Sail to the Sun

Hoagie took me back to his quarters and locked me in a back room as the major did. And he let me out to clean and cook and then whenever it pleased him to fuck me cruelly—far more cruelly than the major ever did. He sometimes would hit me, but he never hurt me badly. He called me his obsession, the itch that he needed to scratch again and again. I endured him, counting the days he was marking off on the calendar he kept in the kitchen, the number of days that needed to pass before he would be leaving Thailand.

I did not know what would be in store for me from my next owner, but I endured by telling myself it could only be better than the here and now. In time I grew numb to the thrusting of his cock inside me before I was prepared to be fully open to him, and I learned to not panic when he was choking me, trusting that he knew the threshold not to cross. I almost regretted it when he went a stretch of days by going to the clubs rather than taking me from my room and laying me on his bed and slapping my thighs open to him. What would I face when he no longer wanted me, I wondered, with fear.

But when the calendar ran out of waiting days and Hoagie packed to return to America, he took me with him.

As we prepared to leave—with the hassle Hoagie went through to get me documented to go with him showing more than anything else had his determination to have me—I couldn't help but think of the young pilot. I tried not to think about what had happened to him, why I'd never seen him again after Hoagie came to the apartment and took me away. I knew why, of course, but I did not want to think about it. But when times were roughest with Hoagie—when he was taking me hard and choking me and I was afraid he was going to kill me—I transported my mind to that interlude with the young pilot. He had told me he was taking me to America too. But I wondered if he would have gone through all of the red tape that Hoagie had to get me there.

Hoagie told me I was his now, that he had bought and paid for me, and that he could do whatever he wanted with me, even in America. And of course I believed him. I had known nothing else, no other life than being some man's servant and bed toy. Even the young pilot had owned me.

Hoagie had been telling the truth about being a cook. I learned that he was a chef, and he'd somehow come back to America with enough money to fix up the place he owned, which he named Hawksbill Inn, and to set it up to suit himself.

I was not the only young man who worked at the inn for him or who sailed to the sun with him. But as far as I could tell, I was the only young man he owned. The others came and went as they pleased and, I think, kept at least part of their wages. I didn't.

"Show us what ya' got, boy. Let it swing." The voice sliced through the din and brought me back into the real world. I turned and spread my buns with my hands as I leaned deep and looked out into the crowd with a provocative smile. The string riding in my butt crack was thin, and I knew I was giving the room a good rim shot. I could tell they were interested by the sucking in of air across the smoke-filled space and the whistles.

I was looking back at the bar, though, at the end, where Hoagie customarily stood. He wasn't there, and this is why I was looking. I wanted to know what, if anything, I had to look to when I left the stage. If he was there, in the stage wings, my time and attention probably had been paid for, and my night was not over. Someone would be waiting for me in the wings. But who? I scanned the crowd, trying to decide who was missing. I couldn't tell.

My eyes fell on a young man sitting somewhat apart and staring at me quietly—not yelling wishes and wants or cat calling as most of the rest were. Just nursing a beer and watching me with a sad look on his handsome, chiseled face. Someone not like the rest—the thin and sinewy miners, with their coughs and concave chests, incongruent with the hardness of their muscles—and the dark cast of coal dust to them that they never seemed able to wash away. A young man—not much older than I was—who worked out and who was too tall and bulky for the confined spaces of the mines. Not sallow from life underground as most of them, but tanned and robust. I'd seen him there before, but, as always, he sat apart and just gazed at me sadly and nursed a beer.

I was struck almost immediately by the similarity between this young man and my young pilot. And my heart went out to him. And I found I was dancing for him and him alone. That somehow transported me away from the here and now, and I felt myself lifting through the roof and over the trees, Sailing free—upward.

The music in the room had reached the signal point where I knew it was time for me to turn from the pole and place my hands on the snaps at the sides of my thong. There was a sudden hush in the room—anticipation. The clientele was regular. There were few places for miners to go in this region of West Virginia if they liked men. The sudden silence from the floor of the club room was deafening, and I could hear the gasps escaping and the cheer forming as I unsnapped the thong and let it fall—and stood there for what was an eternity for me but only a split second for the patrons in the room before the spot died and I glided into the wings.

No one was there. No patron waiting for me. I was initially relieved, but then I began to panic and hyperventilate as my eyes adjusted to the darkness and saw him there. Hoagie was standing just beyond the wings, a look in his eyes that I knew so well—a sailing to the sun look.

I felt the steely grip of his hand on my wrist and he was pulling me down the hallway, past the cells used by the customers, to his own room. He spun me into the room and backhanded me across the face, sending me to the floor, as he unbuckled his belt and let his trousers drop to the floor.

I gagged and instinctively reached for the enclosing leather strip as he noosed the buckle and slipped it over my head. He backhanded me again, telling me to drop my hands, which I did. A beefy arm went around my narrow waist and he shoved my chest down onto his desk top. A drawer opened and then slammed shut and he was pulling my hands behind my back and tying them together at the wrist. I cried out in pain as his sheathed cock slid into my channel, and then I forgot anything but that tight belt around my neck as he pulled back on it until I was at the point of fainting and then relieved the pressure but pulled once more as soon as the rasp left my breath, while stroking hard and deep inside me with his angry cock, again and again and again.

Now, at the point of blacking out, I willed myself to think of the sailing to the sun that I longed for. Sailing up, over the trees and hillsides of West Virginia. Into the air, above the clouds, sailing toward the sun—and merciful unconsciousness.