The highest hill near the ancient Jordanian town of Madaba, thirty kilometers southwest of the capital city of Amman and the only one around with tree covering--olive tree orchards--on it rose from the rear of the Phoenix Palace Hotel in the suburb of Al-Faysallya. Nineteen-year-old American college student, Paul Townsend, liked to do his running here not only because of the incline of the hill or the pathways cut through the orchards, providing some filtered shelter from the sun, but also because Rafik Zawati did his running here as well, and the orchards provided not only shade but some privacy for rest periods from the running.
Paul attended the American University of Madaba to the north of the city, where he was studying archaeology in close proximity to excavation work in Madaba, once a trade route crossroads in the Middle East and where important Byzantine and Umayyad mosaics had been uncovered and were being more extensively studied. His father, once an Exxon Oil executive and more recently divorced and settled in Jordan as a senior official of the Jordanian Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources, lived in Amman. He had brought Paul, somewhat undersized of stature, but well-formed and a handsome blond, blue-eyed young man, with him to Amman, and Paul, taking an interest in archaeology, could see no better place to go to college than the nearby American University of Madaba, where he could combine studies with practical experience at the excavations there.
He knew Rafik Zawati from their combined sports activities on the soccer field. Paul played for the university soccer team. Rafik, twenty-six, achingly handsome, sultry-dark, hard bodied and the result of Arabic breeding with Crusaders, was a standout player on the Jordanian national soccer team. He also was the teacher in charge of athletics at the Al-Faysallya Secondary Boy's School and ran regularly on the hill behind the nearby Phoenix Palace Hotel. Whereas Paul had been raised in wealth and the privilege that goes with being American and living abroad, Rafik had come up in life the hard way--orphaned and living hand to mouth in the alleys of Amman. In doing so, he learned to survive and folded in with the criminal underbelly of the city. Despite the contrast and their difference in age, the two fit together not only because of their shared interest in soccer and running and because Rafik was a source of recreational drugs, but also because they both were actively gay and Rafik was a rough top and Paul was a submissive, preferring it rough.
Rafik was running in place at the base of the hill behind the hotel gardens as Paul drove into the hotel parking lot, parked, and jogged over to him. Each of them was wearing just athletic shorts, jocks, and running shoes. Instead of stopping to greet Rafik, Paul punched the Arab lightly in the bicep as he passed him, gave the older man a grin, and raced up the hill and into the olive trees. Rafik, the more powerful of the two and with the better running legs, hesitated for a moment and then followed. Paul ran and Rafik jogged. They worked their way in and out of the regularly spaced trees in zigzag fashion up the side of the hill, over the top and down a bit of the other side, on the side facing north, away from the village. Here the scrub was scruffier, the trees having been played out and not cared for as well as those on the southern slope.
Here there was more cover, more privacy.
Rafik caught up to Paul, Paul winded from the run, Rafik as fresh as when he had started, by an olive tree with low-hanging branches, the ones near the bottom bare and played out, the tree well off the foot path. The older man reached out, grabbed Paul by the throat, and pulled him into a brutal kiss. His other hand went to the waistband of his own athletic shorts, which, after extracting a condom disk from a pocket, he pushed down, along with the jock strap. The shorts and jock went to the ground, as Rafik forced Paul to his knees in front of him, positioned the younger man's face in front of his crotch, and pressed the bulb of his engorged cock at the blond's lips. Paul opened his mouth, took the cock in, and gave it suck. At the same time, he pushed his shorts down off his waist, handed his own cock and stroked himself what he sucked the cock.
Neither man had said anything in preparation for this. They didn't have to. They'd done this before.
When he felt like doing so, Rafik jerked Paul up onto his feet, backhanded him across the cheek, turned him, and forced him down onto his belly between the low-hanging branches of the olive tree. Paul, conditioned to respond to authoritarian control, murmured, "Yes, yes, yes," as the older man crouched behind him, one hand palming Paul's belly and the other alternating between slapping Paul's bare buttocks and distending and squeezing the young man's balls, while the Arab ate the American's ass out.
Paul extended his arms, grabbing for a hold on the gnarled branches of the olive tree, as Rafik stood, loomed over the smaller man's body, rolled on the condom, put his cock in place, and thrust up inside Paul's channel, penetrating slowly but forcefully, stretching the young man's passage. Paul cried out, with no one up here on the deserted side of the hill to hear him, as Rafik started to pump him hard and deep. One of Rafik's hands alternated from holding Paul in place by palming the young man's belly and slapping Paul hard on the rump, as his other hand gripped the young man's chin, pulling Paul's head painfully back into Rafik's chest, and Rafik's fingers covering Paul's mouth, controlling the young man's breathing so that Paul was completely under his control. Paul's hands scrabbled ineffectively at the Arab's hard body for a few moments but gave up and dangled uselessly at the American's side.
The fuck completed, Rafik let Paul sink to the ground under the tree, jerked his shorts and jock back on, turned, and ran off to complete his run.
Exhausted, Paul lay there for a bit, his run over, his body racked with aches from the brutal taking, but a slight smile on his face and a purr in his throat. He liked it rough. It made him feel alive. He needed to be cruelly mastered.
When Paul had walked, gingerly, back down the southern slope of the hill to the hotel parking lot, Rafik was there, leaning up against the fender of Paul's silver 2005 SLK Mercedes sports coupe, smiling, looking oh so sexy, and smoking a cigarette.
* * * *
Lionel Townsend's villa in Amman, adjacent to the Amman National Park and the Bisharrat Golf Club, was small, but it was well-appointed, with a large lot accommodating a stone terrace and Olympic-sized swimming pool and was in an exclusive part of town. Townsend's position put him in charge of acquiring the oil and gas contracts for Jordan, which had been unlucky in the wheels' spin for underground oil deposits and had to import most of its energy needs. Townsend was currently in negotiations with both the Kuwait Petroleum Company and Abu Dhabi National Oil Company bids for the Jordan contract for the next ten years. The Abu Dhabi company negotiator, Sheik Zayed al-Bunduq, was in town, and when Paul and Rafik Zawati arrived to use the villa's pool, Paul had every reason to think his father was in talks with Al-Bunduq at the Energy Ministry.