“We’re being watched.”

I turned Will’s body a bit to where I could see up the dimly lit corridor leading from the drafting studio at Taliesin back to the lights of the main house, where Frank Lloyd Wright was entertaining Aisaku Hayashi, manager of the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, his wife, and Japanese architect Tori Yoshitake. It was unseasonably warm that February of 1916 and it was the first entertaining Frank was doing at his reconstructed complex in southern Wisconsin, near Madison, since the fire there two years earlier during which his mistress, Mamah Borthwick, and her children had been murdered by a disgruntled employee and the main house burned. Frank said he had to entertain the Japanese because he’d been trying to get the commission to renovate and add to Tokyo’s premier Imperial Hotel since 1911.

I’d been among those Frank said had to come to the party—not because I was presentable in fancy society, which I wasn’t, but because I was his chief stained-glass artist, and Frank wanted the key artisans who would be working on the Tokyo project to be there to convince the Japanese to hire us. Frank was nearly out of money—he always was nearly out of money—and said he needed this job—that we all needed this job for the Taliesin world to be able to continue. I wasn’t one of his pansy artists. I’d come to the stained-glass specialty the rough way—as a welder and glass blower—but Frank did the designs himself, so I only had to do the hot-lead part of the work, and I had become very good at getting the results Frank wanted.

Frank had said to be nice to the visitors. I’d been more interested in being nice to Will Fisher, one of the new brick-layer hirers, who was serving refreshments at the party. And there was a young Japanese guy among the visitors that I’d been exchanging looks with too. I don’t know why I was so horny that night, though. I usually kept my personal hunting business away from the main house and stuck with guys closer to my age. Will was only twenty-two to my thirty-one, and the Japanese youth couldn’t be more than eighteen. But he looked so exotic and sexy in that kimono or whatever the Japanese called the robe he was wearing—all of the Japanese visitors had come dressed that way—that I was turned on by how it flowed and piqued the curiosity of what lay underneath it.

His name was Hirahito Sekenai and he apparently was some royal Japanese something or other and had spent the fall studying architecture at the University of Wisconsin in nearby Madison. Hayashi had brought him along to meet Frank because the lad could help getting the royals to support the hotel redesign. But he’d done as much looking at me as I’d done at him, and I could tell that he wanted it—and from me. I wasn’t all the sure that that was what Frank meant about being nice to the visitors, though.

He was the one Will said was watching us from down the hall, where the corridor to the drafting studio connected with the now-reconstructed main house. He was standing in the light from the house in his Japanese robe—blue silk with golden-beaked white herons on it—looking sexy, and watching me almost fucking Will. I certainly was intending to fuck Will.

I had Will backed up to one of the brick columns running down the corridor to the drafting studio. He had a hand palming my basket and I had one hand cupping his chin to hold him in place while we kissed. My other hand was stuffed down the back of his pants—a finger inside him. I wasn’t a subtle top, and the submissives seemed to like that about me. I took command and claimed victory.

Will was moaning and I was about to put him on my cock. But he tensed up when the Japanese youth showed up to watch us. When he pointed the young man out, it broke the spell.

“Maybe later,” I said, as I dropped the hand cupping his chin and withdrew the finger from his ass. “I’ll stay around until you guys have got the kitchen cleaned up and we can go over to my cottage if you want.”

“I want,” Will said, as he straightened up what he was wearing and padded back to the house, giving Hirahito a lingering look, not all that friendly, as he reached and passed him and disappeared into the main house. The main house was a different world from the eerie, dimly lit drafting studio. Someone was playing the piano and there was a tittering of conversation.

The Japanese youth stood his ground while I slowly walked back toward the main house. I really didn’t want to go back into the party. I was out of my element there. These weren’t my class of people. I was a horse of a skilled laborer, not one of Frank’s pansy artists. I knew my job, but I didn’t know how to discuss the art of it with anyone, let alone some Japanese people. They’d want me to compare my work with some other artist, and that wasn’t me. I did what I did and Frank liked it. That was all that was necessary.

I paused by Hirahito as I reached him. God, he was young. Eighteen I’d heard. I hadn’t done any guy that young. Even Will was young for who I normally did. It would be like robbing the cradle. But that look. I knew what a guy wanted when he gave me that look. And Hirahito was such a sexy little thing. And that exotic robe he was wearing. I wondered what he had on under that.

Without thinking, I leaned over and kissed him on the mouth. He opened to me, taking my tongue inside. It was lingering, sweet kiss. When I came out of it, I turned and walked back down the corridor, away from the party and toward the dimly lit drafting studio, a long, narrow brick-walled room, trimmed with wood—very much the Frank Lloyd Wright design style—with a row of drafting tables arrayed back to the far wall.

Hirahito followed me.

I found out what he was wearing under that Japanese kimono of his—just a loin cloth sort of thing that fell apart and away when I unknotted it. I laid him on a drafting table midway down the dimly lit room and laid him good. He wanted it bad. He was such a small, slim thing. I could barely believe he was even eighteen. I didn’t I’d feel right about fucking a guy that young and small, but I was wrong. I loved it. God, he had a tight hole. I knew he suffered as I forced myself in, but he made clear he wanted it, muttering, “Hai, hai. Watashiwo fakku.” Even without a translation then, I knew he was telling me he wanted it all inside him no matter how difficult that was to achieve. And I did get it all inside him, and he moved with me in the fuck.

He was dusky-skinned, smooth and supple. And flexible. After I’d gotten my dick in him, which was a chore—and very enjoyable as he writhed and moaned but he definitely wanted it—I moved him this way and that way on the table, laying him on his back, with his knees pressed up into his chest and pumping him, turning him to his side and dicking him sideways, and then on his back again with his ankles on my shoulders and the palms of his hands working my bulging chest and nipples. I fucked him from behind, bent over the table, and arching his head back toward me by using the sash of his robe like a leash around his neck. The little fucker couldn’t get enough of it. He coaxed me onto my back on the drafting table and he saddled on me, his robe gaping open and my hands working his perfect little torso as he languidly rose and fell on my cock.

He left me there, with a smile and an “Arigatou—Thank you.” I got that word, because they’d been saying it all evening at the party. But then he added, “Anata ha ookina, utsakushi Otokodesu,” and then, when I gave him a confused look as I was readjusting the fancy clothes I didn’t feel comfortable in, he smiled shyly and said in precise English, “I said you are a big, beautiful man. Very big, in fact.” Then he turned and padded away, up the corridor between the drafting studio and the main house, back to the party.

Shit, he was young. I had no idea I’d like do a small guy that young. It was almost anticlimactic when I fucked Will Fisher in my bed in my cottage on the Taliesin grounds later that night. I’d never fucked a guy nine years younger than me before I’d fucked Hirahito, thirteen years younger than me, earlier that evening. I was already doing the comparisons and thinking I might want them as young as I could get them. The Japanese youth’s small, supple body had been something else.

In any event, I’d done what Frank told me to do—I’d been nice to Hirahito, one of the Japanese visitors.

We sailed for Yokohama, Japan, in December 1916, from San Francisco aboard the Empress of Asia. Frank was on board, but we rarely saw him—even when we got to Tokyo and were starting work on the Imperial Hotel redesign and reconstruction. Stanley Galt, the building supervisor, was the one who kept us together—and he was one to try to keep an eye on me, to the extent he could, which wasn’t much. Since I’d laid the sweet, eighteen-year-old youth, Hirahito Sekenai, earlier that year and discovered that I liked them younger than I’d been laying them, I’d sniffed around other eighteen-year-olds on and near the Taliesin grounds and had gained a “robbing the cradle” reputation.

Not that I had trouble getting eighteen-year-old guys under me. My welding and glass-blowing skills gave me a body of Vulcan, guys claimed that my dark looks were easy to look at, for some reason guys gravitated to my hirsute body, and I’m betting I was the most hung guy in southern Wisconsin. I try to be the most active coverer of young men in the state.

Stan and I were standing at the rails of the Empress of Asia the third day out of San Francisco, when I saw the boy. Stan was on point but I’d gone beyond him.

“One of the ship’s officers was after me about the attentions you were giving one of the young dining room waiters, Cliff,” he was saying. I was looking beyond him down the deck, though, at a family that had just come out on deck and was settling in lounge chairs.

“Which one, Stan?” I asked.

“Which ship’s officer?” Stan asked.

“No, which waiter I’ve been topping?” I asked, not being able to suppress a grin. He was taking this all too seriously, I thought. Indeed, there had been several waiters who had writhed under me. I thought of them as Tom, Dick, and Harry, although I hadn’t taken names. I’d had them all, and I don’t think any of them complained to a ship’s officer. I’d had most of them twice and they were sniffing after me for thirds. I had found that ocean liner dining stewards liked muscles, body hair, and big dicks.

“Well, shit, Cliff Mills,” Stan was saying, “I hope when we get to Japan...” But I wasn’t tuned in to him anymore. I was watching the exotic and sexy little piece who had gone to the railing of the ship up the line and turned and looked at me with “that look” while an attractive couple, but older than he was—his parents?—settled on the deck chairs. He was mixed race, Caucasian and something Asian, having gotten the best of both worlds. He was in a suit, marking the upper classes who insisted on dressing formally and expensively even when three days out on the ocean. He looked like a little business man—one who had plenty of money. He was small and trim, with jet-black-wavy hair, alabaster skin, and a slight, arousing Asian cast to a beautiful face. All made sense if he, indeed, was the son of the couple in the deck chairs. The man, not much older than I was, was a handsome, tall, well-built Nordic blond, full of assurance and dripping in wealth. The woman was a beautiful, porcelain Japanese beauty.

One of the dining room stewards I had spiked and who Stan was admonishing me about, came out on deck at the moment and took drink orders from the couple. He went to the rail to get the young man’s order and the two exchanged more than a drink order, as they both looked down the rail, to me. The youth asked something and the steward whispered something, looking at me. The young Japanese-American lad followed his eyes and smiled at me.

I went hard with want. He was just a boy, though, younger than the eighteen-year-olds I then was indulging in. Maybe sixteen. But I was trying them younger and younger and finding the younger they were, the more satisfaction I got in getting my dick in them. The look and smile he was giving me told me that the steward had revealed what I had to offer and that the young man wanted me—wanted me inside him.

His name was Matthew Kronberg. His father was Stephan Kronberg, a steel manufacturer, extending his business to Japan, which was beginning to modernize and which had recently lost a significant number of buildings to an earthquake and resultant widespread fires that necessitated rebuilding. The Japanese wanted to rebuild stronger, so the market in steel had strengthen significantly as a result.

As I estimated, Matthew was sixteen and I wasn’t his first, but close. I fucked him on the bunk in my small, private cabin, and he wanted it so much the first time that I fucked him twice more before we reached Yokohama.

He looked so innocent and scared when I got him naked and under me on my bunk. He was mixed reaction going with his mixed heritage, both as sweet as hell—struggling against me, making me pin him down, less than half my size and weight, while all the time saying, “Yes, yes, fuck me; be good to me.” I was good to him—eight and a half thick inches good to him. He writhed and struggled until I had him under control, pinning his wrists together over his head, possessing his mouth, and finger fucking him open with the fingers of my other hand, while he moaned and bucked against me. But when I got the cock bulb where my fingers had been, he brought his pelvis up to meet me and to give me a straight shot up into him. He spread and bent his legs and raised his hips, leveraging off his feet pressed flat onto the mattress. And I was in no more than a couple of inches when he bucked up with his pelvis and took the rest inside. We held there, me impaling, him impaled, both panting, while his passage slowly stretched to accommodate me when I got around to pumping him.

He shuddered and muttered, “Fuck me. Fuck me good,” and I did. He was rocking as hard I was during the fuck. When I released his wrists, instead of trying to push me away, he was running his fingers through my chest hair and still going with the rhythm of the fuck.

At sixteen, Matthew Kronberg was no innocent. He was a luscious lay, and he dragged the peak of my arousal down another couple of years into the world of the young.

I can’t complain about the reception in Yokohama. We were met like royalty by the manager of the Imperial Hotel, Aisaku Hayashi, and various royals, including my own young conquest, Hirahito Sekenai—although I’ll have to admit that perhaps it was I who was his conquest—and, I was told, by a fine collection of Japanese royals, who conveyed us to Tokyo in style.