“Is he here in the cabin? In the overhead bin?” The boy’s eyes had gotten big. He’d been bugging me about Mustafa ever since we’d been seated next to each other on the Turkish Air flight from Istanbul to Izmir. Mustafa had been my partner—in the Berlin Turkish restaurant we owned and had operated together for a decade, ever since I’d come back to the UK from Texas with a hospitality degree under my belt and in bed for the past fifteen years as well. He had died recently and been cremated, and I was returning his ashes to his original home in Izmir, Turkey.

“No, he’s in the hold,” I said, touching the sixteen-year-old Erol’s forearm with my fingers and having a little thrill when he didn’t make any effort to pull his arm away. He was a beautiful boy, dark and sultry, all smiles and curiosity. We’d already covered that Mustafa had been my husband, legally so that last couple of years, when it was evident that he was sick and wasn’t going to be getting any better. We hadn’t had any trouble with acceptance of that in Germany, even though it had started when I was fourteen.

The boy had been on the plane from its origin in London. I got on in Istanbul, having had to take two days of flights from Berlin, and found myself sitting by him in a two-seat section. He and I had hit it off almost immediately when it was revealed that he was from a Turkish restauranteur family as well. His family ran a restaurant in London. He was being sent back to Turkey, to relatives in Izmir, to go to a school that would incorporate more of Turkey. He also had admitted that he’d become involved with a man and that was the main reason he was being sent back to Turkey. It had taken half the distance from Istanbul to Izmir for the two of us to establish we both had relations with men—relations that had started at a very early age for us. After that the conversation had been quite straightforward and comfortable—and one of checking each other out—both in experience and background and in current interest.

Having been taken first at fourteen had put me in a cycle in which I fell into the fetish myself of the one that had swept me up into the lifestyle. Erol was sixteen, but he was still in the zone of interest.

“You had been with this Mustafa—”

“For fifteen years,” I answered.

“But surely ... you don’t look—”

I laughed. “I’m twenty-nine. My relationship with Mustafa started when I was fourteen.”

“Fourteen,” he said, his voice laced with both surprise and awe.

“And you?” I asked.

“Fourteen, yes,” Erol responded.

“Just the one man?” I asked.

“No, not just one,” he answered, giving me a meaningful look. His fingers were playing on my thigh.

“That’s why we lived in Germany,” I answered. “Fourteen is the legal age there.”

“Really? I’m sixteen.”

“That’s a great age,” I answered. “If you were in Germany, you would be fine.”

“It’s the age of consent that has sent me to my uncle in Izmir. The age is sixteen in the UK, but it’s eighteen in Turkey. My family doesn’t want me able to make my own decisions. But I know that I’m old enough and I know what I want.” The look he gave me indicated that I might be what he wanted. I certainly wouldn’t object, given the opportunity. He was a gorgeous young man. I myself had started at fourteen, so I didn’t feel any reluctance with a boy of sixteen.

“Life isn’t fair,” Erol said, placing his hand on my knee and giving me a shy smile. “Do you have your hotel reservations in Izmir?”

“I hadn’t planned to stay in a hotel,” I answered. “Mustafa had a family home in Izmir, passed down over several generations. We visited it occasionally. Now it’s mine. In addition to bringing him home, I must stay long enough to get the house sold. I assumed I would stay there starting tonight, but I couldn’t find the keys. I’ll have to get them from the home maintenance office we use, but I hadn’t taken into account that the plane arrives after business hours. I’ll have to find accommodations after we land.”

“I know a quiet hotel near the Dokuz Eylűl University where I was told gay students go—that it’s inexpensive and is welcoming. It’s called the Hotel Beyond.”

“Do you?” I asked, amused.

“Yes. I could find it.”

“What are you saying, Erol?”

“I’m saying I find you attractive and sexy. My uncle doesn’t know I’m arriving in Izmir until the day after tomorrow. I wanted to have a few days to explore the city before putting myself under his watchful eyes. I would be happy not to see the city alone ... or to sleep alone.”

I no longer was amused. I was much more aroused.

The boy knew his way around Izmir. He said he’d been returning here for the school term for the past four years. He also was experienced and unabashed in what I wanted from him. He obviously wanted it from me as well. He was flexible and pliable and had a beautiful body, every inch of which I explored that night, for a sixteen-year-old, although I was forever wanting to return to the emotional state of my initiation and I found the developing body of a boy somewhat younger than Erol was to be what aroused me the most.

He stepped right up to the reception desk at the Hotel Beyond and we quickly had the key to a shared room with no question or sniggering looks. Other men and boys were roaming the lobby, so Erol’s information on what would be accommodated at this hotel had been borne out.

I’d come from Berlin over a day and a half of flights and long delays in waiting areas, so I went off to the shower immediately upon entering the room. When I came out with just a bath sheet around my waist, Erol had already stripped down and was moving about the room, picking up this and that, looking so much like an androgynous wood sprite, both alluring and mischievous.

I sat on the foot of the bed, and murmuring, “And so.”

Erol went to the drawer of the nightstand and opened it to reveal a stash of condom packets and bottles of lube, further clarifying what sort of hotel this was. With a mischievous look, he extracted a packet, brushing through the pile before turning with a questioning look at me and pulling out a gold-foil Trojan Magnum. With a bit of a prideful smile, I nodded my head.

He came and knelt before me, first unknotting the bath sheet at my waist and flaring it open. I laughed at the little gasp he gave. Of course, as open as he was about what we were here for, as young as he was, and having seen him float around the room naked, I was in erection. He lightly grasped my knees, spreading my legs, and lowered his face into my crotch, taking me in his mouth.

He had a talented mouth, which was exhibited in all its glory when he neatly rolled the condom on my hard cock with only his lips. When I couldn’t take any more of his cock teasing with his mouth, I lifted him, turned him away from me, and brought him into my lap. My erection rose up the small of his back while I embraced him from behind and kissed his shoulder blades and his throat until he turned his face to mine. I roamed my hands over his developing chest and flat belly as he trembled and sighed for me, until he was begging me for the cock. Then I raised him, slowly lowered his channel on my throbbing cock, and fucked him.

He was quite the flexible lad. I initially raised and lowered him on the cock with my arms embracing his waist and my face buried in the hollow of his neck, but eventually, when the rhythm of the fuck was well established, I raised and split his legs and he reclined forward, his cheek on the carpet at the foot of the bed, and his hands palming the carpet, using the spring from his arm to rise and fall on the cock himself.

Later, in the night, with me on my back, he rolled over on top of me, saddled himself on my cock, and rode me in the cowboy position.

So far my trip to bring Mustafa home to Turkey was working out just fine. If only the boy were just a couple of years younger.

I wrapped up my meeting with the estate agent early and decided to go on over early for my appointment to arrange the internment of Mustafa’s ashes at the nearby Anglican church. Izmir, a major Turkish city on the Mediterranean that once was called Smyrna and was an ancient Greek city with a predominant Greek population until the Greeks were finally pushed out in the early 1920s with the demise of the Ottoman Turk empire, had long been marginally tolerant toward Christians. St. John the Evangelist’s Anglican church had been located in the city since 1625.

Mustafa’s lineage had been all mixed up with Turks, Greeks, and an English mother, who had taken him to the Anglican church in the same Alsancak district of the old city near the docks and the train station. Mustafa had known the priest there, Father Thomas, before he opened his restaurant in Berlin and took me in off the streets, and Father Thomas had had no trouble agreeing to Mustafa’s being placed in the crypt there. Mustafa’s patronage of the St. John the Evangelist Anglican Church had continued from his youth.

I almost regretted selling Mustafa’s childhood stone house in the Alsancak district, as it suited my tastes and he and I had shared several fully satisfying vacations there over the last decade and a half. It was a nineteenth-century Turkish house entered off an alleyway on the narrow 1457. Sokak not far from the harbor from which Greeks were evacuated in 1923 under the guns of the Turks and with the city burning around them. The house, a traditional Turkish one, had survived the fire. One entered a courtyard from the alley on a windowless stone wall composing one side of the house. The house itself, rose two stories on the facing and right side from the entrance, the kitchen, dining area, store rooms, and servants’ quarters on the ground floor, and the living area and bedrooms above. The fourth side of the stone compound, to the left from the entrance, was two floors of stone-arch porches overlooking a lush garden that came as a surprise to visitors to be found in the center of the heavily build-up city. A fountain in a small pool in the center of the courtyard provided continuous calming sound and pleasure.

Barring the fact that there was no garaging for a car—or even coming close to the house by car—an offsite garaging would have to be found and arranged separately in this modern era, the estate agent thought the house would be a delight for anyone interested in style and antiquity and that it would sell quickly.

That worry being off my mind, I proceeded the five blocks to the Anglican church, located across the major Attaturk Caddesi road from the city train station. I was an hour early for my appointment with Mustafa’s childhood friend, Father Thomas, but I didn’t think the cleric would mind. I found that he was very much engaged in another appointment and hadn’t expected me to appear this early but that, both his own and my relationship with Mustafa being so well known to him, he didn’t mind that I had been early.

I entered the lush-foliage garden of the church, with the sanctuary to the left of me, the graveyard to the right, and the sacristy straight ahead. I heard them before I saw them. There was a window in the sacristy overlooking the garden and I approached this and looked in. Father Thomas was with a young altar boy, looking not more than an early teen. Both in clerical robes, but the robes of both in disarray, revealing both were naked underneath. I couldn’t say I was surprised, and I didn’t pull away from the window when it was evident that Father Thomas saw me there. It was too much part of our history that what I observed through the window without withdrawing would not surprise or shock me.

Father Thomas was covering and fucking the young, blond altar boy. The boy was beautiful, a standout in a city of Turks, seemingly a vestige of the Greek population that once had dominated the ancient city of Smyrna. The boy was bent over a counter on his belly, the balls of his feet barely reaching the floor, and Father Thomas—gaunt and craggy at sixty-five, but once a magnificent figure, as I well knew—was crouched over him, holding the boy’s bare hips in the grip of his gnarled hands, the boy’s surplice gathered up to his waist, and thrusting up inside the boy’s hole. Thomas’s surplice likewise was gathered up to his waist. Both of their faces were turned to the window. Both of them saw me. I did not withdraw and they did not stop their sport. I unzipped myself, pulled my engorging cock out, and stood there, sharing in their sex.

At the height of their passion, Father Thomas had run a hand into the boy’s mop of blond hair and was arching the boy cruelly back into his shaft while striking the boy’s bare butt with the other hand. The boy, in turn, had his arms flung back, grasping the cleric’s hips, panting hard and voicing how total the taking was.