I watched the beautiful boy rise from the pool on the terrace of Lorenzo’s cliffside Isle of Capri villa overlooking the sea pick up a leaf skimmer and walk gracefully around the pool, skimming the surface. The handsome boy frequently looked up to where I was sitting in a canvas-bottom chair, trying to look at some opera stage set drawings. I frequently looked at him too. Federico was nude, his willowy boy’s body moving as if in a languid dance. He was the seventeen-year-old amante maschile—male lover—of my host, the Italian opera impresario, Lorenzo Scarlotti.

I couldn’t concentrate on the drawings. I watched the beautiful blond Italian boy move around the pool. He seemed to be purposely doing a sensuous, slow dance for me to watch. My hand went below the waistband of the swimming trunks I was wearing and my mind went to dreams of “what if.” Federico had been flirting with me for days and I’d been resisting. I’d been there before; I didn’t want to fall into that again. I’d have to go back to the States where it was out of the question and could only frustrate me.

Federico put the skimmer down and climbed the stone stairs to the covered porch overlooking the pool that I was sitting on. He knelt before me and his hands went to the waistband of my swimming trunks. Guiltily, I withdrew my hand, but of course he had seen me—had known what I was doing as I watched him at the pool.

He looked up into my eyes and smiled, his sensuous lips parting and the tip of his tongue darting out to moisten his lips. He tugged at my swimsuit and, as in a trance, I lifted my buttocks off the canvas seat of the chair, and he pulled the suit off my legs. Now I was as naked as he was. He clearly could see now that I was in erection. I had been for some time, even when I was watching him swim in the pool. I had gone hard when he’d walked by me from inside the villa and glided down to the pool, naked. Everyone at the villa other than I had been going naked: Federico, the two houseboys, Lorenzo himself. I had been resisting the siren call, although there wasn’t anything wrong with my body, even at thirty-nine.

Federico’s head lowered to my lap and he took my cock in his mouth, letting his hands slide up my chest to rest on and toy with my nubs. Giving a deep sigh, I ran the fingers of my hands into his blond curls, holding his face to my groin, and leaned back in the chair, looking up to the decorated ceiling of the porch and dreaming.

The temptation had just gotten to be too much.

Federico rose from his kneeling position and moved over my seated body, straddling my pelvis and draping his shapely legs over the arms of the chair. I did nothing to stay him. I found myself clutching his waist, helping him to go into position. I had dreamed of him; I had dreamed of the houseboys. But I had made no move on any of them before. The houseboys were only fourteen, although Lorenzo had laughed and said that was the age of consent here in Italy. Federico was Lorenzo’s amante maschile and had been for three years, I had been informed. And Lorenzo was my host, and, at the moment, my collaborator. I could not be doing this with his servants or young lover, even though I knew that Lorenzo himself covered them all.

But I was doing it—or rather Federico was guiding it. He reached under his buttocks, grasped my erection, put the bulb in place, and descended into my lap with a little moan. His lips went to mine and opened for me. I moved my tongue into his mouth cavity, hungrily feasting on him. He was so sweet, so supple, so tight. My hands went to cupping his pert buttocks mounds, and I lifted and lowered him on my buried cock. I did nothing to stop this. We were fucking. The boy took the cock deep. He was a little whore and knew how to move on a shaft.

I pulled away from the kiss and involuntarily cried out in a strangled voice, “Yes, yes. Ride me. Take it. Take it!” My need and my desire were drowning my good sense. I grasped his buttocks and spread them open, giving me more depth. The boy could not leave me now. I must have my completion.

Lifting him and slamming him down; lifting him and slamming him down. I went straight to heaven.

Federico was stroking his own cock as he rose and fell on mine. At length he gave a little cry and released on my belly. But we fucked on until I felt myself rising. I embraced him close, panting, murmuring of the beauty and wonder of the boy.

He whispered in my ear. “Ora. Ora. Dammelo adesso—Now. Now. Give it to me now,” and I tensed, jerked, and released; tensed, jerked, and released, bathing the boy deep with my pent-up cum. Never had I had so much cum to give. Never before had I climaxed this well. He had been whispering, “Si, si, si,” as we both experienced my rolling ejaculation, breeding the boy.

Federico collapsed on top of me, panting and moaning softly. “Si, si, si. Sei così grande. Sei così buono con me—You’re so big. You’re so good to me.”

I whispered, “Oh, you beautiful boy. But I’m so sorry. This should not have happened.” This was only a momentary pause, though. He gave a little laugh, bounced off my lap, gave me a saucy look, and ran down to the pool and dove in.

Embarrassed and chagrined, ashamed of myself, I rose from the chair, scattering the sketches on the stone floor and stumbled back into the villa. En route I passed Lorenzo, who was standing in the doorway into the villa. He smiled a benign smile at me as I passed him. I have no idea how long he had been standing there. But, then, Lorenzo had had a distraction of his own. He was naked, dripping cock in his hand, and crouched at his side, an arm around Lorenzo’s leg, dribbles of cum on his face, knelt one of the fourteen-year-old villa houseboys, Ettore.

“Are you ready to take Ettore and Tasso to your bed now, Clay?” Lorenzo asked in my wake. I didn’t answer. I just kept walking. I should never have confided my plight in fleeing from New York to Lorenzo.

When I came back moments later to retrieve my sketches, I saw Lorenzo, laughing, pulling Federico into his bedroom. Federico was laughing as well. Were they laughing at me for showing I was frustrated and embarrassed? What had I gotten myself into in agreeing to come to Italy?

Lorenzo Scarlotti and I had been at Oxford together. We’d become fast friends there both because we both were studying branches of the music arts—Lorenzo on conducting operas and me on putting sets behind them—and because we weren’t British. I was American and he was Italian. We always found ourselves in the “foreign student” groupings, and, having found we both were gay but were not compatible gay, both being tops, we cruised together. As neither one of us wanted to seem gay in the college environment, though, we held secrets together and cruised well beyond Oxford. I suppose, when we both became infatuated with the same boy and when neither of us were upset that he was fourteen, this only solidified the bond. That and the fact that we shared the boy on a double bed in a sleazy Bournemouth resort hotel for an entire weekend and thus were bound in a way no two other men would be.

I went back to New York and managed to work my way into being a set designer in several realms, from Broadway musicals to Cathedral Christmas concerts. My love remained with opera, but there were limited opportunities in the States for me until I became well known enough to have a crack at sets for a Met production now and again. Lorenzo returned to Italy and quickly, thanks to a series of lover mentors, rose to premier standing as an opera conductor in Naples.

Lorenzo continued bedding boys, the age of consent being fourteen in Italy, and our connection remained through writing largely because the age of consent in the States wasn’t fourteen, and I had to live vicariously through his description in his letters of his hedonist sex life with boys. But then I had a fourteen-year-old boy myself and made the possible mistake of writing Lorenzo about it—probably to compare with what he included in his letters, a new boy in each letter. Italy was so much easier than the States was for that.

The boy’s name—the name of my boy in New York—was Jamie. I didn’t seduce or entrap him. He came on to me, and I’ve always been sure he had been active before me—and simultaneously with having sex with me, actually.

Jamie was the son of the conductor of the New York City Opera’s production of “La Fanciulla del West,” a modern opera on the California Gold Rush, which then was in production. As they practiced, I was designing their sets. I sat out in the hall and imagined and sketched as they practiced, and Jamie, whose school was nearby, came to the theater and sat in the hall and worked on his homework until he could go home with his father.

He was a beautiful, small Jewish boy—olive skinned and with dark hair and eyes and a perfectly formed body. He also was hyperactive, quick witted, and a bit of a smart aleck, spending more time moving around the hall and flirting and engaging in chit chat than in concentrating on his schoolwork. He flirted with me too, slowing down my design work because he was attention getting. I wanted to talk with him—and flirt with him. He was so alive, so attractive. He talked suggestively to me, but I thought a lot of that was just that he was being raised in the city—in New York City.

Jamie made the move, although I’d been thinking about him in that way for a couple of weeks. I went to the men’s room one afternoon—not behind the stage to the restrooms the practicing orchestra members and working stage hands would use, but out in the theater lobby, which was closed to the public then. That restroom was close to where I was sitting and imagining and sketching ideas for sets for the opera. I’d saddled up to a urinal and was urinating when Jamie came into the men’s room. He came to the urinal beside me and unzipped and took his cock out. He looked over to mine and I looked over at his. We stood there after we’d both pissed. I was half hard, just from the thought of the situation and of the youth and smallness of him. I hadn’t been brave enough to go that young since my Oxford days.

He reached out and touched my cock, tentatively at first but then more purposefully. I leaned forward, my palms against the wall behind the urinal as he wrapped his fingers around it and we both focused on it getting hard just being held by him. He unbuckled me with the other hand. My trousers slid to the floor and Jamie pushed my briefs down. I stepped out of them. He had a thumb on my urethra slit and I moaned for him. It was all him. I don’t know if I’d carried through with it if he’d given over the control and the preparation, but he didn’t. He put his free hand to unbuckling himself and stripping off his trousers and briefs as well.

Neither of us said anything to the other. We savored the moment. I think if he’d said something, it would have broken the spell and I would have managed to retreat. He touched me on the hip, I turned toward him, he went onto his knees, and took me in his mouth. I held his head of unruly raven curls between my hands and guided him rather than making any effort to push him away. He was led in his attentions by my sighs and deep moans—and by the throbbing hardness of me in his throat.

There was a bit of an antechamber at the entry of the men’s room, with a table against the wall. That’s where I fucked Jamie, putting him on his back, with his legs raised and spread. I crouched between his thighs and feasted on his puckered hole and his pert cock and balls before nestling in between his thighs, gripping his hips with my hands, penetrating him, and pulling him back and forth on my cock. All the time I had the feeling that he’d done this before. He certainly had no reluctance to doing it now. I don’t think I could have done it if he hadn’t just moved it along.