Sandra had been doing a crossword puzzle as we waited for the visiting author from New Zealand to arrive at our Chelsea apartment.

“You’re the prose man. What’s a word for ‘inconstant’?” she asked, stretching her long legs, in the turquoise pedal pushers, down the length of the white sofa. The tunic she wore over them, showing her cleavage almost all the way down to her navel, was the same white as the sofa. I assumed she’d stay on the sofa as much as possible while the New Zealand author was here—it highlighted her very nice set of tits. I also assumed that the author, invited by her English Department at Columbia, where she taught poetry, had impressed her with more than his best-seller status. Otherwise she’d have worn an Indian caftan. Before she’d wafted off to his lecture, she’d asked me if New Zealand was somewhere near India. Since the visiting New Delhi University professor, Vijay Modi, fucked her on his desk during an office party, she’d been in her Indian period.

“Fickle? Vacillating? Spasmodic? Fluid?” I tossed out from the other side of the kitchen bar while I was tossing the salad. I did most of the cooking. Her friends tittered behind their fans that she had acquired me, when I had taken one of her classes as a graduate student, as a boy toy, but I knew that what she’d needed was a maid. No, more than that. What was a nine-letter word for a convenient husband? Camouflage. That was it. She liked men and women, a variety of them. I liked men, but for a room over my head and food on the table, I occasionally fucked Sandra. She didn’t mind, which I took as a vote of confidence in my skills with women as well as men, because she’d been fucked by a whole lot of both. It had been a convenient—camouflage—marriage for both of us. “Does it give any clue?” I called out.

“It’s ten letters,” she answered.

“Oh, of course,” I responded. “Capricious.”

“Yes, that fits,” she said.

It certainly would, I thought. And then the bell from the street rang, there was heavy trudging on the stairs, and the New Zealand best-selling author, Bram Overby, was in the frame of the entry door. The trudge wasn’t because he was fat. It was because he was large, a hunk, in fact. He lit up the room with his smile and his ruddy rugby star looks, his broad shoulders, full chest, and biceps—and lips for that matter. He was carrying a large bouquet of flowers, which I knew weren’t for me no matter how I ached that they would be. And from how outrageously Sandra was fawning over him, I knew that they would fuck—that they’d fuck again, actually. He’d been here a couple of weeks, so I assumed they’d already fucked. I expected Sandra to move out of her Indian phase as soon as she had time to research the lifestyles of New Zealand.

The meal went well—better for Overby and Sandra than for me, but it appeared to be a winner all the way around. Sandra managed somehow to accept accolades for the food without outright lying about who had prepared it—which wasn’t below her to do—and my reward was that, in the free-flowing conversation, it became clear that Overby, a best-selling novelist, was more on the beam with me, Aiden Macallum, a first-time literary novel writer, than he was with Sandra Gainsworth, the poetry professor. That was just on the professional level. I had no trouble understanding that the robust New Zealander was hard for Sandra.

I left them, wine glasses in hand, in the living area, looking out of a full wall of glass at the Manhattan skyline in the living area and retreated to doing the dishes and straightening up the kitchen clutter after we’d finished eating. Wes Montgomery was playing the romantic guitar loud enough on the stereo to overshadow their discussion. When I was done and moved back into the living area with full wine glass in hand, they were gone. They’d taken their wine glasses with them.

They were on Sandra’s bed in her bedroom—she and I slept separately. She was on her back. Her turquoise pedal pushers were in a puddle on the floor by the bed. Poetically, his trousers overlay her pedal pushers and an opened condom packet crowned the pants. The two empty wine glasses were on the nightstand. Her white tunic was open and spread. The best-selling author lay between her long spread and bent legs, where he was doing groin pushups on her pelvis, they were kissing, and he was squeezing one of her ample tits and thumbing her nipple.

The decibels of her moaning told me that he was hung and doing a good job of her. As I watched, he began taking her in long slides, pulling almost all of the way out and then sliding in, making her jerk and moan each time he bottomed. Then I could see for myself that he was long and thick in erection. I went hard.

I turned, retrieved a jacket from my bedroom, and went out into the night. I didn’t have far to go. I’d given up an invitation to hear the beat poet, Zach Taggert, perform his poetry to his own guitar music at a nearby bar we all frequented to help entertain the New Zealander. Obviously, my help wasn’t needed any longer. The room was dark, save for the spotlight on Zach, where, dressed all in black, he sat on a black high stool on a black platform, backed by a black wall. The room was smoky, despite the obligatory no-smoking signs on the walls. It was that sort of bar.

I settled at a table near the back of a crowd of maybe thirty people. In a room this small, thirty constituted a crowd. It was hard to do a count in the smoky darkness. Still, Zach picked me out in the crowd, smiled his pleasure that I had come after all, and looked directly at me while he continued reciting his poetry and strumming his guitar. I didn’t think it was specially performed for me, though. He was an intense man—all craggy angles and serious stare rangy and long-distance truck driverly, each separate part of him ugly and crude, but weaving into a rough, sexual creature, with an intensity that made each and every one of us sure he was speaking directly to us—and not to the surface of us. He was slicing right into us and talking to our slow-beating hearts—mine, in particular.

He closed with a poem that was delivered directly to me and that I knew had been composed for me and about me when I last lay with him, under him, him inside me, throbbing and causing the muscles of my channel to ripple over his shaft. The poem was his ticket to lay me again. He gave me a piercing, commanding look as he finished the poem and the deal was settled.

His room was in a nearby tenement.

He hovered over me on his bed in the dark, made darker by the black walls, floor and ceiling, relieved only by the single window looking out on a black fire escape and three letters of a frenetically flashing orangish-red neon sign advertising the pizza parlor on the ground floor.

I was naked, my arms raised over my head, my wrists tied together by a black leather cord. Zach was lying on me, between my spread legs. He was bare-chested—thin, tightly muscled, his torso covered in black curly hair that went down into an unruly black bush. His black jeans were unzipped and flared out from his groin. His face hovered over mine, his eyes intense, his mouth forming poetry that was nonsense to me in the circumstance, although I’d never tell him that, and he was deep inside me, moving his shaft in a slow pump. I groaned deeply, lost to him, as the muscles of my passage walls rippled over the steely hard shaft.

He claimed to be in heaven with me, expressing himself in poetry, which, no matter how poetic, managed to emphasize dirty words. My mind going back to the image of the hunky, unattainable New Zealander, Bram Overby, fucking Sandra, I was just happy to have a hard man between my thighs.

I panted, my back arched, my pelvis rolled up to him, all of my concentration on the cock inside me, not even trying to listen to his poetry. I shuddered as his cock pushed up into me, my walls shimmering, grabbing the shaft, and pulling it in deeper. I kept clinching on his cock. He’d groan and I’d moan. He stroked and stroked. Involuntarily my pelvis began to move with him, thrust up as he thrust down, gasping for him ... and then coming for him in explosions, one after the other. And as the jerks of my ejaculations subsided, his started. This was always the forbidden thrill for me. A man of an earlier era, he barebacked—he checked often, but he refused to be sheathed. He had assured me he had just been checked. I had anticipated this from the time he told me he was clean as we walked to his building. I had no greater thrill than the release of his warm cum inside me. It may be the reason I came back to him again and again—that and how purely, basic, primitive, primeval he was a man of an earlier, simpler era. I was fucked by many a beautiful man. Zach was all cruel, demanding cock, and sometimes that was exactly what I needed and wanted.

I lay there, totally laid out, panting slightly, as he tensed and jerked and tensed and jerked again, finishing me, reminding me of why when he held his hand out to me at the bar, I came here with him, laid down for him, and opened my legs to him. He pulled out to the surface this time, coming in spurts on my rim, my perineum, my balls, and then pushing inside me again, squishing through his warm cum, dragging it deep inside me. The feel of the warm cum breeding me deep had me sighing and moaning.

Later, he lay back in the bed, hard bodied, gnarly muscled, his shoulder blades raised on pillows, smoking a joint, but his eyes boring into me as I straddled his hips, my wrists still tied behind my back, and rode his cock languidly, moving forward and back and side to side, rubbing his hard shaft along my rippling passage walls, gliding through the lubricant of his earlier cum and of his newly releasing precum. He remained rigid, erect, and throbbing inside me, watching me with slitted eyes and puffing on his joint, as I literally rocked and rolled on his cock, using it to rub every inch of the surface of my inner walls, caressed me inside, pulled my cum out of me, and, as he jerked and grabbed my waist, released his cum inside me in strong, virile spurts.

This wasn’t love or even affection. This was pure, raw sex. Zach using me and me using Zach. No shame, no pretense.

Afterward, as I lay on the bed, recovering and panting slightly, he sat on a straight wooden chair facing the bed, strumming his guitar and composing a poem that, when polished, would make me almost cry when I sat and listened to it being performed at the club, knowing it was about me and that it would be his ticket to bringing me back here and fucking me again. All of his love went into his poetry.

It was arguable who was using whom. It was certainly true that I had come to Zach after seeing the New Zealand stud, who I felt attracted to, fucking Sandra.

When I was dressing to leave early in the morning, he was sitting on the sill of the window, guitar in his lap, still in his black jeans, his right leg raised, his foot pressed into the side frame of the window. He was strumming his guitar and reciting poetry, a joint hanging out of the side of his mouth. He was backlit by the orangish-red neon lit, not as glaring in the morning light as it had been in the darkness of the previous night.

He watched me dress when I’d come from washing in the trickle of water his shower produced, and he watched me leave. I can’t remember that he said anything at all—even when we left the bar the previous night, both of us knowing where we were going and what we’d be doing—beyond whispering his poetry. I don’t think I said anything either.

When I returned to the apartment, the door to Sandra’s bedroom was open. The New Zealand hunk was gone. She was on her back, legs spread, rubbing her nipples with one hand and playing with the folds of her cunt with the other. She gave me a little smile.

I stripped in front of her—I knew she liked that—and then walked, erect, to the bed. She slit a condom packet and handed the disk out to me. She dropped the empty packet on the floor by the bed, where it joined two other packets and two spent condoms. I climbed onto the bed and between her legs. I slid inside her and began to pump as she arched her back, threw her head back, laughed, dragged her fingernails across my shoulder blades, and began to moan. I stopped, holding, deep inside, determined to show her that it wasn’t all about her, all under her control.

She began to pant and to move under me, trying to get me to return to pumping her. “Do it, Aiden. Get on with it,” she hissed. But I held her immobile under me, my throbbing cock deep inside her, unmoving. Bram was hung like a bull but he didn’t have that much on me in thickness and length. Sandra had carefully selected me for personal pleasure. And I was young and virile, able to stay hard inside her as long as I pleased.

“Please, Aiden. Fuck me.” It came out in a plaintive whine now. Very deliberately, I pulled back, almost to the surface, and slid in deep again. She groaned and I felt her collapse under me. I pulled back again and the long slide. She moaned, whispering, “Yes, yes, baby.” Then quicker and quicker. We were both panting heavily. I fucked her hard and vigorously, feeling her explode under me and then again before I tensed and jerked and finished her.

This was the circumstance under which I usually fucked my wife—when she’d been with another man and wanted me as well afterward. And I always complied.

“Capricious.” That was a ten-letter word for “inconstant.” I knew a shorter word for it: “slut.” The both of us.

At the breakfast table she told me of the change in our life.

“I have a year’s sabbatical,” she said. “Bram has offered his house and sponsorship, giving me that year to do nothing but compose poetry. I need to produce another book of poems to ensure I can get tenure at Columbia. He showed me a photo of the house. It perches on a cliff overlooking the sea near Wellington. It looks like a bird ready to take flight, raised wings and all. Gorgeous.”

“So, I’ll have to be looking for other arrangements, another apartment,” I said. I hadn’t finished my doctorate yet. Money was coming in the first book, but nothing like I’d need to keep this apartment.

“No, I thought you’d come with me.”

“Will Bram be there, in his house, during this year?”

“Yes, of course,” she said.

“OK, I’ll come with you.” My thoughts went back to what I remembered the most of the New Zealand stud. When he was on top of Sandra, I’d seen his pull almost completely out of her before sliding in again. He had a thick cock that went on forever, a cock that made Sandra’s eyes light up and her mouth to gape open in an unverbalized scream of passion and pleasure. I wanted Bram’s cock to do that for me too.

Sandra was right about the impression of a bird in flight that Bram Overby’s house had, although you had to be out here in Cook Strait, off the North Island coast to the south of Wellington, to get the full effect of it. I had swum straight out to sea off the private beach below the cliff that Overby’s house perched on. I was a strong swimmer, having been competitive when I was an undergraduate. I had a swimmer’s body. I wasn’t tall, but my body was sleek: a very narrow twenty-eight inches at the hips, eight inches broader in the chest to accommodate breathing, and strong bicep, belly, and thigh muscles, and a long, thick cock, with low-hanging balls. I shaved myself smooth except for a tightly trimmed reddish-blond triangle at my bush, which aided in swimming as well. I had no trouble swimming a considerable distance out to sea and turning around and looking back at the top of the cliff.

Overby, naked except for an open terrycloth robe draped from his shoulders and drinking from a cup of coffee, had been standing at a balcony and watched me run, naked, down to and into the sea and directly at the orange orb of the rising sun.

The house did, indeed, look like a bird, wings spread, and about to fly off the top of the cliff. The central portion had a foyer on the land side, with kitchen at one side and a library at the other, with the foyer leading into a long dining room on the sea side. To the left from there was one of the wings of the bird house, soaring up two and a half stories in one large living area, glassed in on three sides. A balcony facing the sea ran the full length of the house on this level. Opposite from this wing, to the left of the central core, was a matching wing, in two and a half stories, containing three bedrooms—two at the sea side—each with bath, and Bram’s office on the lower floor, and the master bedroom above in a rising, glassed-in story and a half soaring to the west.

From here it looked like the sandy beach below the cliff was dedicated to Overby’s house. There was a long, twisting wooden staircase coming from the back yard of the house, which was mostly taken up with a large infinity swimming pool, seemingly plunging over the cliff into the sea, and its concrete-block terrace cascading in sections down to the sand. To add to the dramatic effect of that from the perspective from the sea, a waterfall did indeed send water down the cliffside at the end of the pool to a pool between terracing and the cliff wall down to the cliff’s base. The water for that didn’t really come from the swimming pool, though; it recirculated by pump from the pool below.

I could see the roofs of other houses on either side of Overby’s, and I knew there were some houses on the land side of his, across a road. He’d said he lived in an artists’ enclave and that there would be parties for us to go to, but so far we’d met no one else other than his house staff: a cook, a maid, and a houseman, the cook and houseman being wife and husband. These servants lived in a house across the road and were trained to be efficiently of service but rarely seen—and never seeing anything.

Overby’s books had done him very well financially. The house was expensively, if sparsely, furnished. He had a very nice cabin cruiser bobbing around out here near to where I swam, and he had bought both privacy and everyone looking the other way rather than at his foibles.

We were only three days here, Sandra and I, and I’d already become a part of his foibles. I had come down to the beach, nude, just with a large towel, because of the frustration he’d already established in me. I had wanted him back in Chelsea, on the first night, when he’d come to dinner and we’d talked so passionately about writing novels, but then his passion had gone to Sandra, taking her to the bed and fucking her, leaving me, Sandra’s husband, cleaning up the kitchen and sending me out into the night to seek my own sexual solace.

Sandra and I had been given separate bedrooms, the two guest rooms on the sea side of the bird house wing, but Sandra had spent more time in Overby’s bed than in her own. That’s where she was now. That’s why I had come down to the beach and swum out to sea. That he was bedding her, supposedly my wife, was part of the frustration. But more of it was that he hadn’t bedded me—not until the previous evening. And then it wasn’t on a bed, but on the proverbial white bearskin rung in front of the soaring, smoldering fireplace in the far living room glass wall. It was trite and clichéd, but it was no less real, and, although it should have released tension, it only added to my frustration.

As with the first night here, we’d gathered in the living room after dinner, on a U-shaped sectional in the conversation pit facing the fireplace, which was burning despite the warm weather. Sandra was curled up in Overby’s embrace on the section facing the fireplace and I was sitting in one of the wings. The two of them were cuddling as we drank our after-dinner wine. He was stroking her body, progressively opening up the kimono she was wearing to reveal the curviness of her naked body, the fullness of her breasts and nipples, and her silky blonde bush. My eyes narrowed and my hand went to my own basket as I watched his fingers playing with her clit and in her cunt and making little swirls in the curly hair of her pubes. She was sighing and slowly rocking her V against his hand. He saw me watching him fingering her and took in my response. He smiled, knowingly, knowing that he could have me too if he wanted to.

But he was talking shop, speaking of the writing of Somerset Maugham in the South Pacific and he was discussing it with me. He too was in a robe—we all were, having swum in the pool nude before dinner and eaten in robes at the dining table afterward—and Sandra had his opened at the waist, had pulled his cock out, and was making it hard—and thick and long—with her hand. But he was speaking with me, looking at me. He obviously knew he was making out with Sandra, as he was thumbing her nipples and running his fingers into the folds of her cunt—and he was getting hard from her attentions. But he was talking with me on technical issues of Maugham’s writing and was carrying on a perfectly erudite conversation with me.

And he was looking at me with “that look”—seducing me and already dominating me.

I gave up on being guarded and privately living my need. I brushed my robe open and openly stroked my cock. Overby obviously saw me doing so but went right on discussing Maugham with me and fondling Sandra.

It was maddening. We were operating on two different levels here. We supposedly were here to enrich Sandra’s literary poetry efforts and yet every time I was with Overby he was concentrating on what enriched my prose writing. Which of us interested Overby in literary terms enough to bring us here and sponsor us—Sandra or me? On the other hand, it was Sandra he was fucking, even though he looked at me with lust too. I hadn’t even known if he fucked men until now. Now as his eyes fucked me from across the room, I knew he fucked men too. I hadn’t known if he was straight or bi? Did he just appreciate beauty wherever he saw it? Earlier in the evening, when I had emerged from the pool naked, he had remarked on the beauty of my body.

“Such beautiful proportions,” he’d said. “Good definition in the chest and arms, but so willowy and trim below. I don’t know if I’ve seen a young man with such slim hips—and the hollows between your buttocks and your thighs—so sexy. And yet you’re hung. I think you are right to trim your pubes in a close-cropped curly V like that. But the slimness of your hips ... I don’t know how...”

He didn’t complete the sentence because Sandra had chimed in with, “How about the wideness of my hips, love? The earth mother look. I could bear your triplets.”

“Not unless we weren’t careful and were being very foolish,” he had answered, with a laugh, turning his attention from me, which quite evidently was what Sandra wanted. “Although you bring such hot flashes and capriciousness upon me, that I could see us overlooking something important. And, yes, your hips give me no pause in your being able to take a bull like me. You do handle the thickness of me quite well. And I am a bull, am I not?”

He didn’t say it, but he didn’t have to. He was wondering if my passage, because of my unusually narrow waist and hips, could take the cock of a man bull—or at least he was alluding to his consideration of giving it a try.

“Yes, you a bull of a man,” she’d said, pulling him on top of her on a pool bed. He proceeded to enter her and fuck her, leaving me to dry off and find a pool bed to stretch out on several empty beds from where Sandra had her face turned to me, making no effort to cover the flash in her eyes and grimaced smile on her lips each time he thrust up into her. Making a point, I’m sure, before he finished, he had changed to fucking her in the ass channel, and Sandra took that in stride. I harbored the thought that that too was a signal to me of what he was contemplating doing with me.

What word had he used? Capricious? Yes, that was it. Which one of us was he most interested in I had wondered earlier at the pool? And was he really interested in me at all? He had been on the cusp of musing whether a slim-hipped man like me had a channel that could handle a cock like his—he was that close to declaring that he wanted to fuck me and yet he had capriciously veered away. Had he been teasing me? Or was he just not really interested and was cruelly enjoying himself cuckolding me? Surely he knew that Sandra and I didn’t care what each of us did with others sexually. Or was he challenging me on that point? It’s true that some of our discussions on story themes had been wrapped around the concept of self-denial on sexual preferences and toleration. He, of course, was the hedonist in word and deed. But me? Did I even know what I really felt about these matters? Was that what he was trying to pull out of me?

I now knew, the three of us sitting in front of the fire in his living room, that, yes, he wanted to fuck me—that he would fuck me. Both of us knew he would.

The two left me for a while in the living room then. Overby picked Sandra up and carried her out of the living room. But he only took her as far as the dining room, which opened from the living room. He laid her on her belly on the dining table, her legs dangling toward the floor. He brushed her kimono full open off to the side, exposing her body. His robe remained on his back, but fluttering at his side, the two looking like some sort of gross bird of prey, while he hunched over her and fucked her in the ass again on the top of the table. As he fucked her, he grasped her flowing hair in his hand and jerked her head back into his chest, cruelly arched her back. This just made her laugh.

As Overby fucked Sandra, he turned his face from her. He was looking back into the living room, at me. The lust in his eyes was obvious. Was it for the woman he was fucking on the table or was it for the young man sprawled on the sectional in the living room, openly masturbating and watching him fuck the woman?

He wouldn’t commit, which angered and frustrated me. Turning from them, not wanting to hear Sandra’s exclamations on how big he was and how well he was fucking her, I picked up the novel that Overby had taken from the library after dinner and brought into the living room to discuss with me. It was Maugham’s “Moon and Sixpence” treatment of Paul Gauguin escaping to Tahiti to paint. I stopped stroking myself off and became engrossed in the book, looking for points that Overby and I had discussed, and so lost knowledge of when the copulating on the dining table had ceased and the two had departed the living areas—or, indeed, how long it had been since Overby had returned to the living room, taken the book from my hands, stretched out on top of me on the sofa, taken my lips with his, and begun stroking my body inside my robe with his long, sensitive fingers.

He was stroking my hips with both hands. “Such slim hips,” he murmured. “I wonder—”

“Do it,” I hissed. “I’ve seen your cock. I can take your cock. I want to take your cock. Fucking do it.”

He did it. He carried me over to the bearskin rug, murmuring, “Forgive the cliché,” and stretched out over me in reverse. We sixty-nined each other throbbingly hard and then he moved me to my knees, my chest and cheek to the fur of the rug, my eyes staring into the smoldering, dying fire in the fireplace. Overby mounted high on my hips, finding he did indeed fit inside me, forcing himself inside, controlling my writhing with strong hands holding my hips in position. Out and I sighed, in and I groaned. Then again and again, me stretching, opening up fully to the cock, becoming his.

He fucked me in ever quicker and deeper, fully accommodated as I rocked back to meet the thrusts, to a mutual ejaculation. He fit inside me the perfect way—stretching me and rubbing every surface inside me as he stroked, causing my passage walls to ripple over his shaft and try to grasp it as it forced its way inside, pulling the cum out of me. My spirits soared as he kept mumbling that, “Yes, it fits fine. So sweet, so tight.” He continued to be obsessed with the slimness of my hips, holding and stroking them with his hands as he fucked me.

He left me there without comment and presumably went to bed. Sandra wasn’t in her bed when I went by her room. She presumably was upstairs in his bed. The capriciousness of it all was not lost on me.

Overby was in his office, working, when I got up before sunrise. Sandra already was on a pool bed at the pool, alternating between scribbling verse and filling in crossword puzzles. She had nothing unusual to say to me, either, although she did stare daggers at me as I passed by her on my way to diving into the pool, nude. So, she did know that Overby had fucked me as well as her the previous night. She still had the edge, though, because she slept in his bed.

At sunrise, I went down to the beach, deliberately, knowing that Bram had moved to the balcony to drink his coffee and that he would watch me moving down the beach, naked, into the sea and the rising sun. He wasn’t the only one who could seduce. When I came out of the surf, he was there, sitting on a towel on the sand, naked and watching me rise out of the sea. He fucked me on the towel, me on my back under him, Him cradling my neck with one hand and stroking my cock with the other, as he lay between my bent and spread legs, moving his cock in and out of me in a deep fuck, whispering how beautiful my body was and, once again, his amazement that one with such narrow hips could take what he had to give.