They were both deep in their middle age. The man on top of Ken Curtain was in his mid-fifties to Ken’s forty-nine. But they were both still handsome, trim, and active men. Ken had awakened on New Year’s Eve 2019 in the London flat with his editor, Nathan Horowitz, rolling over on top of him as he lay on his belly, grasping his wrists, forcing his arms over his head, mounting and penetrating his ass, and riding him like a jockey. To aid him, Ken pushed up on his knees, raising his tail and waving it to the rhythm of the plowing cock. Nathan dipped his face down to meet Ken’s turned head, and the two kissed deeply as Nathan rode Ken’s ass to a mutual and mutually very satisfactory ejaculation.
“Happy New Year, lover,” Nathan whispered in Ken’s ear when his last spurt of cum had been produced inside Ken’s channel. The men barebacked and had been doing it for five years, since they both had settled down to the other being the “one and only.” Both recognized that that came with age. Both were happy that they each had someone to travel this road with together, both of them having always been highly sexed and afraid that, as they hit their forties there would be no one to give them the constant sex they craved.
This was not a problem with Ken and Nathan. Nathan was riding Ken’s ass in a driving jockey this morning, but Ken had ridden Nathan’s cock in a galloping cowboy position before they’d gone to bed, and in the middle of the night, they had embraced in a languid lotus position, Ken in Nathan’s lap, facing him, and rocking on the somewhat older man’s shaft. Nathan had held Ken close to him, squeezing, separating, and manipulating Ken’s buttocks, slowly pulling Ken into him and deeper on the perpetually hard and throbbing shaft and then releasing the tension to pull Ken back a bit. Ken had leaned his head into the hollow of Nathan’s shoulder, sighing, at one with the hard-as-steel cock inside him, moaning lightly every fifteen minutes as Nathan gently flowed deep inside. Their coupling in the morning and evening could be vigorous, still athletic, sweaty sex. But in the middle of the night it was a complete, sustained fusion and a gentle, periodic seeding. The two, at night, were often able to go to sleep in each other’s embrace, fused and flowing.
The two had given up much in the ten years they’d been together since Ken had been liberated from the clutches of a now-imprisoned Altan Hulugu in Italy and had joined his liberator, his publisher’s editor, Nathan, in London to write and publish and fuck—and, eventually to love, or to come as close to it as Ken could, realizing that his love had long ago been lost to another. What they hadn’t given up was hot sex nearly every day and sometimes, like now, in the Christmas-New Year’s season, three or four times a day. What they each had given up in terms of the variety of sex partners, they had maintained in the variety in sexual positions—and in their individual clutching at virility, enhanced because Altan Hulugu had not blamed Ken in any way for his problems with the law. He was seeing to it that a supply continued to Ken of the pills that maintained Ken’s desire to have a churning cock inside him and other pills that enhanced Nathan’s virility and kept his shaft erect and his cum flowing for hours on end. When Hulugu had gone on trial in Italy and the government had tried to get Ken to come testify against him, Ken had made himself scarce and Hulugu had gotten a shorter sentence than he otherwise might have gotten.
Ken often now visited the offices of his HarperCollins publisher in London, where Nathan worked, and other employees there were surprised and intrigued at the looks and private smiles each continued to give the other over the decade they’d been together and how they could be seen touching when they didn’t know others were looking. Some few of them knew that Ken often timed his visits to the offices over the lunch hour, when many were out at restaurants but Nathan was fucking Ken over a chair, on his desk, and or on the carpet, with his office door closed and locked.
After coming and then coming again, Nathan reached down and stroked Ken’s flanks through the last dribbles of his flow, leaned down and kissed Ken on the neck, slapped him on a butt cheek as he pulled out of him, rolled off the bed, and sat on the side of the bed long enough to open his nightstand drawer. He extracted the first of three cigarettes he now permitted himself to smoke in a day, lit up, and stood, pointed toward the en suite bathroom.
“You’re getting up already?” Ken asked. “It’s only . . .” he turned to look at the clock on the nightstand on his side of the bed “. . . well, shit, it’s only 6:45.”
“I’m done and I have to go into HC. There are buys to be closed today, or we’ll have to redo all of the paperwork in the new year.”
“You’re done? I’m still horny.”
“The pill’s worn off. Sorry yours hasn’t. I’ll take another one after the office New Year’s party tonight and we’ll party the new year in at home.”
“I want to go to Oscar’s after the office party and ring in the New Year there,” Ken said. “It’s New Year’s Eve and a new decade. We don’t go clubbing much anymore.” Oscar’s was a no-holds-barred gay club.
“In that case, I won’t be taking the pill until after we come home from there—unless you want me to go off our agreement, with me fucking every guy in Oscar’s into the new decade.”
“I’ll see you at the office party this evening then,” Ken said, rolling over in the bed to catch more sleep.
Ken was sitting at the kitchen counter, covered only in a silk robe and drinking coffee and reading The Guardian when their male housekeeper brought him the telegram. “He wants you, not me. It won’t be long now. If you’ll come, send flight schedule to Munich. A car will pick you up there,” the telegram said.
He sat there for several minutes—minutes he didn’t have to spare if he was going to go. But then he knew he was going to go. “Stanley,” he called out. “Get me on the first plane available to Munich.” He pushed off his stool and went to the bedroom to pack. He’d leave a note for Nathan and tell Stanley to phone it to him after the plane had taken off. Nathan wouldn’t like it. Ken might be gone for a long time—maybe forever. Nathan didn’t deserve that, but that’s how it was.
* * * *
HarperCollins had excellent accounts with the airlines and Ken was on a plane to Munich as soon as he could get packed and to the airport. A Mercedes limousine was waiting for him there, as promised. for the nearly two-hour drive up into the Bavarian Alps to the 1936 winter Olympics town of Garmish-Partenkirchen. Luckily, the limo driver spoke good English and was willing to fill Ken in.
“How is he—Clifford Langston?”
“I’m afraid it won’t be long, sir. But I think you’ve come in time.”
“Klaus Heineman? He’s—?”
“Herr Heineman left for Berlin this afternoon, sir. He has, I think, a movie to begin filming.”
“Yes, of course,” Ken said. Klaus was the man who had displaced him twenty years earlier during a cruise on the Rhine. He was a celebrated movie director now. He had filmed all of Clifford’s best-selling books. There had been some interest shown in optioning a few of Ken’s books too, but Ken hadn’t wanted to open up old personal wounds and had declined discussions. His literary agent had tried for other film options, but they hadn’t happened. Ken took that as really evidence of a ploy by Clifford to get in touch with him again, through Klaus’s organization. It wasn’t filming Ken’s books Klaus was interested in. Ken had to face it—his books just weren’t and never would be of the quality that Langston’s were.
But Langston had gotten Ken on the road to being a published novelist at all. Ken already knew the literary agent, Ted Sullivan, before he met Langston, but Ted had wanted to land Langston as a client and that was, Ken was sure, the only reason he’d taken Ken on too. Langston and Ken were lovers by that point. Ken didn’t think he would have gotten into what was then Harper and Row and soon HarperCollins either, if he hadn’t been with Langston. Clifford had done it all for Ken in those years. So, even though Clifford had thrown Ken over for Klaus—and then stayed with Klaus for twenty years—Ken couldn’t ignore what he owed Clifford.
But that wasn’t what was important—certainly not now. Ken loved Clifford and always had. He hadn’t had any contact with Clifford in the past twenty years simply because he didn’t want to compete with Klaus. If Clifford had ever called for him to come, under any circumstances, Ken would have come.
And now he had called for Ken to come. So, Ken went. Unfortunately, it was on Clifford’s deathbed.
He arrived at the mountainside chalet above the now-tourist town of Garmish well before dark. He didn’t know who owned the chalet, Clifford or Klaus, or if it was rented. None of that mattered right now. He didn’t know how long they’d lived here. He did remember that he had once told Clifford that something like this would be the ideal home for him.
Clifford was reclining against pillows in the master bedroom when Ken went in to him.
“You’ve come,” Clifford said. He was as handsome as ever, but oh so thin and gray. Leukemia was winning out with him at last. Ken had heard rumors of the illness six years earlier, and he had written a letter. But he hadn’t sent the letter. He had it with him now.
“Of course I came,” he said. “Anytime you had called for me to come, I would have.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t know that. It seemed so final, and I thought perhaps you would have contacted me when my illness was made public, but you—”
“I wrote you a letter then. I have it here, with me, now. Would you like to read it?”
“Of course.” Ken handed it over and Clifford put reading glasses on with shaking hands and read it. After he finished, all he said was, “I’m glad to have had the opportunity to read this. I can die happy now.”
“Oh, you mustn’t die for a long time.”
“Even a day now is a long time,” Clifford said. “Let’s not escape into pretense on this.”
Embarrassed, Ken turned and looked out of the window. From where he sat he could see the peaks of Alps above and a lake below, with the outskirts of Garmish touching it. “This is what I’ve always wanted,” he said. “To be able to see the mountains and water at the same time, but to be able to see the far shore of the water too.”
“I know,” Clifford said. “That’s why I bought the place. I always thought you’d come back to me. And now you have. The house will be yours, after—”
“Shush,” Ken said. “I’ve just arrived. There’s no need for us to talk of such things . . . at least yet. It’s New Year’s Eve and one leading into a new decade. Do you remember? It was on just such a New Year’s Eve when we first met.”
“Yes, of course I remember,” Clifford said. “And it was on another one that we parted.”
They were both silent for a while, watching twilight settle into darkness beyond the window, both of them seeing the symbolism in that. A car arrived on the drive below, its headlights beaming into the room and across the wall. Ken realized that Clifford had been dozing, but the change in light woke him.
“How long will you be staying?” Clifford asked.
“As long as you want me to,” Ken answered.
“Thank you. It won’t be long, though.”
After that Clifford drifted off to sleep, and Ken rose and went out into the hallway. There were only two bedrooms on this level. The servants lived in an extension at the side of chalet, along the steep slope behind the building, running up into the mountains. He went into the other bedroom where his luggage had been placed on the double bed and changed his clothes. He could tell that it was a rarely used guest room. There were no clothes in the closet or drawers. So, Klaus and Clifford must have slept together to the end.
Dinner was announced with the ringing of a bell. He descended the stairs and went into the dining room, where a manservant, who had also been the limousine driver, was finishing placing the food bowls.
“It’s set for two,” he said, surprised. Surely Clifford wasn’t expected to come down for dinner. Or perhaps it was a house ritual—to set a place for him anyway.
“The gentleman I brought up from the airport just now and is in the living room will be dining as well,” the man said.
“The gentleman?” Ken asked. He turned to see Nathan Horowitz standing in the doorway.
“I hope you don’t mind my coming,” Nathan said in an unsure voice. “I don’t want to intrude, but I thought you might want some company for the wait. I have an open ticket. Your man could take me back to Munich tonight if you want.”
“No, I’m glad you came, and I must have known that you would—or at least hoped you would,” Ken said.
“Why is that?”
“I didn’t come unprepared. I brought Hulugu’s pills—the ones for me and the ones for you. I’m sure I realized that Clifford wouldn’t be up to using the ones for you.”
Nathan laughed. As he did so, the sky lit up through the window of the dining room. Bells began to chime furiously in the distance.
“What?” Ken exclaimed.
“Those are the fireworks and church bells from down in Garmish,” the manservant said. “They start early on New Year’s, and this is a special New Year’s. It opens up a new decade. The bells are ringing in another new decade.”
“Yes, yes, ringing in another new decade,” Ken said. “Well, shall we eat our dinner and retire upstairs, Nathan. I think we have all we need to celebrate and to welcome in the new decade.”
-FINI-
