by shukyou (主教)

The light in the room was hazy and dim, filtered through the cigar smoke currently lingering in the air and years of its predecessors’ remnants on the windows. Orlando knew the people the club employed to tend to such things, knew how hard they worked. Some things just wouldn’t wash clean.

He walked through the door to find a dozen or so men arranged on the room’s expensive leather couches — all of them important tycoons of industry and government and other respectable professions, done up in smart suits and crisply tied ties despite the more casual atmosphere their club provided them. So much of wealth was an artifice that could never be dropped, lest the whole illusion fail. That was why Orlando himself dressed the part, in a dove-grey wool suit and dark blue tie, proper without being flashy. No one should ever mistake him for one of the real men of power here.

They didn’t turn to look at him as he entered, though he was sure they all noticed him. They didn’t turn to look, because turning to look would have indicated he was important enough to merit notice, and he wasn’t. He was a secretary, a doer of a million petty things. A hundred years before, he would have been a butler to the great industrialists; a hundred years before that, perhaps, a footman to the nobility. But this was the twentieth century now, where a man could look upon his employer and dream someday of sitting in his seat. Best not to give him any ideas.

“The place has really gone downhill since they lowered their standards for admission,” said James Calhoun, sixty-three, prominent banker and financier, father of three grown children, none of whom were currently speaking to him at the moment. It was Orlando’s job to know these things. “Silly people calling it a quota. Poppycock! It’s simply a smart matter to take a good, discerning look at an applicant’s background.”

“Mark my words, twenty years from now, you won’t be able to so much as set foot on that campus without stepping over two or three” –and here he inserted a choice racial slur– “to do it!” said F. Patrick Jameson, to uproarious laughter from the people in the room who mattered. The owner of several steel mills, Jameson was forty-seven, with one wife and at least four mistresses that Orlando could count. “Are you regretting sending your boy there, Wright?”

There were two men in the room who could rightly have responded to the name. The elder swirled the whiskey in his glass and chuckled. “Not at all,” answered Abraham Wright, seventy-five, global shipping magnate and the reason Orlando was there in the first place. “A few” –a completely different slur went here– “and” –this one was so obscure, Orlando didn’t even know what group it was meant to be insulting– “won’t lower the bar so far as to muddy the waters for the rest. Isn’t that right, Hyram?”

The “boy” in question gave a little smile — though at twenty-eight, Hyram hadn’t been a boy to anyone but his father in a long while. Unmarried and childless, he had the older man’s striking features, but his foreign mother’s black eyes and black hair, all of which gave him a look so intense that he could have pinned butterflies to boards with it. “I found my time there most edifying.” He gave the group a nod, then deigned to acknowledge their intruder, who was in fact primarily his responsibility. “What is it, Orlando?”

Well, now everyone was looking at him. “Apologies, Mr. Wright,” Orlando said, his voice low with deference, “but there’s an issue with the catering for tonight’s event that needs your attention.”

The elder Mr. Wright gave an indignant cough around the cigar he was absolutely not meant to be smoking, given what the doctors had said about his lungs. “And you can’t fix it yourself?”

Orlando let his head droop slightly with the shame of failure. “I’m sorry, sir, but the kitchens–“

“Oh, blast it all!” Hyram Wright slapped his knees and stood with a fury he’d inherited from his father. He set his strong jaw and looked directly at Orlando. “Are you so worthless that you can’t fix a problem with food?”

Orlando pressed his lips together. He stared at Hyram’s well-polished shoes; he didn’t dare look him in the eye. If there was one thing Orlando knew better than any other, it was his place. “There will be some substitutions needed that I wouldn’t–“

Hyram cut him off with a disgusted noise. “This is unacceptable! How could the staff be so incompetent? Haven’t you trained them properly?”

There was no excuse that Orlando could give. He shrank, visibly chastised, until he might have collapsed into nothing, leaving only his starched suit behind.

Screwing up his mouth, Hyram pointed an angry finger silently at Orlando’s chest for several seconds, as though on the verge of striking him. At the last moment, he relented, balling his hand into a fist again before letting it drop to his side. “Gentlemen, if you’ll excuse me, but I’m going to go give them a piece of my mind!” With that, Hyram stormed out of the room, his expensive leather shoes announcing his departure with every strike of their heels against the floorboards.

Just before he took his place following right behind, Orlando dared a glance over to Abraham Wright, who wore a smile so satisfied it veered into smug. He was ever so proud of his boy, taking charge and not taking any guff from the help. He’d raised his son right, he was surely thinking, ignoring how he’d barely raised his son at all. That had been the help’s job as well. And look at what a job they’d done.

Everyone heard them coming as they strode together down the corridors of the club, from is guest areas toward the back of the house, to the places where the illusion of effortless perfection were broken. With the way Hyram was walking, the club staff knew to get out of his way before he had even arrived.

“What in hell’s the matter anyway?” Hyram asked as they traveled, his voice pitched loud enough for bystanders to hear clearly his complaint.

“The wine,” Orlando answered. “The vintage you wanted is not available.”

Hyram threw up his hands with frustration. “Then make a substitute! Why on earth do we have a sommelier on premises if not for occasions like these?”

“The pairing, you see, is a very delicate matter, sir.” Orlando scurried ahead of Hyram slightly, just enough to hold open the door for him. “I wouldn’t dream of making any changes without the approval of your seasoned tongue.”

The noise Hyram made at that was a great snort, followed by a throat-clearing pause. “This is unbelievable. Simply unbelievable. Show me to the cellars, and I’ll make the decision myself!”

“Right this way, sir.” Orlando led him along the path to the wine cellars, which were mercifully close. A few staff they passed along the way were bold enough to meet Orlando’s gaze, and he shook his head slightly at every one. If they knew what was good for them, they would not accompany Orlando and Mr. Wright down to the cellars, no matter what they heard; if they made that foolish choice, their continued employment could not be guaranteed, much less their continued physical safety. Every member of the staff had been subject at one point or another to the elder Mr. Wright’s temper, and thus weren’t willing to test the same from his son.

Orlando unlatched the cellar door, then pulled the string the activated the single bulb above the staircase. With an angry huff, Hyram started off down the wooden steps. Orlando pulled the door shut behind them, then followed.

Above them, the world held the busy warmth of an early autumn afternoon, but down here, everything was dark and cold and quiet. High wooden racks surrounded them on all sides, filled with the finest vintages money could procure. The bottoms of the bottles stared at them like perfectly round eyes, glinting in the light as Orlando walked past, following as Hyram led them down behind a thick wall of casks stacked three high, almost all the way to the low ceiling. There he stopped, looking at the markings on a crate as though considering its contents.

A half-second later, he was pressed up against the wall, his back flat against the chilly concrete as Orlando pinned him there. With a grin, Hyram grabbed the sides of Orlando’s face with both his hands and pulled him in to a hungry, greedy kiss that tasted of expensive brandy. “I was ready to explode,” he said into Orlando’s mouth. “Where were you?”

Orlando grinned as he got his knee between Hyram’s thighs. He didn’t take the question personally; he knew it was a reflection of how much Hyram wanted him. “We’ve used all our good crises before. I had to be clever to manufacture a new one.”

Hyram snorted, letting his hands rake back through Orlando’s curly hair. “Oh, you’re clever, all right,” Hyram agreed, laughing. “You’re the cleverest man I know.”

That was likely true, though modesty forbade Orlando from confirming it. He nuzzled Hyram’s cheek, enjoying the smell of Hyram’s aftershave, the smell of his skin beneath it. He pressed tighter against Hyram’s body, feeling the stiffness of Hyram’s cock bulge through the fine fabric of his well-tailored trousers. “How long does it take you to choose a bottle of wine?” Orlando murmured into Hyram’s ear.

“Oh, you know how particular I am about such things.” Hyram hooked a finger in the front of Orlando’s tie knot and gave it a little loosening tug. “We could be here a while.”

Orlando’s fingers raked back through Hyram’s thick black hair, then clenched into a fist, yanking Hyram back from the embrace. Other men tamed their hair with pomades and other creams, greasy substances that lingered for days on anything that touched them. Hyram chose not to. The better to feel you with, my dear, Orlando did not say. Instead, he took the leverage from his grip and pushed downward. Without hesitation, Hyram sank to his knees on the cold cellar floor.

The well-dressed men they’d left upstairs would have been horrified to see such a thing, and that was part of what made it so delicious. Would they have been disgusted or jealous, or some measure of both? It didn’t matter to Orlando, because what he had, they were never going to get — this was for Hyram alone. Hyram, so pretty as he turned his beautiful gaze all the way up to Orlando’s face and slowly, seductively unbuttoned the fly of his trousers. When at last he had them all undone, Hyram reached inside, his fingers fireplace-warm in the chill air. No sooner had he freed Orlando’s cock than he’d swallowed it to the root, his perfect Cupid’s-bow lips wrapped around Orlando’s shaft in a hungry ring.

They’d learned this about themselves by accident, back at the expensive college the elder Mr. Wright had paid for the family servants’ son to attend alongside his own boy, in the hopes that such an education would make Orlando a well-rounded asset to Hyram, someone who could do more than shine shoes and manage a calendar. And things had worked out perfectly according to Mr. Wright’s plan, until the night they’d gotten into a fight about a matter so trivial that Orlando had forgotten the matter of it long ago, and Orlando, in a fit of pique, had slammed his hand against the wall right beside Hyram’s smirking face in order to punctuate his side of the argument.

For as long as he could remember, Orlando had always been taught to know his place. But the truth was that no one had known what his place truly was, not even he himself, until he’d suddenly found himself inches from Hyram as that pretty smirk had vanished into a surprised and shuddering gasp.

Hyram’s mouth was soft and warm as he bobbed his head up and down the length of Orlando’s stiff cock. He moaned softly with every exhale, his eyes half-lidded with the haze of pleasure. For all the privileges and diversions in Hyram’s life, Orlando had never seen Hyram so content as he was when fellating Orlando. He rolled his tongue around the head of Orlando’s cock, smiling at the taste before he opened wide and swallowed him whole again.

Orlando’s hand remained tight in Hyram’s hair, tight enough to rest just at the edge of pain. He didn’t want to hurt Hyram, any more than Hyram wanted to be hurt. But the reminder that he could hurt him? That, too, made the act sweet. “Keep going,” Orlando told him, his voice low. “Be a good boy for me.”

Hyram was good. He was so good. It was what everyone said about him, what an obedient son he was, how he did so much for his poor ailing father. If only they knew his real talents. But no, Orlando didn’t want to share. This was his. Hyram was his.

With a little shove of his hips, Orlando held Hyram’s head steady and pushed his cock deeper into Hyram’s mouth. Hyram relinquished his control of the act immediately, letting Orlando be the one in charge now. With one hand, he gripped Orlando’s hip to steady himself against the pressure; with the other, he undid his own trousers and began stroking his own erection. If they’d been in a more secure location, Orlando would have told him to stop, to wait his turn. Tonight, then, or whenever Orlando could next sneak safely into Hyram’s room after everyone else in the household had settled in for the evening. Then they’d have a lesson in the virtue of patience.

For all his virtues, Hyram was not a patient man. He could wait, but he wasn’t patient. Therefore, Orlando saw no need to drag this out. He gripped Hyram’s hair and shoved his hips forward, until Hyram’s mouth was full and his nose was pressed fully into the soft flesh of Orlando’s lower belly. Hyram held him there for a beat, then jerked him off roughly, leaving Hyram gasping for air. Orlando let him fill his lungs before thrusting in again, this time even harder. Hyram’s moans were louder now, greedy encouragement.

“Good boy,” Orlando said as he pressed deep into the hot embrace of Hyram’s mouth. “You’re so good, so beautiful. I’ve never seen anything so beautiful before in all my life.”

Once, Hyram had confessed that his life was so full of empty praise from employees and sycophants alike, he’d come to believe that nothing good said about him could ever be true — except, that was, when Orlando said it. And so Orlando said those things as often as he could, to make up for everyone else. He stroked Hyram’s cheek with his thumb, feeling the little tracks of exertion tears that had slipped from the corners of his eyes. The rough thrusts and the tender touches together were how Orlando showed that he meant every word.

Despite the force with which Orlando plunged his cock into Hyram’s warm mouth, he found no resistance there. Hyram kept his lips tight, but his throat was loose and welcoming as Orlando took his mouth again and again. His lips were growing pink with the friction of it all. His eyes had slipped completely shut by now, focusing only on his other senses. 

That was all right. In the dim light, Orlando could see enough of him for the both of them. Hyram’s thick hair was wild in his grip. His expensive suit was rumpled, telltale evidence of their debauchery. His handsome face looked serene, almost beatific, except for the part where his mouth was engaging in an act no church would allow through its front doors. Orlando had thought before about how much he wanted a photograph of Hyram just like this, at his loveliest. He’d have to learn how to develop his own film to get it, but that shouldn’t be too hard. And then he’d have a memento to put in a locket and keep close to his heart, as sweethearts did.

Well, perhaps not precisely as sweethearts did. Then again, they weren’t precisely sweethearts. They were something altogether different, an entire separate species of love found only in moments stolen from a world that made no bones about their respective places in it.

No matter how deeply Orlando wanted to make this last, even the most off-puttingly volatile of rich men couldn’t spend that long contemplating a wine choice before some brave soul came down to offer assistance. “You’re going to swallow for me, good boy,” Orlando said, not a command but a statement of fact, as clearly true as noting that the salad would follow the appetizer course. “You’re going to be good and not miss a drop.”

As much as he could move his head, Hyram nodded. Yes, he would. He would be very good, for Orlando if for no one else.

Orlando closed his own eyes and let the sensation of Hyram’s mouth around his cock take him. The warm wetness, the tight pressure, the eager way Hyram took him in as though he might never let Orlando go — that was more than enough to push Orlando over to orgasm. With a loud exhale, he thrust deep into Hyram’s mouth, and Hyram, good as gold, swallowed every drop.

When Orlando caught himself enough to look again, he saw that at some point Hyram had met his own climax, some drops of which had landed on Orlando’s shoe, circles of slightly darker wetness that would seem like nothing at all to the untrained eye. Orlando liked how it looked. He decided he’d keep it.

Hyram stood and wrapped Orlando into his embrace, kissing Orlando such that Orlando could taste himself on Hyram’s tongue. Orlando smoothed back Hyram’s hair, which was damp with sweat despite the cellar’s chill. “You did so good,” Orlando promised him, speaking the words into the space his cock had been only moments previous. “I’m sorry I had to make you wait, but you did so good.”

“I’ll always wait for you,” Hyram swore in return, resting their foreheads against one another as he caught his breath.

“And I for you.” Orlando cupped Hyram’s cheek tenderly. “You and your seasoned tongue.”

At that, Hyram exhaled heavily through his smile. “You absolute devil. Do you know how hard it is to stay mad at you when you say things like that? I nearly burst out laughing and lost us the whole game.”

If Orlando could have manifested a halo of pure innocent radiance just then, he would have. “But you didn’t.” He pressed a playful kiss to the tip of Hyram’s nose. “And that’s what I love about you.”

Hyram narrowed his eyes, though there was no bite to the expression. “One of many things, I’d hope.”

Orlando made a half-hearted little shrug, which lasted exactly as long as it took Hyram to poke him right in his ticklish side. “Yes! All right, one of many,” Orlando said, bringing his hands up to straighten Hyram’s suit. “Come on, let’s get you looking presentable for your return to polite society.”

Hyram submitted himself to this treatment for five seconds, which was exactly as long as it took him to get bored of it, whereupon he began kissing Orlando again in a way that was absolutely counterproductive to Orlando’s stated goal of getting them out of the wine cellar. Still, Orlando couldn’t entirely bring himself to mind.

As they emerged again a few minutes later, the kitchen staff did their best to pretend as though they were invisible. A few glanced over in a way that conveyed sympathy for Orlando, or even relief to see that he had emerged in one piece. “And I trust you’ll make the appropriate arrangements with the wine steward,” said Hyram, continuing a conversation they’d never started.

“Of course, sir.” The arrangements to be made were easy, in that they required Orlando to do nothing. The original pairings would be served, and the men in the room would compliment Hyram on his exquisite taste, and no one would be the wiser about anything. He gave a deferential nod.

That the elder Mr. Wright was not long for the world was a truth everyone knew but no one would speak. What no one knew was what would come after. Hyram would step into his father’s shoes, of course, but to what end? Orlando worried not that the stolen moments would continue, but that they wouldn’t — that the photograph he joked about taking would become his only memento of being with the man he loved.

Then he lifted his head to see the quiet smile on Hyram’s face, the one that said that everyone else in the world could go hang for all he cared, so long as they were together. In that look, Orlando saw the promise that carried him through their moments apart. They would be together, no matter what that togetherness would be, and  it would be enough.

Hyram glanced over to a nearby table, where three silver trays of small confections sat waiting for the evening’s goings-on. All of them were cut small, no larger than a bite, and decorated artistically with a variety of seasonal berries. With a glance around as though to make sure no one was watching, even though certainly everyone was, Hyram plucked the closest one, a little square of vanilla sponge topped with a dollop of cream and a slice of strawberry. He considered it for a moment, then popped it inexpertly into his mouth, so that the cream smeared his lower lip. Looking Orlando in the eye, he dragged his tongue along his lower lip, clearing away the evidence of his crime. “Now that,” Hyram said with an approving nod, “is the second best thing I’ve had in my mouth all day.”

Orlando could have murdered him. He could have kissed him. He settled instead for a long, quiet sigh. Perhaps he’d get the chance to make Hyram pay for that little remark later tonight. He could only imagine how much they were both looking forward to it.