“Gut Junge--Good boy.” Werner Kleinschmidt kissed Travis on the back of his neck and reached over and released the boy’s right wrist. “Now, that didn’t hurt much did it, not after the start.”

“No, Herr Kleinschmidt. Not after a while.” The boy suppressed a sob. He didn’t want to cry. He wanted to be happy. He clutched a ten euro note in his right hand. The teacher touched Travis on the right cheek and the boy turned his head. They kissed on the lips. Kleinschmidt reached over the rough-wood potting table in the shed and released Travis’s left wrist. He crouched down and released the boy’s ankles where his legs had been spread and tied off on the potting table legs at either side. While he was down there he kissed the boy on each butt cheek and patted them. Just minutes before he’d been squeezing them and pulling them apart to open the boy up more. Travis sighed when the man kissed the mounds. The boy’s feet didn’t touch the dirt floor of the shed. Kleinschmidt covered Travis’s back again close with his body and ran his fingers up the boy’s arm. The boy shuddered and was trembling.

“Are you going to put it in again, Lehrer—Teacher?” he whispered.

“No, not today. I think not.” He kissed Travis on a bare shoulder. The boy was naked. The teacher was not.

“Because ... because you can, if you want.”

“I’m glad to hear that, Travis. And, as I told you, there will be more pleasure for you each time we do it. But it’s good that you give—and that you gave—permission. Remember what I told you—that you are in Germany now, and here we can give permission at age fourteen. You can say ‘yes’ to it now ... here in Germany.”

“Yes. I say yes, Lehrer.” Travis liked it that he was old enough to make the decision on his own. He was glad that he had the power to make decisions and that decisions would be made. His parents were so hazy. They couldn’t make decisions. They hardly noticed he was there. And it wasn’t so bad ... not after a while. And his violin teacher had been patient with him. That doesn’t mean it didn’t hurt ... at first. But even pain was better than the dullness he had been feeling. And the pain was accompanied with feeling. All the time he’d been doing it—moving it in and out of Travis’s bum and going faster and crying out at his release—Herr Kleinschmidt had been giving him a music lesson. He’d been telling Travis that it was like how he should play the violin. He should passion into the playing. That’s what he’d told Travis he was doing while he was fucking him. He was putting passion into the playing.

And that’s what Travis had felt—the passion of the man. And for the first time Travis felt the power of pulling passion out of someone else. Yes, he was old enough at fourteen to start making his own decisions.

Kleinschmidt rose off Travis’s body, which was stretched out on top of the potting table, still quivering. He patted the boy on the rump again and zipped up his fly.

“Did you like the bindings?” he asked. “Did they make it easier, knowing the decision was out of your hands once you had agreed to it?” What Kleinschmidt really enjoyed was the helplessness and vulnerability of the sweet boy when he was bound. It heightened the music teacher’s own arousal.

“Yes, Lehrer. It helped. I liked it,” Travis answered. He didn’t process the contradiction of having the decision-making power but losing it in being bound. He just knew that the hint of guilt at what they were doing—what the teacher was doing to him, sticking himself into Travis and moving it in him, tensing and releasing inside him—was lessened by being bound and in the teacher’s full control. It had been Travis’s decision, something in his power to give here in Germany, Kleinschmidt had pointed out, but it had been his teacher’s responsibility. In the end, after Travis had told him he could, the German man had tied him up and done what he wanted to do to him.

“Go on home now. The music lesson is over for today,” the music teacher said. “Dress, and don’t forget your violin in the house.”

Travis gingerly climbed down from the table. Kleinschmidt pulled the boy to him and kissed him on the mouth again. Travis yielded to him. “Schoene Junge—Beautiful boy,” the teacher murmured and then released the boy. He watched Travis dress. “Schoene Junge,” he whispered again.

“Du wollte es, nicht wahr? Du hast ja gesagt—You wanted it, right? You said yes,” the German said to the boy at the door.

“Ja, ich wollte es, Lehrer—Yes, I wanted it,” Travis answered, and he had wanted it. But he couldn’t look at the German when he said it.

“Gut, wir werden es nachste Woche wieder tun. Schoene Junge. Du wollte es?—Good, we’ll do it again next week. You want to? Beautiful boy.”

“Ja, Lehrer—Yes, teacher.”

He stood at the potting shed door and called out to Travis as the boy walked—more like limped—to the door of the house. “And don’t forget to practice your scales each day this week. You’ll be as good as your father in no time.”

Travis rode his bicycle back to his parents’ house on the outskirts of Munich. He rode his bike everywhere. He rode alone that summer of their arrival in Germany from the States, school not yet having started and there being no other children in the neighborhood near his age. Cycling had been a new luxury for him. He had been raised in the city—New York City—where both of his parents played in the New York Philharmonic. They were on a year’s sabbatical here in Germany, playing with the Munchner Philharmoniker—the Munich Philharmonic.

Travis’s parents put all of their attention and their energy into their music. There wasn’t much of either available for their son. He had been aching to reach the age to make his own decisions. Herr Kleinschmidt had pointed out that, newly fourteen, he was empowered in Germany to make his own decisions in this matter. Travis felt the new-found power.

Yes, he had wanted it. He had ached to have a man cover him and be inside him—to be that intimate with him.

When he arrived home, his parents were rehearsing with others in the living room. His father played the violin and his mother the cello. His mother smiled vaguely at him when Travis came to the door between the foyer and living room, but they were playing a difficult piece and Travis didn’t want to intrude. Travis wanted to be alone now and to think. And he wanted to ride his bicycle. He wanted to ride it to the end of the earth. But, no, what he really wanted to do was to ride back to Herr Kleinschmidt’s house and exercise his decision power again. But the music teacher had told him he wouldn’t see him again until the next week.

They would do it again next week, the teacher had said. Would the man bind Travis again and take even more from him without him being able to prevent it? Travis shuddered. He hoped so and let his mind fantasize on what that might be, how it might feel, how intimate the man would be with him.

Travis went to the kitchen and made himself a sandwich—another decision he could make on his own. When he’d eaten that, he went outside again, through the foyer, by the living room. Neither one of his parents looked up from their music.

He got on his bicycle and rode out into the countryside.

Travis was peddling, blindly, out into the country, on narrow roads through farmland. His mind was preoccupied by what had happened in Herr Kleinschmidt’s potting shed. Somehow the music teacher who had been touching and fondling Travis for weeks—and, liking the attention and liking the looks of the music teacher, Travis had let him become increasingly affectionate—had gotten Travis into the potting shed and bound to the table and had fucked him, all with Travis saying Ja, ja, ja—Yes, yes, yes.

And, somehow, when the German was finished fucking him, Travis had wanted him to do it again.

Travis had felt so, so alone since his family had moved to Germany during the summer and he was starved for attention, attention his parents weren’t giving him. And he was raging with hormones in the process of changing from a boy to a man at fourteen, and there were the questions and doubts on what sort of man he wanted to be sexually.

Once naked, Kleinschmidt had made love to Travis’s body with his hands and his lips and tongue and Travis had felt new sensations of arousal that he couldn’t completely understand but that were sheer pleasure. Even the fantasy of being held prisoner, helpless, as the man bound him, spread-eagled and draped, belly down on the table, arms and legs spread and tied to the four corners of the table. The man’s body—a man’s body—covering him and moving on him. Travis would have liked the man as naked as he was, to feel skin on skin, but Kleinschmidt had been anxious, in a hurry. Travis would have liked the man whispering in his ear what he was going to do to Travis and then do it, with Travis having no power to stop him, but the man had been too nervous to take and give this pleasure. Maybe next week.

The new-found pleasure and arousal of the man’s mouth between his bum cheeks, kissing and tonguing—eating him out. He had never, never felt anything like that before.

Kleinschmidt covering him close on top, kissing him, running his hands over Travis’s body. Travis moaning and moving languidly under the man. The gasp and pain of the man’s bulb at the boy’s hole. Then forcing himself inside. The pain and the stretch and the filling. Trying to relax on command, but not managing it. Writhing under the man, crying out. And then he was in and moving up inside Travis, stretching and filling him. Travis panting and crying and then the collapse and release of tension as the man started to move rhythmically inside him. The period of some pleasure coming in over the pain and then more and more.

The man inside Travis, closeness, intimacy. Attention and intimacy with another person that Travis wasn’t getting from anyone else. The kiss on the nape of the neck. The hands running under Travis—one to his chest, playing with his nipples, the other between his legs, fondling his balls, stroking his cock. Travis began moving in the same cadence as the man moving inside him and the man’s hand stroking his cock. The boy moved his hips with the motion. With a little cry, he came.

The man’s pumping became more insistent, more passionate and intense. He was building up to a crescendo. Tensing, jerking, releasing. Tensing, jerking, releasing. Tensing, jerking, releasing. The man collapsed on top of Travis’s back with a long sigh.

And then the blaring of a truck horn jerked Travis out of his remembering and, as the vehicle roared past the boy, Travis’s bicycle careened off the road, throwing Travis up and away and into the mud.