Life was little different in the mansion hugging the snow-clad mountainside at Snowshoe than it was in Hoagie's inn. Less demandingāin terms of service both at table and in the bedāand the surroundings certainly more sumptuous. But very little different in terms of feeling owned and controlledāand isolated, all alone in the world. I cursed Buddy nearly daily for having shown me a glimpse of what could be. I was far better off before that.
I wasn't the only house staff member there, by any means. There was a young man named Frankie, who did the heavy workāthe cleaning and laundry. And he served in Mr. Reardon's bed as well. Reardon obviously liked his men young looking. Frankie told me he first met Reardon at an audition for a movie. In whispering tones he told me that Reardon made more movies than those that were shown on the silver screen and acclaimed for their artistry if not always by their box office returns. He also filmed male porn, which Frankie thought he probably made more money on and took more delight from than his mainstream movies.
Frankie had come to Reardon for a job, having come up through the system working on films that he couldn't even legally talk about. Reardon hadn't put him in a film, but he'd put him down on his studio couch and then in his bed and, finally, here at the Snowshoe house, which Frankie looked after even when the Reardons weren't in residence. Frankie said he had no complaintsāthat this life was better than any he had before.
And the way Frankie said that to me rang loudly as a friendly suggestion that I should feel the same.
I was given lighter tasksāsome of the light cleaning and cooking and the waiting on tables. I and Frankieāand the chauffer, Dwain, had rooms on the lower level of the villa, two flights down from the driveway and parking aprons and garages at the road side of the house. Our quarters took up one side of this floor. There was only one door leading into the other side, and that was kept closed and locked. I had my own window looking down the side of the mountain, which was one of the ski slopes of the resort. The room was quite nice. The three of us shared a bath, which was a luxury for me and would have been even more so if Dwain hadn't asserted his position my first night there by coming into the shower stall while I was bathing and manhandling me and turning my belly to the wall and setting my channel down on his monstrous black cock and fucking me hard and rough. He took me here often as if it was a privilege Reardon had granted him for a possession that had no say in the matter.
I thought he was presumptuous and wondered if he was skating on thin ice with his employers and whether I was sinking into a bad situation where more was going on than Reardon knew and that, when it all came out, whether the burden of the blame would be given out fairly. But I needn't have worried. The afternoon after the evening we'd arrived in Snowshoe, all of the men were taken into the Reardon's massive master bedroom, and Reardon and Dwain took turns fucking Frankie and me on the master bedātogether, Frankie's and my faces within inches of each other and watching the effect of the fucking on each other. After they each had finished and rested, they changed positions.
Reardon's son, Wade, who indeed was Reardon's son by an earlier marriageāalthough there were suggestions that Wade was adoptedāsat and watched us, in the nude, until Reardon and Dwain were finished with Frankie and me. And then Reardon waved Dwain, and Frankie, and me out of the room, and I could hear sounds of Reardon taking his son.
As far as I could determine, Reardon let no one but himself have sex with Wade beyond the first time at the Hawksbill Inn, where he let Wade take me while he fucked Wade. I knew from the way that Wade watched me, though, that he wanted me again.
I needn't even have wondered about what Reardon knew of what happened between Dwain and Reardon's wife, because that first full evening, as I was finishing up washing up the dishes, I heard the sounds of sex coming from the great room and peeked out to see Reardon sitting calmly at the dining table with work papers strewn out before him and him closely concentrating on, while across the room, in an overstuffed chair in front of the fire, the big, black Dwain was sitting in the chair, nude, and Mrs. Reardon, also nude, was straddling his lap and facing himāand rising and falling on his cock.
I wondered how long this would go onāhow stable this environment was for me until the next man came along and bought me. And where would that next man come from? It was pretty isolated up on this mountainside, and although there were skiers aplenty on the mountain slope, the house overlooked, they seemed far away, in another world. I wondered what would happen when I was too old for men to want to buy me. What would become of me then? Wondering got me nowhere. It was all beyond my scope. But I could wonder and I could ask. I asked Frankie what he thought.
Frankie was bluntly, emotionally unattached about the questions. "The household hasn't increased here ever since we first arrived. I don't think you'll be staying here. Mr. Reardon's brought men here before. He brings them here for his movies, and then they are gone. The young men skiers are handsome and in top shapeāand many of them need money, as all they want to do is to follow the hard-packed snow. Mr. Reardon makes movies here, taking advantage of their good looks and needs. I asked Dwain where the last one went and he said that he just drove the young man down into the town in the valley and dropped him off at the bus station."
"Movies?" I asked. "They make movies up here?" And that's when I learned about the movies Reardon made behind the scenes.
What Frankie said about the last young man brought up here scared me more. "Just let him off in the town?"
"Yes. You should be happy. You've said you've never been free. You'd be free then to do whatever you want."
"Whatever I want?" I must have said that funny, because Frankie turned on me then.
"You could go back to whatever life and freedom you had before this man you said brought you to the States bought you."
"There was never before," I whispered. "There never has been a before I was owned by someoneāthat someone else didn't tell me whatever I could do and didn't take care of me. And I can't see Mr. Reardon just sending me down to the bus station. I'm sure he paid a lot of money for me. It's not a boast. I'm sure Hoagie would have demanded a lot of money."
Frankie snorted at that. "You don't seem to understand how much money there is in the kind of movies Mr. Reardon makes up here. He'll get back his money on you in no time."
* * * *
"Here, strip and put these onāand nothing elseāand come down the hall to the door that's open."
Being awakened like that out of a sleep early in the morning was a shock. A larger shock was having Dwain burst in my room; they'd let me have this as a private space until now. Another shock was what Dwain was wearing: just tattered cotton pants not coming much below the knee, held up at the waist by a rope belt.