I did bear guilt. They kept telling me I shouldn’t feel any, but I couldn’t get out from underneath it and I couldn’t tell anyone why. The loving had been intense and among the best we’d ever had. That should have given me a clue, because it wasn’t joyous. It had been tortured. I should have realized it would be the last—that Nate intended it to be the last. All the signs were there. Before we went upstairs, Nate leading me by the hand, he wanted me to hear the tune of a new composition he was working on and made me stand behind him, my hands on his shoulders, as he played.

“Do you like it?” he asked.

“Yes,” I’d answered—truthfully. “It’s a haunting tune.”

“Remember it for me,” he said before turning and saying, “Take me upstairs now, please.”

He was calm on the surface, but so morose and, I knew even then, by how intensely he rode me, that he was teeming below the surface. He was still agreeing with me that all would work out, all would be well, as I lay on my bed, watching him dress, wanting him again. I was minimizing it, but he lied to me about how serious it was. It wasn’t until I heard the car start up that panic set in. He shouldn’t be driving; it was my car; he wasn’t licensed. I leapt out of bed and pulled my jeans on. I heard the crash before I’d raced out of the front door—and then seen the car wrapped around the tree on the road beyond my driveway. And Nate slumped over the wheel, lifeless.

I fell apart. I don’t think I have pulled much of anything together yet. They told me that there wasn’t anything I could do and I shouldn’t be taking it so hard, that they should have known how badly Nate was taking the diagnosis. How bad a diagnosis, I’d asked, and I’d blanched when they told me. They apologized about my car being wrecked—and I fell apart—and I couldn’t even tell them why.

“Uh, sorry.” I came back into the present standing there next the baggage carousel in the Birmingham airport, people having to jostle around me to get to their bags and me, with my suitcase right in front of me at the carousel. I heard the mumbles about just standing there in the way. I couldn’t disagree. There had been too many flashbacks to that day. Fewer as time went by and after I’d left the rehab center. But they were still there and they probably would be as long as I couldn’t talk to anyone about the guilt. I couldn’t do that to Nate, though. I hadn’t even been able to talk to the therapist about it, and he was a complete stranger.

Sighing, I left baggage claim and took the long walk to the car rental pickup. It had been the therapist’s idea to leave entirely for a while. God, I hoped he was right. I couldn’t take too much more of this being bottled up inside me. And I hadn’t been able to even think about sex since that day—or, rather, I’d thought about sex frequently but hadn’t been able to do anything about it.

“Get out of Weston. Leave Vermont for a while. Get out of the country. You can do your writing anywhere,” Doctor Jameson had said. “And find someone you can unload on,” he’d added. I think he was hurt I hadn’t been able to talk to him about it.

So, here I was in Birmingham, England, about to get into a rental car and head south, past Gloucester on the A48, into the Forest of Dean on the border with Wales, to Dragon Hall, wherever that was, to steep myself in English history and maybe get a long-dormant novel out of it—before I went mad. The chances were quite good I’d go mad from not being able to talk to anyone about Nate. No one else in the world had taken the path I had, or was saddled with the needs and wants I was.

I’d been tutoring him in English. He was a gifted student—and musician. I’d been sure he’d be a famous composer someday. He was sure of that too until his confidence—and his future—were stolen from him. But he needed help in expressing himself in writing. He’d come to my house outside of Weston, Vermont, twice a week, walking from his house in the town. As he become more comfortable in opening up in his writing, the more apparent it was of what we shared. I didn’t think anyone his age would want what I wanted from someone his age. But it showed forth in his writing that he did.

We’d work on English, more at the start than later. Later he’d spend time at my piano, composing and chatting with me as the tunes poured out of him. And even later, after his writing had become more expressive and revealing, much of our time together would be spent upstairs, in my bedroom under the eaves, me stretched out on top of him, his fingers playing tunes on my shoulder blades and his heels rubbing on my calves as I moved inside him. He was fully open to me, wanting all of me, from the very first time we lay together. I had never imagined this could be, but it was.

And then when he’d gotten the diagnosis, the time with me was more frenzied. He’d compose on the piano furiously as if there wasn’t time to get it all out, and in bed I’d be on my back and he’d be riding my cock hard, as if there were no tomorrow. He lied to me, though, the leukemia was worse and more advanced than he’d acknowledged to me. And he was less prepared and inclined to take it all slowly than he owned up to. I, smitten with him and absorbed in myself and my own pleasures, had overlooked the signs of how serious he was about not going on. Others missed them too. But no one else was as intimate with him as I was. No one else, to my knowledge, was fucking him. So, I should have listened more carefully, not just to what he was saying but also to what he wasn’t saying, to what he was signaling with his body.

And then when he did it and I fell apart, I couldn’t tell his parents—the world—why I was taking it so badly that I had to be institutionalized and, eventually, banished across the ocean. I couldn’t do that to Nate. How could I tell his parents—the world—under the circumstances that I had been fucking their fourteen-year-old son?

“No, that would be Dragoon Hall, not Dragon Hall, Mr. Nelson,” the caretaker who let me into the house said. “It tis a common misunderstanding. It’s a recent name, no older than the seventeenth century—which is new for a house whose foundations go back to the Normans and the fifth century. Named after the king’s dragoons who were housed here in the English Civil War, it were, and who were murdered right here in the entrance hall when the Roundheads rode their horses right into the house. You can see the marks of the horses’ hooves still gouging the floor planking, and it’s said that for a hundred years you could see the stains of the Dragoons’ blood spilled there, but that’s long past worn away.”

“Interesting, Charles,” I said. I’d met him down in the village of Newnham on the banks of the Severn River on the A48 that I’d taken south from Gloucester. He was the one who was to take care of anything that went wrong in the house while I was there. “Matthews have been caretakers here for hundreds of years,” he had said proudly.

My publishers had arranged for me to stay here, steeped in English history, while I attempted to pick up on the writing of the novel I’d dropped when Nate died. And, indeed, the house was interesting—beyond interesting. The latest house on these foundations dated from the Jacobian period, Charles said. The foundations went back to the Normans, and there were even remnants of something here from the Romans. It was a solid red-brick house with two principle rooms, a living room to the south and the dining room to the north of a center hallway on the main floor, the lower floor being where a kitchen, keeping room, and storerooms were located. Above the main floor were two large bedrooms, each now with bath, and a library over the center hall, and another, quite atmospheric, bedroom was in the attic, under the eaves. The house was set remotely in its own park, with stables and outbuildings that predated the current house and even included the ruins of a Roman temple.

“I suppose there are stories of the ghosts murdered Dragoons walking the floors at night,” I said in amusement. Charles Matthews, an older, gnarled, but solidly built, assuredly once handsome and strapping man in worn work clothes—obviously a hardworking, simple, close-to-the soil man of the fields—was not amused, though. He might have been any age from fifty to sixty-five.

“Aye. Those unfortunate king’s men and many more besides. This may be the most haunted house in England. It’s certainly one of the oldest ones. Many momentous and tragic events have been seen by these old walls. Besides those Dragoons, a family named Pline be in residence here in the mid seventeen hundreds. One master of the house of that family was murdered in his bed by his manservant for buggering a stable boy, the manservant’s brother, up in the attic room, all while his wife slept in the room below—during both the buggery and the murder. And the Plines lost the house when two brothers fought a duel over ownership up in the library room and both fell mortally wounded. A coven of witches is said to have burned out on the lawn for being Catholics, and there’s talk more recently of a woman in yellow being seen in the house, but no one knows the meat of the legend of that one.”

“Luckily, I can sleep through any creaking,” I said, with a smile. That wasn’t true of late. I’d only slept in starts and stops since I’d lost Nate. But I was sure that any sounds at night could be explained by the house’s age. “As long as the ghosts aren’t literary critics,” I added.

“Won’t be no one living to disturb you here, Mr. Nelson,” Charles said. “No one close by. I be told you’ll be wanting your privacy—that you’ll be writing a novel on the empire in the middle eighteen hundreds. You’ll find help on that—and most every other period in England—in the library. For light shopping, there be shops down in Newnham, but you’ll probably want to go up to Cinderford to lay on most of your stores. I’m told you’re booked for three months.” He looked at me appraisingly. I suppose that an American novelist was quite a novelty for him.

“That’s how long my publishers took the house for, yes,” I said. But I didn’t add that I had no idea how long I’d be here. I had no idea how long I’d be anywhere. I was just drifting along—with everything that was hurting me and that I couldn’t let out weighing me down.

After Charles left, I wandered around the house and then sat in the window of the upstairs library and stared out over the landscape. There wasn’t another house to be seen anywhere. I dozed at the writing desk facing the massive window in the library, which was located directly over the front entrance. The framing was in wood-separated diamonds and the edges were in ancient, wavy glass, but the center panel was in clear glass, giving a magnificent view over the verdant lawn and the wooded hills in the near distance.

Tired from the journey, I dozed—or, more accurately, went into a daydream such as I had been subject to in recent weeks. I woke, startled, with the sensation of the saddled roundheads riding their horses into the entrance hall below, their swords slashing away at the king’s Dragoons. But, fully awake, I saw that it only was a wagon, being pulled by two horses, that was driving past the house on the drive. It was only then that I saw that the wood-shave driveway continued on past the side of the house and into the woods. Two figures were on the wagon bench, one large and one small. Both were male. The larger figure was a robust man, muscular and large of frame—not fat, just large and muscular. The other was a berry brown boy. What caught my attention as they passed and focused it was the notion that the man had pronounced sandy-blond mutton chops.

I reached for my laptop and entered my observation in my file of short story notes. One never knew when something seen or sensed could be used in a short story. Indeed, the legends of this house that Charles had already told me could easily get the creative juices going. I’d have to invite him up to the house for further discussions. I found Charles interesting, and of a familiarity that aroused me. And, as he suggested, I’d have to mine the shelves of this library for ideas.

I couldn’t face a major shopping trip just now, so I decided to take the harrowing ride down the hill and into Newnham to check out what Charles described as a couple of mom and pop convenience stores. I should be able to buy enough provisions to tide me over to the beginning of the week and then I’d go up to the larger town at Cinderford for some serious grocery shopping. The road down the hill was a narrow, winding lane, bordered closely by hedgerows. It was a breath-holding, prayer-producing challenge to navigate. But the road continuing on up to Cinderford didn’t look any more inviting.

Newnham was just a small collection of buildings with the Severn River slowly flowing beyond. But there were a couple of pubs, one, set off from the other buildings, curiously called The Buggerman—English pub names were always something to ponder and try to decipher—and there were, as Charles had promised, a couple of hole-in-the-wall convenience stores.

The one I entered appeared to be run by a South Asian family. I found what I wanted, but as I shopped, I was aware I was being watched. I looked, casually, to see who it was, and my heart—and another part of my anatomy—went all aflutter. An early teens’ boy, dark complexioned and so handsome that he could almost be described as pretty, was closely watching me with a little smile on his face.

For the first time since I’d been with Nate, I felt myself stirring inside. He was perfectly formed and sensual in the way that had always moved me and that I couldn’t talk about and had only rarely acted on. I’d acted on it with Nate, though, and that had ended in tragedy. I couldn’t afford that anymore—that stirring in my life had to be repressed. It would break my heart to go there again, I was sure.

I quickly paid the woman—the beautiful boy’s mother?—for the small basket of groceries I’d bought. I couldn’t resist taking another look toward the counter where the young boy was standing, though. I nearly hyperventilated when I saw that he was still looking at me with a small smile on his face and that he was fingering a packet of Trojan condoms hanging on a wall of hooks at the drug counter.

I moved as rapidly but unobtrusively as I could out into the village street. It couldn’t be possible. I must have imagined it. He couldn’t have intentionally been signaling anything. This was what Doctor Jameson said might happen with never-calming medicine he had subscribed for me. He’d said the illusions might be the side effects.

“It might give you an overactive imagination—from time to time confuse you a bit and make you think you see what’s not there,” he’d said. “Of course, as a writer you may find that gives you an edge professionally. It might help you weave your stories. The medicine can get addictive, though, so we mustn’t let you become dependent on it.” We’d both laughed at that, but I had been having flashes of this overimagination even before he’d prescribed the medicine. It had been like urges and wants anxious to bust out of me—my inner self yearning to stop holding onto what I knew should not be released.

It was growing dark as I returned to Dragoon Hall, mercifully not having met another car on the narrow, hilly lane. I quickly opened packets and wolfed down some food without even warming it up. Figuring out the appliances in the lower-floor kitchen could come in the light of the next day.

I went back up the library and opened up my laptop. I’d taken some notes on research I’d already done on England’s colonial empire in the nineteenth century and, suddenly energized, I immediately started drafting text. As some point, however, weariness overtook me, and I lowered my head onto the desk in front of the library window and went to sleep.

I woke up and lifted my head off the desk facing the library window. I was in a pool of light cast by a desk lamp but otherwise darkness was everywhere—in the library and out on the lawn down to a pond, the surface of which was shimmering in moonlight. My attention went to a hint of light among the trees off in the direction where the drive going past Dragoon Hall disappeared into the woods off to my right.

Charles had said that there weren’t any other houses in sight of the hall. If these lights were coming from a building, it wasn’t at that great a distance—just over the top of a hillside to the north of the house, beyond the Roman temple ruins Charles had shown me. But it would be in a wooded area.

I felt stiff and there was a stitch in my side from having been hunched over the desk while I slept. I felt restless and not sleepy now that I’d dozed—for how long, I didn’t know. I checked my watch, and when I realized I hadn’t changed the time on that since I’d gotten on the plane in New York, I looked around for a clock. There was one on the mantel over the fireplace, but it was in the shadows too much to see the time from here, or even if the clock was working. There was a flashlight on the desk by the desk lamp. Charles had warned me that the electricity wasn’t always that reliable here and the wiring was ancient in some of the rooms. Not all of the rooms were used that much.

The flashlight worked. I stood and went to the mantel. The clock was ticking. It was after midnight here. I went back to the desk and looked out the window. The pattern of lights in the wood had changed. There weren’t as many points of light seen between the trunks of trees as there had been before. I stretched and yawned.

I should go to bed, but I felt restless. What I really needed was to take a short walk. It was a warm night for October. I had a flashlight in my hand that worked. I was curious about the light in the woods. It didn’t appear to be far away, and the narrow wood-shavings-bedded road seemed to run right to where the lights were. I decided to take a short walk and explore.

If there hadn’t still been a light on in the cottage, I would have missed it and walked on by. This could have been because it was nighttime, although the moon was full enough that, until I entered the copse of trees, I didn’t need the flashlight. Indeed, I didn’t turn it on even when I got into the woods because I had the light ahead to guide me and kept to the track of the drive. I might have missed the cottage even in the day, though. The foliage around it was overgrown, it was built of stone, with a slate roof and ivy growing up the sides, and it was set into a hillside of like-colored rock and moss.

There had been more lights on, I was sure, when I’d first noticed them from the library window. Now there was only one, and I was drawn to it.

It was a bedroom, the furniture rustic wood, the floor and walls rough stone. They were on the double bed, the man and the boy I had seen riding on the horse-pulled wagon into these woods earlier in the day. The were both naked. The contrast between them was startling. The boy, lying on his back on the bed, was berry brown. He was small, perfectly formed, both his features and his proportions delicately balanced. He couldn’t have been more than fourteen or fifteen. I judged him to be South Asian—jet black, silky hair dipping down to his shoulders, dark eyes, hard, well-defined pecs, slim waist and hips, and a boy’s cock and balls. He was bound, his arms stretched over his head and tied with rope to the bed’s headboard. His ankles were tied together with rope too, but with a play of several inches. His legs were raised and his ankles were hooked on the man’s shoulders, the rope lead running between the ankles behind the man’s neck. Although bound, he didn’t seem to be in distress.

Compared to the beautiful young South Asian boy—Hindu or Urdu, I thought—who made me go hard with my first sensation of sexual need since Nate had died, the man was monstrous. He was tall and solid, heavily muscular and so hard bodied that his veins popped out on his body. He had nearly three times the body weight of the boy he was fucking, and he was protectively cradling the boy’s body under his. He was well into his forties, giving the impression of having been a soldier who had seen serious combat. His skin was rough in contrast to the smooth silkiness of the boy he was fucking. There were marks as from sword slashes on his torso and one wound, in particular, on his leg was deep and had set into a deep crease across a thigh. His facile features were rugged, yet handsome and sexy, in a thuggish way. His most distinctive feature other than how pronounced the bulges of his muscles were his sandy-blond mutton chop sideburns.

But of course the mutton chops weren’t the man’s most prominent feature. A man that large couldn’t help but have a large cock. But also when a man was that large of frame, a large cock wasn’t as noticeable. But the cock on this man, hard, thick, and long as it moved in and out of the stretched hole of the diminutive South Asian boy, was definitely noticeable and attention getting.

The boy appeared to be in ecstasy, lying back docile and quiet, his pelvis moving slightly, in the rhythm of the fuck. The expression on his face was both beleaguered and beatific. There was every evidence that he was luxuriating in the size and feel of the shaft working inside him.

Mesmerized, I stood outside the pool of light streaming from the cottage’s bedroom window and watched the man, hovering over the boy and taking him in a missionary position, the boy’s pelvis raised high off the bed, his legs, the ankles bound together, rising up the man’s massive, muscular, scared chest, slow fuck the boy into heaven. The boy’s hole was being stretched impossibly wide to take the thickness of the man, but they must be experienced lovers as, with low moans that I could hear from outside the cottage and murmurings in some foreign language that obviously were terms of want and acceptance, the boy was taking the cock, in long, deep strokes, well.

Eventually, when I was inside the boy myself and heard the same murmured foreign phrase in Hindi—”Han. Han. Is tarah. Bhad men jao mujhe gahari”—I was to request and receive a translation from the man—”Yes. Yes. Just like that. Fuck me deep.”

I stayed, with my cock out and stroking it, until both bodies on the bed tensed and shuddered and both released their seed and I had done so as well in the ivy under the window. Then I withdrew as quietly as I could manage and stumbled back to Dragoon Hall. That had been the first time after Nate’s death that I had been in heat enough to go hard and masturbate myself. The second time was later that night, on my bed on the upper floor of Dragoon Hall, when, unable to sleep or to get the sexual coupling I had observed in the hidden cottage out of my mind—moving from images of being fucked by the rugged man with the mutton chops to fantasies of fucking the delicate Hindu boy—I stroked myself to completion again and sank into the sleep of the dead.

I swam back up into a dream-like state in the darkness of the night cradled in the arms of Mutton Chops, held loosely, but securely, incapacitated, as my wrists were tied to the headboard overhead and my ankles, hooked on the massive man’s shoulders, were tied together, with the connecting rope running behind Mutton Chops’s thick neck. He was working his monster cock inside me and I was panting hard and willing my channel to open to him. He penetrated me slowly, deeply. When he started to pump me, I writhed under him, crying out, “Yes! Yes! Just like that! Fuck me deep!” The fucking went on and on and on.

I woke in the morning, naked and stretched out on the bed on my back, a puddle of cum on my belly. I felt, first my wrists and then my ankles, for burn marks, but there were none. Nor was my channel torn or even sore. But it had seemed so real. Had I taken the medicine Doctor Jameson gave me—the medicine that he’d said might give me hallucinations? Yes. The packet was empty on the night stand.

I heard the clearing of a voice. I looked toward the door to the corridor, which was open. Charles was standing in the doorway, a slight smile on his face.

“The door was left open. I was just checking to make sure we didn’t have an intruder,” he said.

There I was, stretched out on the bed, naked. There was every reason to believe that I had masturbated in half sleep before I had become conscious. I don’t know how long he had been standing at the door, though. I had awakened with my hand grasping my cock and with morning wood and cum on my belly and I’d felt my wrists and ankles. What could he have thought?

Whatever Charles thought, he wasn’t quick to leave the doorway, and one of his hands was hovering over his crotch. I took another look at him. He was old, yes, probably in his fifties, and he was chunky. But it was more muscle than fat. He wasn’t a handsome man and he had of the look of a field worker about him. But for the first time since we had met, I found myself wondering if he was hung. If he was experienced. If he preferred women or men. In many ways he’d been like the man in the field near the Vermont boy’s prep school I’d gone to who had been the first one to lay me—there between the rows of waving corn stalks in the field—when I was fourteen.

The farmer hadn’t forced himself on me. I had wanted it and he’d known that. He’d been old, but hung and experienced, and he had slowly given it all to me. And I had opened to him, taken him deep inside, and moved with him, begging for more of it. I couldn’t get enough of him; he did it all—and then did it again.

Could it be? Could I be coming back to life sexually for the first time since Nate and I had fucked that last time months ago? Doctor Jameson had said that what I may have needed was a complete change of setting.

I looked back in Charles’s direction to imagine him, conceivably a strapping, masterful man in his prime, without the baggy farming clothes he was wearing, but he was gone. He had reminded me of someone—someone from my past. But I couldn’t think of that now. I was here to forget more than to remember and to work on finishing my novel on the period of the decline of England’s empire. It was time to mine Dragoon Hall’s library material. I rose and padded, naked, to the adjacent bathroom. As I past the door to the corridor, I saw that Charles had not withdrawn all that far. He was standing in the corridor, watching me—and smiling knowingly.

I had a productive morning and early afternoon pouring through the rich resources of the Dragoon Hall history collection, dragging dusty tome after tome over to the desk facing the library window and interlacing periods of intense reading with productive hours of making notes and actually drafting paragraphs that progressed the plot of my novel. I also snatched interludes of looking out over the lush shades of green of the Forest of Dean landscape on the edge of Wales. I was concentrating on the unrest in India in the mid nineteenth century in my research. I wondered who was in residence here at Dragoon Hall during that period and what, if any, connection they’d had to India’s colonial empire. Among the treasures gathering dust throughout the house were items connecting the hall with the rest of the world—China, Egypt, and India.

As I had done the previous day, I worked myself into a pleasant exhaustion and, at length, pushed my laptop to one side, lowered my head on my folded arms on the desk blotter, and dozed off.

The first sensation of wakefulness was the sound of a flute playing a familiar tune I couldn’t identify in a mere whisper on the wind. What brought me to attention, though, was a rasping grating of the iron door knocker on the front door in the entrance hall below me.

I opened the door—to Mutton Chops. It was the same brutish, sexy older man I had observed fucking a bound Hindu boy in the cottage down the road and tucked into a hillside the previous night. I had nearly convinced myself that last night’s observation hadn’t happened at all, that it had just been an illusion created by Doctor Jameson’s nerve medicine, but here he was, standing in front of me—nearly naked. He was bare-chested, his torso Zeus like, magnificent despite his apparent age and display of old combat wounds. He was wearing only tight, tan-colored linen breeches that took his appearance back a hundred and fifty years. The tan of his body was deeper than that of his breeches. The breeches were form fitting; low rise at the waist, showing the creases of his underbelly taking the eye to his crotch; and ending just below the knee. The breeches had a lace-up codpiece pouch that more pronounced the generous endowment he enjoyed, as I had seen the previous night, than hid it. He was barefoot.

“I believe you lost your torch last night,” he said to me when I opened the door and had been standing there, speechless, for a long moment.

“My torch?” I asked, dumbly. I looked down at the beefy, calloused hand he was holding out to see that he was holding the flashlight I’d taken on my nocturnal adventure the previous night. Until then I hadn’t realized I had lost it somewhere along the way in my stumble back to the house.

“Oh, thank you,” I said, reaching out for the flashlight he held in his left hand only for his right hand to reach up and grasp my hand. He held my hand in his strong, yet gentle grip. I should have pulled my hand away, but I didn’t. I was captive to him there on the threshold of Dragoon Hall.