The grunting and, to his ears, fake moaning woke fourteen-year-old Mateo Marcos in his closet-sized bedroom in the North Houstin Avenue attic apartment and make him realize he needed to take a piss. Giving no thought to what he was listening to, he got out of bed, wearing just sleeping shorts on his slight, not-much-more-than-five-foot berry brown frame an paddled into the hallway and to the bathroom across from his bedroom door. On the way back, he was drawn to his mother, Maria’s, bedroom door, which was open. That room wasn’t too much bigger than his, but it was big enough to hold a double bed.

The double bed was barely big enough to hold the muscular, tattooed man on it. Maria was under him, her legs sticking out of either side of his thighs and waving in the area. The man was doing pushups on Mateo’s Filipina mother. The bruiser, a good twice the size of Maria, was doing vigorous pushups on her body, fucking her good.

The curtains were open in Maria’s bedroom, and the lights of the around-the-clock gas station across the street beamed into the room, sketching out both the copulating pair on the bed and the handsome, dark, half Filipino and half black fourteen-year-old boy, standing in the doorway to the hall, dressed in just drooping sleep shorts, and watching his mother get power fucked.

Maria’s face was turned to the wall. She never knew Mateo had been there in the night. But the john, Gill Turner, a sailor from the Commander Naval Base in Philadelphia, visiting Atlantic City, New Jersey, on a two-day pass, and having linked up with Maria at the Ocean Casino Resort earlier that evening where she hoofed it in the floorshow’s chorus line, turned his head toward the door. He saw Mateo standing in the doorway. The boy remained there through the orgasmic liftoff and then he turned, went back to his bed, picked up his beat-up skateboard, wrapped in masking tape, off the floor, and hugged it close to his chest as we drifted off into sleep.

Maria didn’t bring men home often, but she did on occasion. It helped them with the rent. Mateo’s black soldier father, who brought Maria to the States from the Philippines, was more permanent than most of the others, but he didn’t stay around much past Mateo’s birth.

“My name is Gill. I’m a friend of your mother’s,” the man from the previous evening said to Mateo when the both came out to the living-dining room area. Gill, gym-built, bare-chested, and massively tattooed was sitting at the table in the nook the kitchen area opened out too. He had a man-sized eggs, bacon, and toast meal in front of him. When Mateo had fixed himself supper the evening before, his mother already gone to her casino show revue job, none of this had been in the refrigerator. Stopping at a convenience store for breakfast fixings before coming here after midnight must have been part of the deal of Gill coming here. Maria was in the kitchen, wrapped in a robe, making coffee and burning a couple of pieces of toast for herself. She had a meal of eggs, bacon, and toast ready for Mateo.

“Hi,” was all Mateo could manage. He couldn’t look directly at the man. The previous night Gill had been naked; had had the body of a Greek god, including a massive shaft; and was giving his mother a good pounding. Mateo realized he had watched them more than he should, but such goings on were getting priority in his mind at his age, and he couldn’t help but be more interested in what the men had and what they did with it—and the possibility they could do it with him. He was gay before really knowing what gay was.

He hadn’t been shy about watching Gill at work the previous night, though, and this hadn’t been lost on Gill.

“Your mother says you aren’t in school today,” Gill said, as Mateo sat down to the biggest breakfast he’d had in weeks, although he was aware that when his mother brought men home after work, they did eat better for a couple days after that.

“It’s Saturday,” Maria said from the kitchen. The inflection of her voice half indicated she’d told the sailor why Mateo didn’t have school today. It only half indicated that because she hoped it wasn’t finished yet with Gill—not just because he still had money in his wallet but also because he had a great body and he’d fucked her real good. “No school on Saturday.”

“Say, that looks like a really sick skateboard there, and your mother tells me you are a champion skateboarder. You shoes look worn out too.”

“So?” Mateo said, looking up at the man for the first time. Was he making fun of them—how they lived—how hard it was for them to make it from day to day?

“So, how would you like to go shopping all by yourself? Pick out a new skateboard and shoes and stay out all day breaking them in. I think this would cover it.” Gill took a wad of cash out of his navy-white tight trousers and plunked it down on the table top. “Then, if you come back at about 6:00, I’ll take you someplace for dinner.”

He planned on staying for the day. He wasn’t finished with Mateo’s mom. Mateo gave his mother a look and was returned with a clear signal that this suited her just fine.

“A good board and sneakers that will work would cost a lot,” Mateo said, assuming that would be a deal breakers.

“There’s a hundred and eighty dollars there,” Gill said. “You can’t buy the best, but you can buy good enough for someone as good I’ve been told you are to do a whole hell of a lot better than you can do with what you’ve now got.” He didn’t say it in anger. He said it knowing Mateo would consider it a good deal.

Mateo did consider it a good deal. He wolfed down his breakfast and was gone before Gill could reconsider. He knew what Gill and his mom would be doing while he was gone—up until his mom had to go to work. And, truth be told he was a bit sorry he couldn’t stay and watch what that was and how they did it. He more than halfway wished Gill would do it to him as well.

Mateo came home with a broken-in Santa Crux Jackpot Hand Large skateboard and a red pair of Bronax sneakers with black spiderwebbing on them. There had been enough for lunch and fifty dollars left over if Gill didn’t ask for change.

Gill didn’t ask for change, but he also didn’t take Mateo to dinner after the boy returned home at 5:00. Gill was there, sitting at the table, nursing a beer, just in his briefs. Maria had already left for work. When Mateo showed Gill the skateboard and sneakers, the big bruiser sailor took them from the boy, tossed them aside, and then grabbed Mateo and started pulling off his shorts and T-shirt.

Mateo could have given more of a struggle that he did, and Gill, even though more than half looped, seemed to sense that.

Muttering, “You want it. I know you want it. You watched us last night and I know you were wishing it was you,” Gill, more than twice little Mateo’s weight, more than a foot taller, and much—much—more muscular and stronger than the boy, picked Mateo up and manhandled him into Mateo’s bedroom. The boy’s bed was too small for the two of them. It almost was too small for just Gill. But they weren’t lying side by side. Gill was on top, trapping Mateo under him and working the boy over with his hands, mouth, and tongue.

Mateo was under Gill, completely cowed, breathing hard, knowing he should say something, but too overpowered to say or do anything other than initially struggle ineffectively and unsuccessfully working to keep his legs together. He couldn’t keep his legs together. Mateo on his back, Gill pressing him down from on top, panting hard as Gill was squeezing and slapping his bare buttocks and snuffling in the boy’s throat, pushing Mateo’s fluttering hands away, as he entered and spread the boy’s channel with the fingers of the other hand.

Not long after that, Gill was putting the mushroom cap of a thick, hard erection in place. Mateo cried out in pain and surprise as the shaft penetrated. The boy writhed under the man as Gill’s shaft waited, momentarily, throbbing, for the sphincter to give way and the channel to spread open. That hadn’t quite happened when Gill lost patience, forced his way in as Mateo shuddered and trembled and sobbed under him, gained depth and the saddle, and move into the up and down, in and out of the anal fuck of a fourteen-year-old boy less than half his size and weight.

“Daddy, Daddy! Oh, shit, DADDY!” Mateo cried out as he lost resistance and Gill gained a rhythm in the thrusts. Mateo was to reflect on this later, the use of the word “daddy,” but he wasn’t trained to understand how this connected to anything in the life he was experiencing.

The fuck lasted for ten minutes before Gill tensed, jerked, and came; tensed, jerked, and came. Mateo had already collapsed, his arms and legs rubbery, spread out in a sacrificial, open position, and the boy panting, sobbing, and blowing bubbles. He also, though, was feeling guilty because it had brought the realization that this was what his curiosity and developing preference had been building him toward.

He had lost something at fourteen that most don’t give up until much later. But to a certain extent it was a barrier he knew he’d want to break through eventually anyway.

Gill, who had no idea beyond wishful thinking and that prolonged period when the boy had watched him fucking his mother the previous night and seemed to be “in” to it then that Mateo actually wanted to be fucked by a man, rolled off the boy and the bed immediately after coming, as if he hadn’t really done it, and returned to his beer at the dining table.

He left Mateo moaning and trembling on the bed, murmuring words to himself that even he didn’t understand.

Gill was horny again when he’d finished the beer. And he’d fucked the boy once, so there wasn’t really anything keeping him from doing it again. He went back into Mateo’s bedroom and picked the boy up, turning him onto his stomach, as Gill climbed up on the bed behind him. Running an arm under the boy’s stomach, Gill raised Mateo to his knees, with his buttocks elevated. Crouching over and behind him, Gill mounted, penetrated, and fucked the boy again. This time, while moaning and groaning, Mateo also began weakly going with the fuck. Using the leverage o his knees and elbows, he slightly pushed back on Gill’s thrusts, and he got a hand under his belly, stroked himself off, and managed to come before Gill did.

There was no going out to supper. Mateo had become Gill’s supper. By 6:00, Gill had showered and left the apartment, never to appear again and never to fully understand that he had taken Mateo’s virginity.

The boy was asleep in his bed, hugging his new skateboard and sneakers, the extra fifty dollars tucked away in his secret place when his mother returned from work.

The next morning Mateo found that the refrigerator was well stocked. His mother had stopped at an all-night grocery store on the way home. Gill had stolen Maria’s dignity and Mateo’s virginity, but he had been generous with his money. At least that’s the way that Mateo looked at it. His mother said nothing about any part of it and it wasn’t clear how much she knew of everything that had taken place.

Unbeknownst to him, he also had pushed Mateo through the beaded curtain of transition from innocence to a gay lifestyle. Mateo wanted more. Maria went to church that morning, but Mateo stayed back, using his laptop to research gay hookup sites. He’d play on them when he found them and could get into them. What was the harm in sexting over the Internet? That’s as far as he’d go for now.

He found a site he managed to get in because the site actually welcomed fourteen-year-old boys. It was B4M.net—boys for men.

Mateo went from one locker to the other at Atlantic City’s New Jersey Avenue School. In the first, in the school’s hallway, he deposited his school books. He was a high school freshman there. Then he went back to the boy’s locker room by the gymnasium. There, he stripped off his school shorts and T-shirt and exchanged them for neon-blue biker’s shorts and a white muscle T. He didn’t have to change his Bronax sneakers. Underneath, in celebration of what he was going to do after school today, he was wearing red-silk pouch briefs he’d found under his mother’s bed, having probably been left in haste in the departure of some man she’d brought home.

His body was small but perfectly formed and berry brown for a fourteen-year-old. At just five-foot-three, though, he looked younger. He had been blessed with all of the good elements of both his Philippine and Caribbean black heritages.

Pulling his Santa Crux Jackpot Hand Large skateboard out of the locker, he closed and locked it and left the school on skateboard wheels headed down South Connecticut Avenue toward the beach and the boardwalk he could reach by skating around the side of the Ocean Casino Resort, where his mother worked. Once on the boardwalk, he pulled the white T over his head and tucked it into the back waistband of his biker shorts. He looked good—deeply tanned and trimmed—and he knew it. His goal was the Atlantic City Eatery’s outdoor café at New Jersey Avenue and the boardwalk, nearly abutting the boardwalk.

He skated to just below the café and stopped there, bending down and fooling with the laces on one of his sneakers, as if he had to retie them—which he didn’t. He was trembling. This was really happening. The man who he had exchanged photos with on the B4M gay dating site was right there, where he said he be. He was the same man as on the photo Mateo had been attracted to—tall, maybe in his forties, strikingly good looking, clean-cut, looking like he might be a professor or something; and well built.

The B4M website had been a revelation for Mateo. Men had to pay to get on it, but boys didn’t. Once in, he saw that there were a whole bunch more men using the site than boys and they’d rushed to his first posting like a swarm of bees to a honeypot. What was even more striking was how many men claimed that they were within an hours drive of Atlantic City, New Jersey, and could be there almost any time Mateo was available—and that they’d pay for everything.

Nothing had been left to guessing about the man Mateo was meeting at Atlantic City Eatery’s outdoor café, which was the same for Mateo, because they’d exchanged full-frontal nude photos in their last exchange. The man, calling himself Peter, was well-proportioned, hard-bodied, and well-endowed. What had attracted Mateo the most, though, was that he was slightly hirsute. Gray had taken over from the reddish auburn at his temples and had invaded the close-cropped curly hair on the man’s head. But he had swirls of hair on his chest, with a trail of it descending to his trimmed pubes, and the hair got darker, more reddish as it moved down to his privates. Mateo hadn’t encountered a man hirsute in this way before. Somehow it made him thing the man was more of a man.

A real daddy is how Peter struck Mateo from their first sharing of photos, a feeling that Mateo didn’t analyze. He just “had” it. Mateo’s father was black and Peter wasn’t, so although the physical look activated the thought, it wasn’t a physical look issue. It was more age than anything else.

Mateo had been with men before—there were a few after Gill—but never on a blind date, like this—a blind date that emphasized that they were hooking up for casual sex with veritable strangers.

“That looks like hot work.” The voice had come down from the café tables. The man had spoken first.

“It is,” Mateo acknowledged.

“Perhaps you’d like to take a break, son. You could come up here and I’d buy you something to cool off with.”

“I suppose—”

The man stood and gestured. Mateo thought that they’d done enough for anyone watching to think this was a chance encounter, although they’d exchanged quite intimate emails via B4M. Mateo pulled his T-shirt out of his waistband and put it on. He knew the hotel café wouldn’t like for him to be bare-chested and he’d already made his entrance that way. Picking up his skateboard, he mounted the steps at the end of the café platform and came to the man’s table.

“I’m Peter,” the man said, gesturing for Mateo to sit, which he did.

“Mateo,” the young man answered.

“What sort of name is that?”

“It’s from the Philippines. My mother tells me it means ‘child of God.’ She’s religious. She’s from the Philippines. My father was an American soldier. They met in Germany. He was black.”

“Ah, I wondered at the mix. Quite exotic and arresting.”

A waiter came forward and Mateo ordered a Diet Coke, knowing there’d be a hassle if he ordered a beer, which was what Peter was drinking. The man had on a diaphanous short-sleeve shirt, open down two buttons at the neck, showing the swirl of hair on his chest. He had a gold chain around his neck. Worn designer jeans descended to bare ankles and open-toed sandals. Mateo shivered at the sight of no socks; it gave him a sense of the man being nearly naked. He could see the line of the man’ cock in the crotch of the jeans. He was half hard already. Mateo felt himself going half hard as well.

“I have to ask,” Peter said after Mateo’s Coke was served.

“If I’m really fourteen, right?” Mateo asked. “Because I know I don’t look it.”

“Yes, right. Sorry. I can’t really go below twelve. Much to risky. But fourteen is perfect.”

“Perfect? How so?”

“A boy is still young and fresh and smooth-bodied, but at fourteen, he’s becoming aware and physically aware, capable, and curious. You are all of those, aren’t you?”

“Yes, I guess so. But maybe I’m too small?”

“No, no. Young and small. That’s all good. I like to fully control.”

“And I like to be fully controlled,” Mateo ventured.

“Good, good.” He moved a hand below the surface of the table and placed it on Mateo’s knee. “I hope I’m not being too forward too fast.”

“No, of course not. It’s B4M. I’m told it’s best not to beat around the bush on B4M.”

“Go right for it then? So, was there something about me that drew your attention?”

“Well, at first, you looked clean-cut. A professional. And I guess you looked about the same age as my dad.”

“You have a father fetish?”

“I don’t know I haven’t thought about it much.”

“I can be your daddy, if that’s what you want. Nothing more as our exchanges progressed?”

“Yes, more. You have some hair—not heavy but it turned me on.”

“You’ve not gone with a man with hair on his chest before?”

“No.”

“But you’ve gone with men.”

“Yes.” A few, not many. Maybe this was where Mateo should have established that. But he didn’t.

“Men have fucked you before?”

“Yes.”

“And you enjoyed it?”

“Yes. That’s why I went on B4M.”

“Yes? There’s more about me?”

“Your nipples. The dark area around them. I don’t know—”

“The aureoles?”

“Yes, them. Well, they’re so big.”

“You like that?”

“Yes.”

“And? Anything else? Anything else big enough to impress you.” The man wanted him to say it.

“Yeah. That last photo. You’re big. Hung. I don’t think I’ve handled anything that big. I guess the challenge of that.”

Peter was breathing heavily and his hand had moved up Mateo’s leg, his fingers going under the leg hole of the short biker shorts. “What do you have underneath?” he asked. “I can’t feel any briefs.”

“I have a pouch thong. Red silk. I wore it just for today. And you? What sort of briefs are you wearing?”

“I’m going commando. I don’t have anything—but the hots for you—under my jeans.”

“Well, fuck,” Mateo said.

“Come, feel.” Mateo looked around. A waiter was watching. “Don’t mind him. I know him. He’s gay too. He’ll probably think this is his tip.” Peter unbuttoned his fly, took Mateo’s hand, and moved it inside.

“Shit, you’re big,” Mateo murmured, his voice breathy.

“And hard. And it’s all for you. I’ve booked a room at a hotel near here. The Showboat Hotel. Just inland from here on Delaware Avenue. It won’t take long to get there on foot.” Peter didn’t want it to take long. He wanted to do this kid before the boy had time to rethink what he’d do. “Shall we—?”

“It’s what we came for.”

“No ties or anything. Just raw sex, right? Me fucking you and the two of us going our own ways after that. A B4M date.”

Mateo moaned, unable to verbalize a response.

Just inside the door into the hotel room, Peter had Mateo up against the wall, the smaller, younger boy already stripped down to his red silk thong pouch, his knees hooked on Peter’s hips, one hand cupping the back of the older man’s head, and the fingers of the other hand rubbing a squeezing the aureoles of Peter’s left pec. Peter had stripped off his shirt and pressed Mateo’s hand to his hairy chest, knowing that the young man took that as a turn on. He wanted Mateo turned on. They were deep kissing.

Mateo had come a long way in a short time in fully participating in a fuck with a dominating partner.

“So small, so smooth, so young, so yielding,” Peter murmured.

He carried the boy over to the foot of the bed and pushed him down on his back, pressing his knees between Mateo’s thighs, forcing the boy’s legs open. He grasped Mateo’s throat and pressed his head down on the mattress. Finding, with his right hand, that the red silk pouch briefs hooked at the sides of the waist, he quickly had them off and tossed to the side. Then he wrapped his right hand around Mateo’s erection and beat the boy off, countering Mateo’s attempts to writhe away from him. When it seemed like Mateo might break free, Peter grabbed his balls and squeezed.