Stefan almost had me that warm afternoon in the summer pavilion of the Eisler country house in the Vienna Woods. We had played two sets of tennis, stripped down to our shorts in the unusual August heat on the mountainside above Vienna, and I knew by the way he looked at me that he wanted me. And, truth be told, I think I wanted him as well. I'd always had those urgings, but I had never pursued them. The one time I'd had sex with a man, it was more or less forced on me by Coach Jacoby. I had accepted it before it happened, but I hadn't pursued it.
I knew of Stefan's sexual exploits. I knew that he preferred to be pursued—that he wanted to be begged to give sex.
I hadn't seen Stefan since we had been on the soccer team together at the southern U.S. university I attended for my junior year. Like me, he had transferred away for his senior year, but it was to a different university than the one I moved too. Even though he was a slightly better player than I was, I guessed right on school transfer and he didn't. The soccer team of my new university, with me the star player now, won the national championship. We beat Stefan's team in a semifinal match.
Stefan hadn't held a grudge. In fact, he kept in contact with me throughout our senior year and when graduation came he urged me to try out with him for the Milan Serie A football—as soccer is called everywhere but the United States—league. He said he had an in with the team, and I was sure he was right. I, of course, was interested in playing professional soccer, and the European leagues were even better than the American ones, so I was sorely tempted by his offer. At the same time, I knew he was trying to get into my pants. But when I told him of my fears, he said that he was just trying to sweeten the deal for the Milan team as much as possible—two American all-stars who knew how to work with each other at one go. He assured me that he was over me.
So, I had come back with him to Austria after graduation to prepare for the football trials in six-week's time. Taking up Stefan's offer to stay with his family had been ideal. They were quite wealthy, they came from a titled family, and they traveled all over the region and had been good enough to say they'd take me with them. Since I was coming to Europe, I planned to stay long enough to do some traveling around the continent.
I knew it was a risk to come back into Stefan's realm. He put himself in front of me constantly in our junior year, obviously wanting me to beg him to take me as so many others on campus were doing, trying to wear my resolve down. But, other than that one time with Coach Jacoby, I had been too strong for him. I knew my inclinations were dangerously close to what he wanted, but I had come from a small southern town and I planned to return there to take over a business that had been in my family since before the Civil War. I couldn't afford to indulge what Stefan had to offer. I would marry a cheerleader coed from one of the other prominent families in town, live in a southern colonial mansion on a golf course at the edge of town, and raise my allotted three and a half children and one dog and two cats. It wouldn't be risky or exciting, but it would be safe.
Still, Stefan was not the type to give up, and I was fully on guard against an ulterior motive for his invitation to me to summer with his family. I hadn't been totally cold to him. He had been raised on his family's Italian estate, and he was naturally expressive with his hands. I had let him become friendly with his hands—and I had thoroughly enjoyed his occasional attentions in that vein—but other than that one session with Coach Jacoby more than a year earlier, I had not succumbed to his expressed desires for something more between us. He quite well knew what my limitations were and why I had set them.
After the tennis game, Stefan and I dove into the pool, in our tennis shorts, to cool off, and I'd left him there swimming vigorous laps and retired to the summer pavilion down near the small lake and dozed off on a chaise lounge.
I awoke with Stefan's full lips on mine. He caught me completely by surprise. I had just then been dreaming of someone very like him, so I was slow to draw away—in fact, I was holding up my end of the kiss. He was leaning over me, droplets falling off his hard, heaving chest onto mine, and he'd run a hand under the waistband of my shorts and was fisting my cock.
"No, Stefan," I exclaimed. "Too far . . . I don't want . . ."
"Don't tell me you don't want it, Troy," Stefan retorted in a low, guttural voice. "Your dick tells me that you want it." He began to stroke me, and my cock did, in fact, belie my interest. "Just let me jack you off. You're driving me crazy."
"Not what you want, Stefan. You can't have what you want. You don't want to just use your hand on me. You've been very clear in what you want. And I've been equally clear that it won't happen. That it can't happen. I've been—"
