I stood up and went over to the wall. There was no mistaking it. Eugene Peters was fucking her against it. He was having intercourse with this trollop only a foot or so of wood and paint and plaster from where I was standing. And he was doing it on purpose, to gall me.

I stood there motionless, listening to them, unable to move away, unable to stop picturing exactly what was happening in that room, exactly what Eugene Peter's was doing to her. I could see it as clearly as a motion picture: her braced against the wall, head thrown back, long hair wild, mascaraed eyes closed, face a gaping mask of pleasure, one slim leg curling its painted toes in the carpet while the other was lifted up above her head in a ballerina's pose by the large hand of Eugene Peters, his other hand rucking up the flimsy piece of silken negligee as he hunched over her like the Beast from some more honest fairytale, the thick red-veined shaft of his penis ploughing wetly into her vagina, shoving aside the lacy white panties that were the only other thing she was wearing, her lower lips shiny and red as his meat rammed into her over and over again with violent force, the fuzzy rounds of his testicles jiggling and swinging forward to clobber her swollen clitoris.

I felt a wetness on my fingers and opened my eyes and looked down and saw that my hands were shaking so violently the tomato juice was lapping against the side of the glass. I put it down in the table.

My wife's warning rang in my eyes, louder than ever. He wants to humiliate you.

Evidently his diversions with this slut, calculated to begin upon my arrival, at the very hour of our scheduled meeting, no less, were aimed at that purpose. Well, I would not be thrown off balance. He would humiliate no one but himself. Whatever I heard, whatever I saw, I would be unflappable: cool, collected, level-headed—scrupulous and exacting, a consummate accountant.

I was already fumbling at my zipper before I had completed this thought. What I did next was sheer madness and fortunately I cannot remember much of it. It seemed to happen in bursts, as might result from ahead injury; as if my brain, accustomed to more decorous sights and sounds, was overheating, short-circuiting from sheer arousal.

When I opened my eyes and looked down I found I had pulled my penis, which was erect, through my fly and was furiously masturbating, even, I cringe to recollect, falling so low as to use the spilled tomato juice as a grisly-looking lube, making my tool appear as though it had just raped a virgin. My eyes fluttered closed and when I opened them again I found I had wrapped the soft black material of the legging around my length and was briskly stroking myself with it, much as a more ordinary man might do with a woman's stocking or panties.

My more sober self was horrified. What I was doing was as near to sacrilege as an agnostic like myself can come. Yet even as it appalled me, the thought of defiling the sacred relic of this idol among modern men excited me inordinately. The thought of spoiling Mr Peters's unearned prize even more so.

My fist moved in a blur; unintentionally matching the all-too-clear rhythm of thrusts coming from Eugene Peters's bedroom. His moans and hers were getting louder. I didn't care that he wanted me to hear, that all this was just another way to exert dominance over me, to make me look small. The fabric was so soft and I was so close to coming. I was going to shoot all over the damn thing. It was mine by right anyway. I was entitled to claim it with my sperm. I'd earned it and we both knew it. Mine to do what I want with and Eugene Peters could suck it.

I closed my eyes and the room around me vanished. Everything vanished except the smooth friction of the fabric on my shaft and the sound of Eugene Peters fucking and all at once I was in the room with them and it was me he was pounding, not her. The lingering soreness of my asshole made this only too easy to imagine.

I was standing in the bedroom of Eugene Peters, the richest man I knew, in a moment when we were supposed to be having a meeting to secure the biggest deal if my career, the stolen sock of Willie Mays in hand, wrapped around my hard dick, Mr. Forbes or hotel staff or God-knew-who potentially around the corner, about to walk in on me jerking off listening to my once-best-friend fuck a hooker, imagining he was fucking me instead. Which he had already done, that night.

Since I have promised to withhold nothing in this confession, I must own that it was this memory that finally tipped me over into that momentary abyss of ecstasy that is the petite mort.

I only just remembered to draw the sock up over my head as I came, otherwise I would surely have spurted halfway across the room. My balls emptied with such force, my urethra dilated so violently, my sphincter clinched up so minutely, they hurt. It was like being a damn teenager again.

As I puffed and wheezed back to a somewhat regular heart-rate, coming down from what had been the most intense climax I had experienced in decades, if one discounted the previous night, I realised that the noises from the next room had stopped.

No sooner had I become aware of the silence than it was broken. I heard a door open and slam shut and footsteps in the foyer.

I had only the presence of mind to stuff the warm sticky mess I was holding back inside my pants and zip myself up, sock and all, before the door to the bedroom opened and Eugene Peters strode in.

He was still wearing a bathrobe, and it quickly became apparent that he had indeed worn it for a strategic purpose, though the strategy in question pertained to a realm far distant from that of corporate negotiation. It hung open at the front and he made no move to close it as he sat down opposite me. On the contrary, he sat with a needlessly wide stance, spreading his legs so I could see all there was to—could see everything he wanted me to see. Which was his cock. It rested, half-softened on his thigh but still large enough to reach almost to his knee, pulsing only gently, like a runner catching his breath after a race. Glistening with the excrescences of I knew only too well what orifice.

I could smell his come from across the table.

Eugene Peters grinned at me, as if expecting congratulations. As if our `escapade' of the previous night had made us partners in some kind of unwholesome pact. No doubt the kinds of friends he now had would be all over him, crowing and slapping him on the back and damn near slobbering on his dick and balls. I bet they'd get down there on their knees and lick them clean for him, if he asked, or rather, paid, them to. I sniffed and pushed my glasses more securely up the bridge of my nose.

The door opened again and the whore came in, and she too, as she passed behind my back, carried a fragrance of recent and vigorous intercourse, though she had at least had the courtesy to spritz it over with some sort of floral scent.

She sat down next to Mr. Peters. He pulled her into his lap and immediately commenced mouthing at her neck and pawing at her chest, pulling her breasts out of the glossy tube of cloth that was evidently meant to pass for nightwear, and which I had in fact pictured with tolerable accuracy in all aspects except colour.

She caught my eye for a moment and then quickly looked away. She seemed abashed and uncomfortable, but at the end of the day the dollar was king and she, like Willie Mays, like all of us, had no choice but to do her job. Which was to dance to Eugene Peters's tune. Once again I was not unaware of the irony that she was the only one of the two of them who had some decency. I didn't blame her one bit. My ire was directed wholly toward Mr. Peters, since this entire sordid display was clearly for my benefit.

His penis jerked upright as he groped and kissed her. It stretched out over the small cherry table toward me, as if trying to touch my own, which, I will record for the sake of perfect candour, though it causes me some consternation to this day, was once again also inexplicably erect.

Now, notwithstanding the impression I may have given hitherto, I am not so ignorant of the ways of the world that I did not understand what was happening to me that morning. It may be simply that the sound and sight of anything related to sex, for which category the male sexual organ in its tumescent state certainly qualifies, is going to arouse a certain response in the physiology of that man, regardless of his moral or professional feelings. Or it was possible that that episode of childhood folly to which he had alluded earlier had not failed to leave an unsavoury imprint on both our developing psyches. Or maybe it was all down to what had happened in my room that night. Whatever the cause, I was hard, and so was Eugene and I didn't know what to do or say.

I looked down at my briefcase.

`See, I told you, honey. Mr. Roth is always ready for business. Ain't you. Abba here knows how to have fun, even if he walks around like he's got a ten inch stick up his ass.' The orifice in question throbbed as he made this final jibe. I don't know if Mr Peters had quite ten inches, but it can't have been much less from the agony my asshole was in.

I glanced up and found Mr Peters smirking at me. The lady looked less sure. As she met my eye the simpering mask dropped and the glance we exchanged was, to my surprise, a sympathetic one. Both of us, it seemed, understood our roles as mere sops to Eugene Peters's evidently insatiable ego. And libido, though I wondered if—hoped she hadn't, understood my role in appeasing that. She turned her attention back to her client, and the giggling and pawing started again.

I threaded my fingers together and clasped my hands, but my knuckles turned white while my nails turned red. I couldn't stop my foot tapping on the floor. I was sweating so much I wished I had more layers to take off.

Mr. Peters lifted his mouth off her nipple long enough to give me another gloating, taunting look. `Roth, why don't you grab me a whiskey from the bar, would ya?'

As irked as I was to be ordered about like a waiter, I was glad to be granted a reprieve from being the compelled audience for Mr. Peters's exercise in consummate self-gratification. The sooner this was over with, the sooner we could get on to putting ink on paper, the sooner I could be out of here, at home, away from Peters's vaunting of his own vices.

As I was pouring the whiskey into one of the hotel's expensive, and rather heavy, tumblers, I heard behind me a rustling, a sound like a muffled protest and then a groan from Eugene Peters. These were followed by other, wetter sounds.

I knew what I would see before I turned around and sure enough, only Mr Peters's head was still above the sofa. It was tilted back slightly, his eyes half-closed and mouth half-open.

I walked slowly over to them, feeling as if at any moment I might float up to the ceiling. As I circled the sofa there he was with his bathrobe open, legs splayed wide, shamelessly fucking the whore's mouth.

`Just—yeah fuck—put it down on the table there, pal.'

I seriously considered hurling the contents of the tumbler in his face and possibly the tumbler as well.

But I did not. The sight of the briefcase on the table, and the knowledge of what was in it, what was at stake, steadied me. I set the tumbler next to it and sat.

Eugene Peters stared me directly in the eye as he shoved the woman down on his length, the furry stalk of his penis driving up and up and up into her head as he bucked his hips, riding on the balls of his feet, tongue between his teeth, abdominal muscles flexing.

He held my eyes with his, kept them anchored on him, even as, with curled toes and clenched teeth, he rode through what could only have been his orgasm. Gagging sounds came from the lady, but I ignored her. Mr. Peters's gaze did not release me even as in my peripheral vision frothy globs of sperm slid from under her stretched purple lips and rolled down the bevelled column of his cock to catch in his sandy pubes like the world's worst Christmas ornaments.

I had never bought a dirty magazine or been to a pornographic movie, though in my youth I remember Mr. Peters attempting to entice me down both these paths of sin. My relations with my wife, though satisfactory, were intermittent at best, and after the birth of our third child had trailed off altogether. All this is merely to make it clear that I had never seen anything like this and my mind had no reference point for the depravity that was unfolding before me. To elucidate why I found myself transfixed even as I was, I assure you, disgusted, by the scene. Why, though we were sitting more than three feet apart, a sticky restless heat was smearing itself across my skin, making me perspire more profusely than ever, making the muscles in my thighs and abdomen and rump clench and ache, my mouth go dry with longing, my head spin.

Why it was that, quite spontaneously, and most emphatically without touching myself, I found I was rocketing through a handsfree ejaculation even more intense than that which I had recently spilled into Willie Mays's sock. My toes scraped at the soles of my oxfords and my vision went white. I felt myself helplessly rolling through it, my hips jerking up as if mimicking the actions of the man opposite, fucking through fabric into air. My groin felt heavy and full even as it unloaded into the still-sodden material I had stuffed in my pants.

When my vision came back into focus I met the sharp scrutiny of Eugene Peters blue eyes. At some point, without my noticing, the lady had left the room. Now it was just the two of us. The two of us, the proposal, Willy Mays's sock and two throbbing erections.

I attempted to take command of the situation, bizarre as it was. I sat up straighter and cleared my throat firmly, attempting to convey that all that had passed thus far was mere sewage under the negotiation table. I gestured toward the briefcase, whose solid ordinariness seemed the last token of sanity in that stifling, sex-scented room. `Eugene, I've brought the proposal documents, as you requested.'

Eugene, rather than replying, dropped a hand down between his splayed thighs to grab his penis. He squeezed it gently, not quite masturbating, but not attempting to hide what he was doing either. He kneaded it lightly as he scrutinised me, silently waiting for something. I tried to keep my eyes on his but they seemed to be magnetised to his crotch. Now, far from being dry, my mouth was flooded with saliva, as a starving man's might be when presented with a rich meal. I chose not to dwell further on the implications, though I could not avert a fleeting speculation as to what precisely the lady had tasted when she was sucking him. I, after all, had not had the chance the night before. I swallowed, and the sound seemed very loud in my head.

Finally he said, `that's not the deal I brought you here to make.' He straightened up and leaned in a little, still cupping his genitals. `You know', he began, then paused and cocked his head to one side. `What's that you've got in your pants?'

I followed his gaze down and noted, with a drop in my stomach, a tuft of black cloth peeking out the top of my fly.

Mr. Peters reached over the table, his dick flopping forward as well, drooling slimy afterfuck onto my briefcase. Even as his hand moved down toward my groin I found myself frozen in place, unable either to fend him off, to escape, even to speak to defend myself. Unable to do anything except blink and tremble, caught fast in the consequences of my own reckless impulsivity.

He tugged on the bit of cloth and reeled the legging out through my fly like a magician pulling a giant handkerchief out of his pocket

`Is that—my God. You son of a bitch.'

He did not sound exactly angry, certainly not apoplectic as I expected. It dawned on me gradually that I had done something that hitherto would have been unthinkable. I had shocked him.

`Were you—' he started with a perplexed half-smile, staring at the sock. Stupidly, without thinking, I did the only the thing that occurred to me in that instant and snatched it back. It was a defensive, rather than acquisitive gesture, like that of a child who had been caught stealing a toy and was ashamed. Mr. Peters's eyebrows rose still higher. For a second we watched each other.

And then we were both on our feet and he was chasing me around the table. We were scrambling across furniture or blundering into it; every so often he'd catch me and I'd elbow him and wrench away. We were indeed like two boys again, wrestling over some mutually-desired trinket. Or, my mind supplied, whether out of rebuke or hope I could not say, like a couple from a movie, chasing each other around the room where very soon both they and the audience know they will fall to play of a more carnal kind.

`Eugene, this is all very childish', I panted. However, I did not surrender the sock. Never mind that it was technically his property; it was meant for me and we both knew it. Besides which, I was aghast at the thought of what he would see if he got a chance to properly examine it, what he would realise I had been doing with it. The one advantage I had over Eugene Peters was propriety and moral rectitude, and I'd be damned if I'd let him think I was no better than him.

`Motherfucker', he rasped, sounding equal parts enraged and amused. `Give that here. I said—damn it. Come here! Give me that fuckin—get your fuckin—huff—ass back over here, Abba! I swear to Christ I'll nail that fuckin ass right to fuckin—c'mere!'

I now had my wits about me in sufficient quantity to aim for the door (but what did I intend to do then? Run all the way to the airport in my shirtsleeves? Fly all the way home to California with only a briefcase full of legal documents and an ageing baseball star's stocking?) But as I rounded the table for the last time I made a misstep and slipped, and Eugene was able to grapple me down onto the fold-out sofa. In an unexpected, but not, I must allow, entirely unpleasant, rerun of the events of the previous night, I found myself on my back with Eugene Peters—this time an almost entirely naked Eugene Peters—huffing on top of me.

The clean scent of his recently-showered body was overlaid by an unexpectedly refined feminine perfume and underlaid with a purely masculine musk that rose, to be both blunt and precise, predominantly from his aroused penis. Which was nudging against my own organ, which at some point in the course of the chase had stiffened as well.

Then it was Eugene Peters's turn to shock me. He did something that surprised me more than anything that had happened until that point, something that I could not on any account have foreseen and could not in any wise explain.

He kissed me.

I made a series of small noises of surprise and then protest, but he did not relent or release my mouth.

In fact, it took me a second to register that he was kissing me, and I call it that only because I do not know what else it could conceivably be called, though it was not a kiss like any female had ever given me. He licked at my mouth, across my lips and inside, stroking my tongue with his tongue, painting his taste onto me, marking every orifice and recess of my body with himself. At the same time as he ravaged my face his hands worked at my belt, undoing it and slipping both my trousers and underwear down under my buttocks.

Strange to say, as it happened I found myself thinking of the day of my wedding, and the sense of doom that had gripped my heart when the cantor began the blessing. Only now it was reversed, an odd and quite unaccountable sense of elation, even of liberation. As if only in that moment had whatever knot of fate I wove for myself on that day been undone.

I became light-headed, a side effect no doubt of the deprivation of oxygen that can result from a prolonged connection of this kind. I was dimly aware that I was humping up against him in the most revolting manner of a dog in heat, my now-released member gliding slickly against his own. I wasn't sure whether I was going to orgasm or pass out, but whichever it was it was going to happen any moment.

But before either could take place, Eugene drew back, his lips releasing mine with an audible pop. My mouth remained open, the whole lower part of my face wet, tingling and almost sore, as if I had been devouring some succulent forbidden fruit.

Eugene smirked at me and at the same time slipped two fingers into my asshole. They went in so easy. I sucked in a startled breath and—I don't know whether it was simply because I was already on the edge or whether Mr. Peters had succeeded in hitting that special spot whose existence I had only discovered the night before. Whatever the cause, I came instantly.

Then I must have truly blacked out for a second, or perhaps several. When I came to, I was still on my back, half propped up against the sofa and Eugene Peters was standing over me.

I tried to dredge up some response, some remark, but I found I had absolutely nothing to say, and what was more astonishing, I didn't mind that.

He was holding the legging. I didn't mind that either.

He looked at it and chuckled. `Well I'll be damned. You little perv. You got come on Willie Mays's sock.'

He raised it for me to see and sure enough there were thick strings of white, not unlike melted Mozzarella cheese, streaked across the black cloth.

Well, whose fault was that, I thought and blushed, feeling my asshole still flexing and twinging where Eugene Peters's fingers had just been. I opened my mouth but was too embarrassed to speak. My hand wavered between my crotch and my face, not sure which to cover. I had desecrated the legging of one of the greatest baseball players of our age. It was practically sacrilege. Never in all my life had I done anything so outrageous. Any minute now Mr. Peter's would throw me out of the suite and sling my briefcase after me.

But to my astonishment he let out a bark of laughter. `Aw, to hell with the fuckin thing', he said, and tossed it away. His eyes tracked the arc of the sock through the air, then widened in surprise. `Shit, I didn't mean—' he broke off and started to laugh, his cock wobbling gently as he did so.

I did something then that to this day makes me blush to remember it, something I could never conceive of doing in my right mind, something I could never have envisioned myself doing prior to that point.

I stood up, plucked the legging carefully off my face, brought it to my mouth and sucked the gooey sperm out of it.

Peters stopped laughing and looked at me stunned, like I'd just hit a home run right between his eyes.

I threw the sock back down on the table between us. The sense of triumph I felt when I batted that single into centre field had not been greater. The fatal flaw I alluded to at the beginning of my confession, that appetite for uproar and disorder, for cataclysm and discord, had now mastered me completely. All thought of propriety, of discretion, of matrimony, of fidelity to employers or family or anyone else, of exactitude and scruple, was gone, and I was now determined to do whatever I wanted and damn the consequences. And what I wanted then was whatever Eugene Peters wanted.

And what he wanted, it became apparent, as he backed me toward the table, an intent and somewhat intimidating cast to his expression, was to fuck me. Again.

Because I determined at the outset not to conceal anything, I must admit that my penis leapt back to almost full hardness at the thought. You will appreciate that for a man of my age this was no mean feat. And yet that morning it truly felt as if the last three decades had been erased.

Eugene pushed me down on the table again and kept me there. Try as I might, I could not bring myself to make even a token resistance, though his purpose was only too obvious from everything about him: his darkly smouldering eyes, his harsh breathing, his flushed cheeks. And, of course, his still rampantly, gloriously huge erection.

Repeating his drunken assault of the night before, he hefted himself on top of me, and then I could not have escaped even if I had wished to.

Eugene Peters had always been tall, and, while he had stayed in uncommonly good shape compared to most men our age, he was still far from the trim fifteen year-old who had used to insist on practicing his wrestling holds on me while I was attempting to do algebra homework. Which is as much as to say, his bulk was a considerable weight, especially deposited so suddenly on my prone form. However, out of politeness, I made no objection.

My arm was trapped rather awkwardly between me and the table and my erection was trapped even more awkwardly between our two bodies, the head pressed against his hip, both stimulated and rather sore as he ground against me. I squirmed to settle both appendages more comfortably and it was apparently this action that made Eugene groan and his eyes briefly flutter shut. When they opened again there was a surprising softness to the way he looked at me—though most certainly not to his arousal, which was situated in the slightly roomier space between my thighs, and skidded stickily up them as he surged forward, the tip nudging at my entrance.

`God damn, darling.' The words were used reflexively, borrowed from another script, the one he had been using with the departed strumpet. Nonetheless, something in my chest, as well as my crotch, swelled when I heard them.

`Gonna hafta beat off.' And without any further prevarication he jacked himself up with the one hand he had planted above my shoulders and started to, well, jack off.

I heard the table creak, and remembered that underneath me was the briefcase with Priebe, Emond and Farmer's proposal, the ostensive reason for this whole encounter. And that outside, somewhere, possibly just at the door, was Mr. Forbes.

`Eugene, this is extremely improper.'

`Baby, I swear if I don't get in there this second imma blow all over ya.'

He shuffled down the table a little so he could jab his dick under my nuts, to where my hole was tensing in agonised anticipation. At the first nudge of that ridiculously huge organ sparks of mingled panic and desire set my belly ablaze. On instinct I tried to move away but his weight was still holding me down. `Don't you dare.'

'Just let me in, oh fuck just let me—fuck. Still fucking wet for me from last night', he husked. He had succeeded in slipping the head in by now, and I wasn't sure whether it was just the sweat or what, but even without proper lubricant, proper preparation, his penis seemed to be making alarming progress into my behind. To talk of being split in half would be to grossly understate the enormity of the affair. It truly felt like he was trying to kill me with his cock.

`No, ah, you bastard, take it out!'

`Darlin, calm down.'

`No, Eugene, no! No way. You can't do this—God!'

`Sweetheart, what's the matter?'

`Too. Damn. Big', I puffed, trying to come to term with the sheer dimensions, sheer depth of the intrusion.

`You took it fine last night, honey, what's the problem?'

The problem was, I wasn't drunk. Not even slightly buzzed. I don't mind telling you, and I hope it will betray no want of physical fitness on my part, but it hurt like hell. Even as it also felt unaccountably...amazing.

I shifted a little around his length, doing my best to come to terms with the involuntary repositioning of my innards.

There was a smugness surfacing on Eugene's handsome sweat-slick face as he entered me, watched me writhe on the vastness of his manhood.

At any other time I would have wanted to punch him; then, if I could have, I would have kissed him. I am aware that this makes no sense, but it has been my observation that the normal functioning of reasoning faculties are often suspended when the libido is involved and I, as it turned out, am no exception.

`It hurts', I said, and if it hadn't hurt too much to think of anything but the pain I would have been horrified at the plaintive, submissive quality in my voice. I wasn't asking him to stop, though. Of course I wanted it to stop hurting, even, inanely, expected him to somehow take the pain away. But I wanted him to stop fucking me even less. I cannot explain this, but so it was.

`Well, baby, I can't help that. Just the way I was born.'

I muttered something uncomplimentary about the circumstances of said birth, but made no further objection as he started to work his hips, moving back and forth inside me. The portable table jostled and squeaked alarmingly, and the heels of my oxfords dug furrows into the plush carpet. With each stroke the pain seemed—not exactly to disappear, but to just become normal, while the pleasure mounted and mounted until it was as unbearable as the pain had been.

I did want him to stop then, not for fear that I couldn't withstand his size, but that I couldn't stand how good it made me feel. Nonetheless, I was supremely annoyed when he did.

I opened my eyes, which had fallen shut, and prepared to demand why I had so rudely been left teetering on the brink of orgasm. Eugene's face, however, told me everything; told me that it was he who was teetering on the brink.

A petulant defiant impulse then reasserted itself and also, difficult as it may be to believe, a certain fastidiousness which made me loath to have any part of my person converted into a receptacle for Mr Peters's unwanted children. Of course, a more logical voice reminded me, that had already happened. But then I had been hardly aware of what was happening. I tried once more to get away, but he held me by the shoulders and jammed me down even harder on his cock.

`Eugene Peters, don't you dare ejaculate inside me!'

`Stop fuckin squirming if you don't want my come. Aw, fuck!'

He heaved in a breath like he was dying and his stomach sucked itself into a youthful hollow. It was apparent that he had, in his idol's words, `creamed that sucker'.

He took my hand and put it down between our tangled legs to feel his cock and balls pulse as they released their load. After all that, I registered with horror and a hint of awe, he was only halfway in.

I glared at him from over my misty lenses, which had slipped down my nose somewhat, and Eugene made a face that was somewhere between a pout and a smirk. `Honey, don't look at me like that. I didn't mean to get your pussy all dirty with Daddy's baby-juice.'

I hit him.

He made a surprisingly high-pitched yelp and reached for his jaw. I wondered if he would but me back, but he just rumbled, `Yeah, I guess I asked for that. Fuck, Abba, I just...' He sighed. Connected as we were, every movement of his body, even the vibrations of his vocal chords, spilled over into me.

`It hurts', I said again.

`I'm sorry. I'm sorry, baby, I swear I don't mean to, you're just so fucking hot. Need it so fucking bad.'

`Get off me. Now.'

`Please, honey, just lay still and let me come in you.'

`Again?'

`Yeah. You feel so fucking good. Better than any fucking whore. It's like I'm fucking twenty-one again, and you're so goddamn tight.'

He started to push forward again and I bit back a curse from the sting. I shoved my hand against his torso, trying vainly to hold him back from ravishing my ass beyond repair. `Eugene. Not one inch more. I mean it.'

`How about a half inch?'

`I'll hit you again.'

He laughed at this and half-sung under his breath, `Hit me baby, one more time...'

I believe this was a line from one of the vulgar and aesthetically vitiate songs that were playing on the radio stations which my daughters, regrettably, listened to on the way both to and from school, much as I tried to impress on them the infinitely superior virtues of the classical composers.

`Guess what? You can't hit me if I do this.'

I opened my mouth to enquire as to just what `this', might be, and Eugene covered it with his own.

Our teeth clacked together, noses bumped, lips got entangled; his canine pierced the inner lining of my cheek and there was blood and it hurt but I was happy because he was tasting my blood and that meant part of me, of my essence, was inside him too. It was wet and filthy and maddening and all the while his length was spearing deeper into me, goring me open for his throbbing hungry flesh, and that hurt too but I didn't mind it, my body wasn't resisting and my mind was blank with pleasure.

While I was gasping against his mouth, sucking down his spit instead of air, I felt something deep down in me give and he sunk his dick into me all the way.

Pain flared up again and this time I truly felt panic. It was too much. I couldn't take it. He'd break me. I'd have to go to the hospital or something, and oh, the shame of having to explain how I received such an injury. How would I explain it to my wife?

I bore down on his penis with my anal muscles, trying to expel him. This made it hurt more but Eugene stayed wedged inside me with his gut solidly buttressed against my pelvis; his cock did not budge an inch.

Instead I felt my inner passage mould itself to his shape so minutely I could feel every swell and vein of his manhood, could feel him expanding and contracting within my body. It was unspeakably intimate. I found myself blinded by tears—undoubtedly tears of pain, though I recall that by then the soreness was fading.

Eugene pulled his mouth off mine to moan, `Shit, Abba, you're gonna kill me. Gonna fucking squeeze my dick off.'

I bore down harder.

He wheezed as if I had punched him again. `I swear I'm gonna blow again if you don't let that up, Jesus Christ.'

Since, being a Jew, I did not believe in the deity of Jesus of Nazareth, and thus his invocation meant nothing to me, I did not let up. And Eugene was as good as his word.

As I have already abandoned all delicacy in recounting these proceedings, I will venture to describe the sensation of Mr Peters ejaculating inside me, which had already happened once; thrice, if one counted the past twenty-four hours. It may be of some interest, given it is not a sensation most men, particularly those of my milieu, have a chance to experience. It was strange, both intrusive and intimate, both defiling and somehow reassuring. Kinaesthetically speaking, it was not unlike a water pistol firing into my intestine, but the warmth it spread through me was not exclusively material. I felt that Eugene Peters and I were now joined in some ineffable but permanent fashion, in much the same way, in fact, I had been with my wife on our wedding night.

He sucked his way into my mouth again and while we were kissing a distinctly less romantic conjunction was taking place a foot or so lower down. Far from stopping or even slowing, Eugene picked up the pace of his thrusts, fucking into me harder with each scalding rope of fluid he shot off, as if trying to pack his seed as deep inside me as he could get it, as if trying to get me pregnant. Had this been his aim, his actions would have had exactly the opposite effect. Though I blush to record such indelicate, not to say obscene, details, as a matter of strict factual record I must relate that Eugene's semen, large quantities of which had now been deposited in my rectal canal, was squirting out around his penis as he slammed in. Never in all my life have I felt so unclean, or so erotically liberated.

For a moment after, we rested. I had not climaxed this time, and my erect organ strained upward, brushing gently against Eugene's torso, as if politely asking to be allowed to come as well.

Eugene, however, ignored it to focus on what his own tool had just accomplished.

`You're so fucking full. God.' His big rough hand caressed my stomach, which had, I must admit, swelled ever so slightly as a result of our activity, much as it might after a substantial meal. He paused with his palm right over my navel. He started to press down.

At once I was shocked of out my mid-coital haze. My voice rose to an unwonted pitch. `Don't you dare.'

Eugene did dare.

With a flex of his bicep and a show of teeth that was positively feral, he shoved down on my bulging stomach and physically forced all the ball-gunk he had just pumped into me out of my hole again, spraying out around his penis which was still plugging my passage. The effect was not unlike what occurs when one puts ones thumb over the end of a hose. Only in this case the hose was my poor unfortunate ass.

Eugene made a long wavering moan and I believe he ejaculated yet again, firing futile volleys against the outrushing flood.

As for the sound I made, I shall not attempt to describe it. I do not think I could if I wanted to. Similarly, the sensation of a liquid ton of warm viscous semen gushing out of my colon in a seemingly endless torrent is not one I can capture in words. Suffice it to say that I do not ever wish to relive it.

I can only attribute it to the perversity of my own biology that it was at this point that my penis started to spasm and spend against my chest and chin.

I can only attribute it to the perversity of providence that it was just at that moment, as I was squirting male fuckjuice all over myself from both ends, that the lady came back into the room. This time she was dressed in a long fur-collared coat and a pair of stylish but sensible shoes; more dressed, in fact, than either of us men were in that moment.

Her cool brown eyes made me aware of how our sweaty bodies wallowed awkwardly atop the coffee table like two hirsute four-flippered cetaceans, his larger lying across my smaller—not that I was small, I must take pains to point out, by any reasonable measure, but only that Mr. Peters was so excessively, needlessly large. In all parts, it transpired. Perhaps this basic physical disparity alone should have humiliated me. It had in my youth, when I still yearned for the day when, as Eugene assured me, I would hit my growth spurt and catch up to him. But I can only say that on that morning I did not mind it one bit.

Regardless, there was no conceivable way she could have mistaken the position we were in, or the activity we had just been pursuing—the activity that, given that Eugene's penis was still three-quarters inside my anus, we were still technically engaged in. Her eyebrows rose a half inch or so, but altogether she did not seem as shocked as one would have expected. I supposed, in her profession, she saw many more shocking things on a regular basis.

`Honey, did he rape you?'

`Yeah.'

`Eugene, you swine.'

`It's okay, I liked it.'

`Well, that makes one of us.' She lit a cigarette, plucked a roll of bills from the dresser and was gone as quickly as she appeared.

The embarrassment I ought to have been feeling over this whole surreal exchange was still catching me up, so to speak, when Eugene Peters cleared his throat. He did not, however, remove either his person or his penis from me. He trailed his fingers over my face, and dragged them down the front of my shirt, gathering up the ropes of come I had involuntarily laid there, and pushed his fingers into my mouth. Previously the idea of ingesting male ejaculatory fluid in any quantity would have disgusted me beyond measure, and that it was my own would have made scant difference. But just then I wanted to do everything Eugene asked of me, wanted to please him any way I could and that I felt a downright slut doing it somehow only made it better. I parted my lips for his fingers, let them invade my mouth with their alien size and pressure and gently, ever so gently, nursed on them till the last of my seed had dissolved in my saliva, before pushing them out again with the tip of my tongue, spit-polished and shiny. In its own way this small interplay of muscle and skin, of come and spit, was as erotic as anything we had done so far. Even when he lifted my glasses off and made me lap up the drops of fluid that had spattered over the lenses, before carefully replacing them, this too, in its own odd way, was arousing. Judging from the hollow, hungry glaze that had set over Eugene's eyes, the way his dick perceptibly chubbed in my colon, he felt the same way. Although I will admit this latter may have been aided by the way I was milking his dick with my ass as I sucked on his fingers.

This went on till my face was as clean as it was going to get and my shirtfront was a slimy mess. Eugene had his fingers slightly penetrating my mouth, thrusting slowly in and out against my palate, and I was waggling my tongue over the tips, when his face broke up and he suddenly let out a hoot of laughter. I, after a moment of being offended, had to follow suit. I suppose I must have looked rather ridiculous, behaving like some bimbo a quarter of my age. But who cares if I did, since it was just us? And Eugene for once, I was sure, wasn't judging me. Indeed, his expression betokened precisely the opposite. His eyes shone with the kind of limitless, unconditional affection that I had only ever seen in the gaze of my mother, my wife, and occasionally my children. Then a sadness came into them and his gaze dropped.

`So. Guess you'll be going home.'

`Yes.'

`Back to your wife. And kids.'

`Of course.'

His voice turned suddenly desperate. `Abba, don't go.' It was the first time in our forty years acquaintance I had heard him beg for anything.

`I'll pay for your divorce, your alimony. I'll buy you a mansion—buy you a hundred fucking mansions. It's not too late.'

I gazed at him and spoke very softly. It was odd to feel this way. To not hate him after so long. `Eugene, what are you saying?'

`Didn't you ever wonder why I never married?'

I had not.

`I thought that this was gonna be the start of something. Us being us again, the way we were before college.' He shook his head. `Christ, I was mad then. You sitting there all prim and prissy like you had the national reserve locked up your ass. Wanted to put you over that desk and ream you out with the door open.'

An image flashed into my head of a younger Mr. Peter's subjecting a younger me to the same indignities I had just endured, but doing so in my then-newly furnished office at Priebe & Emond. I imagined an unholy symphony of carnal lust echoing through those halls hallowed by the sanctity of the craft practised therein. I imagined respectable middle-aged secretaries in pearls and partners in sober dark suits, Mr. Priebe or Mr. Emond, Mrs. Polaris, standing in the doorway and gawping as Eugene used me as he had been for the last half hour. Just picturing it made my heart pound and my head light. It made my hole twist up all around Eugene's fat dick.

`We went to fuckin college together. I thought—' Eugene actually sounded choked-up. `And you made me so mad, how you treated me when I came to see you that time. Why'd you do that, Roth? What the fuck had I done?'

I considered this for a moment. There were many answers I could have given, all of them truthful and all of them hurtful. In the end, I said, `I guess I was always jealous of you. Everyone just liked you right away and you weren't even trying. Didn't even seem to care. And—well, you know how I am.'

He tenderly brushed my hair back from where it had fallen into my face, clinging to my glasses. `I know. Who'd know better?' He exhaled harshly. `Sometimes I get so crazy. Think about hiring a fucking hit squad to kidnap you. Take you off to a fuckin cabin up in the Rockies somewhere.'

I considered this for a moment, then said, `That would be a great inconvenience to the firm.'

Eugene let out a bark that sounded more than slightly like a sob.

I put up a hand and tentatively allowed my finger to trail over his cheek. He pulled it into his mouth with his lips, which, now I looked at them, were fuller and plusher than one would expect of a man of his age, as full and plush they had been during that period high school when he practised making hickeys on a different part of my body each week, beginning with my neck and working his way down to my butt. Which I realise, looking back, was especially strange as he hadn't even had a girlfriend at the time.

It was his turn now to suck my finger in and suckle on it, eyes locked steadily with mine, like it was the slender digit of some delicate courtesan of yore, rather than the stubby appendage of—well, of me.

He released my finger with a slick pop not dissimilar to the sound my anal sphincter had made disgorging the head of his penis, and I sighed. The table was hard and various parts of me other than my rectum were starting to ache. Whatever spell of atavistic virility had possessed me, it was quickly dissipating. My body was now stridently reminding me just how much too old I was for this kind of rough-housing. `May I be removed from your penis now, please?'

Eugene looked at me steadily, not smiling, eyes filled with a clear intent brightness that gave the impression of a good-natured vivisection. `Do you want to be?''

`I want—' I began, then shut my mouth again. I could not formulate any statement that began with `I want', for it was impossible for me to know what would follow. It might be anything, something as outrageous as, I want you to pull your cock out of me so I can get down on my knees and suck your spunk off it and then curl up like a hedgehog so I can drink you out of my own ass.

`I want to go home', I said finally, in a small voice.

`What if I say no?' Eugene was grinning, already leaning in to kiss me again. `I could spend the day like this. Wish I could spend every day like this.'

`What about the baseball?

He gave me an odd kind of look—evaluating, with an edge of mischief. `I'd stick a baseball up your ass. Already got the bat in there.' He bit at my ear—hard—and flexed his cock inside me in a way that made me wince and arch up.

`Shit, that hurts'

`I'm sorry.' He chuffed. `First time I've heard you swear.'

As the adrenalin ebbed away, I was steadily becoming aware of the atmosphere in the room, which smelt like it was more spunk than air, as well as how drenched in perspiration I was, not to mention other fluids. A long and thorough shower would be in order before I went anywhere in the vicinity of an airplane.

`Eugene, I've got a flight.'

`Fuck the flight.'

`I'd rather take it.'

`I'd rather take you. Again. All fuckin day and forever.'

`Well, unlike you, I have work to do.'

He gave me that pained yet earnest look again. `What would I have to pay you to get a divorce?'

`Eugene.'

`What would I have to pay—'

`Eugene, you can't.'

`I know. But—you know you could have it all. Houses, cars, business, everything I've got. I'd sign the fuckin papers right there. If I thought it could—if I thought you would—'

`Eugene—'

`I know. God damn it!'

I was alarmed to observe that he was near to tears. His shoulders slumped and he let his head fall down onto the table next to mine, chin knocking my shoulder. For a while I felt his chest rise and fall against my own, then he mumbled something next my ear.

`What did you say?'

I felt him turn his head so his lips tickled my earlobe as he spoke. `I asked, are you happy—with your wife?'

I could only answer truthfully, and I had never been as sure of the answer I gave as then, caught in Eugene's burly arms with his penis buried inside me. Yet for some reason it hurt to say.

`Yes I am.'

`You married a good woman.'

`And you never wanted to marry at all.'

`I did. Want to get married it. I fucking wanted it.'

I turned my head to look at him. We were nose to nose, so close his blue eyes were all I could see.

'Just. Not to a woman.'

`Eugene, if I could—'

`I just wanted—'

I was about to say the second thing in my head which was, Eugene, this has to stop.

But Eugene barrelled on, seeming helpless to hold back whatever confession was coming. His eyes held a forlorn appeal which I had not seen since they were blinking out of the face of a very young boy who had just moved into the neighbourhood and saw me riding my bike that was the same as his and wanted to be my friend. They also, unmistakeably, held tears. `Abba, please. You have to know that I l—'

I could not imagine what he was about to say, but for some reason I wanted more than anything to hear him say it. It suddenly seemed important, more important than anything. But it was not to be.

As Eugene crushed me against him with his arms, as if trying to squeeze me inside himself even while he was inside me, there was the sound of something cracking, and I felt the portable meeting table, which was far from sturdy, wobble and finally give way below us.

There was a knock on the door. Then, after a beat, it opened. It was Mr. Forbes, who had no doubt been hovering in the foyer outside, waiting to ascertain the status of our negotiations, and now evidently alarmed by the noise of the table breaking.

Between the first knock and the door opening I managed to disengage myself from both the broken halves of the table and Eugene Peter's body and stand upright. I had just enough time to hitch up my pants, buckle my belt, collect my jacket from the dresser and pull it on as I strode over to look out the window, trying to appear as though I had been standing there for several minutes. I discreetly swiped my face for stray semen, trying to look as if I was just scratching my jaw. Behind me I heard Mr Peters more slowly and more noisily climbing to his feet and fumbling with his bathrobe, and I blushed.

No doubt Mr. Forbes assumed the state of the room, and of us, was due to our joint exertions with the recently-departed prostitute. At this point however I was not especially interested in what Mr. Forbes, or anyone else, thought.

He did not stay once he realised, or thought he realised, what he had walked in on, but neither did I. I took his reappearance as an opportunity to slip away. I had left both Willie Mays's sock and Priebe, Emond & Farmer's proposal behind. In that instant I cared nothing for either. Something was constricting alarmingly in my chest and I felt, with a bizarre certainty, that I would have a heart attack if I stayed there. Or something else terrible, something irreversible, something I had only just avoided, would befall me. But the sense of tightness, of mounting panic, only worsened with each step I took away.

As we left Mr Peters's suite there was the a storm of vituperative cursing from the bedroom behind us, and then something that sounded like weeping. My footfall stuttered only for a second. With no memory of the intervening elevators and corridors I found myself in my room, preparing for a discreet departure as efficiently as my stiff legs and twinging rear end would allow.

Everything was quiet and orderly once more. It did not take long for the familiar motions of folding clothes and placing them in the optimal arrangement in my valise to ease the tightness in my chest and slow my rapid breathing. By the time I clicked shut the clasps on my valise I felt almost normal again. Though I found as I was packing that my clothes were stained with mysterious spots of shining darkness.

It was a long plane trip home.