I don’t even know how I’ve gotten into this position. Hari, beautiful berry-brown, lightly hirsute, trim, yet muscular body, is standing at the foot of the bed in my Garmisch hotel room—at least I think it is my room. I am watching him between my knees, my bent legs spread, my feet digging into the bottom edge of the mattress, me as naked as he is, as, smiling down at me, he rolls the condom on his cock. In contrast to his slim body, he is built long and thick, and he is in full erection.

I don’t know how we’ve come to this place. There was the ice-skating show. And then there was this nice, beautiful couple, she English and he Indian. She begged off a bar crawl evening. He didn’t. And now he is leaning over me at the foot of the bed, one hand stiff armed into the mattress beside my shoulder, the other hand putting himself into position. The gold medallion on the chain around his neck is dangling before my eyes, so I take it into my mouth and suck on it. My hands reach for the bulges of his chest, pushing through the finely curled dark hair there, rubbing on engorged nipples.

I may not know how we got in this position, but his body is beautiful and I am in heat. I want him inside me. And he is inside me. Just the bulb of him, gently rubbing just inside me, giving me spasms of “just do it.”

“Open to me. Take me in,” he murmurs. “If you want me, open to me. Good, good.”

I’m panting as I will myself to stretch to receive him. He’s already big inside me. Demanding. Stretching.

“Oh, God. Oh, fuck.”

“Yes, yes, like that, Tyler. Take it, let me in. Give yourself to me.”

The voice is soft, sing-song, the accent still with a touch of that Indian cadence I don’t like, that makes me shiver in distaste. I’ve never liked anything Indian. And yet, I’m here ... with him. So, why now, am I... “Oh, shit. Oh, fuck.” I turn my face to the side, the medallion slipping out of my mouth, my mouth still open, panting hard. I had no idea that an Indian could have such a beautiful body.

He’s inside me, stretching me. Big. Thick. Long. Pulsating. My hands move to his shoulder blades, fingernails digging in. I arch my back to relieve the stretch, the pressure. His cock expands and goes deeper to take up the slack. I hug his hips with my knees. He’s possessing me. For now, this minute, I’m his.

And, maddingly, against all my prejudices, I want to be his. I want him inside me—challenging, stretching, owning.

“Yes, good. Take it, take it.”

He begins to move inside me. In and out, in and out. He buries his face in the hollow of my throat, kissing me there. My hips involuntarily move with him. My hands glide down his tightly muscled back to his buttocks and dig in there, holding him to me, inside me. He raises his chest off me, capturing my eyes with his flashing black orbs, enslaving and controlling me with his body and his eyes. He grasps my ankles, raises and spreads my legs wide, and nestles even closer into me, going deeper inside me. In and out, in and out.

I don’t remember a man ever being this deep, this big inside me. “Yes, yes, yes. Fuck me!”

And he does, huge inside me, pounding, relentless, virile, long lasting, mesmerizing me by singing to me in soft, rhythmic, exotic tones ... until he comes to climax, crying out in Hindi or Urdu or some other Indian language, tensing, shuddering, releasing, tensing, shuddering, releasing. He no longer is courting me; it’s all about his manhood, his release, his victory. For several seconds I am just a vessel for his seed. It’s exhilarating, strangely satisfying.

“Is it all right to share the table with this couple, sir? I’m afraid we overbooked, and you have a table for four. Or were you waiting for more to arrive?”

He knew damn well I wasn’t waiting for more. He knew exactly who and how many had booked. The maître d’ of the new Casa Carioca in Garmisch, Germany, a picturesque alpine village in the embrace of the Bavarian Alps, was looking at me with hopeful eyes. No, I wasn’t expecting anyone else for this very-well-placed table in the second tier up from the ice. This was my second night coming here to moon over the athletic figures out there giving an ice show. I couldn’t decide whether to ogle the women skaters or the men, so I was doing both. I was an indiscriminate ogler—and more. I was on vacation in Germany, taking in the Ludwig fairytale castles of Bavaria precisely because I’d become entwined with both a Christina and an Alan at home and couldn’t decide which way to lean when they demanded I choose.

I looked beyond the maître d’ and saw the couple standing there. The man was young, brown, Indian, and I gave a little shudder. I worked with Indians in New York in the translation service I worked for. They were obsequious and cloying. I felt slimy when I had to deal with them as chief of Asian services. I wanted to shrink from this one, even though he was very different from my work colleagues—handsome, well formed, exotic looking—and all gleaming white teeth in his smile at me. Beside him, the woman was beautiful in a former blonde model way, clearly fifteen or twenty years older than the young Indian man, a real fashion plate, although spending more and more hours, as the years went by, on presenting as such. She was in a beaded black dress that hung on her like she was walking the runway and that shimmered in the gleam of the spotlights roaming the room in preparation for the ice dances to start. No, I wasn’t in the mood for an Indian, no matter how handsome, or of trying to relate to a Gretta Garbo type, even though all of my attention could be directed to the ice below.

The lights were flashing. The first show was about to begin.

“Certainly, do let them join me at this table,” I said. “Seat them quickly, though, as the show is about to begin.”

The show was good, featuring Olympic ice skaters from myriad countries. The nightclub, the Casa Carioca, had been revived just in the last two years. It had its origins in the 1936 Winter Olympics hosted here in the Bavarian town of Garmisch-Partenkirchen, nearly in the shadow of the Alpspitz and Zugspitz of the Bavarian Alps. The club itself, featuring ice skating shows, didn’t get established until 1950, after World War Two. Skaters in the 1936 Olympics had remembered how picturesque the town was and set up a world-renowned small club here to feature their ice-skating prowess and provide them some income in the off seasons for ice competition. Ice shows had run for twenty years before the club had burned down. Lately, though, in a surge of nostalgia, the club had come back to life, thanks to the efforts of such figure skating stars as East German Katarina Witt, Olympic champion from the 1980s.

Introductions were scant because the show was starting, but the couple and I spoke during the intervals, during which food and drink were being served, and, though the conversation was stilted at first, it warmed up. Myra Parker wasn’t an ice maiden at all. She was quite expressive, flirty, and witty and had an infectious husky laugh. She was English, working as a producer for BBC costume-drama television series in London. He, Hari Mehta, in his late twenties, thus somewhat the same age as I was—maybe a couple of years older—was a television actor from Mumbai, India, appearing in one of the series Myra was producing. The two were on an escape vacation from filming the interior scenes for the drama in Italy—”of all places, darling.”

“Oh, no, don’t give me that look, dear,” Myra had said, accompanied by a husky laugh. “We’re long married. Has it been what, three years now, Hari? He’s not stealing me away to have his way with me, although he has his way with me quite nicely.” The look she gave me when she said this suggested she wouldn’t mind me having my way with her as well. She gave the impression, though, that all of the control in sex with a man would be hers.

We all laughed, me at least with the thought that the robbing of the cradle went the other way. But she was a good sort—and, as far as I could tell, a very good sport. Now Hari, Hari was something else. Him being an Indian, I was wary, and, yes, prejudiced, and determined to hold him off at arms’ length. But he was a hunk and a half—handsome in a way that immediately justified him being a television actor, also friendly and open, dark and sultry, with movie star looks and a fine head of curly back hair. There was still much of the Indian in him—an accent that almost, but not quite with him, bordered on cloying, and a habit of touching whoever he was speaking with with long, sensuous fingers. With the Indians from my work, that made me feel slimy. When Hari did it, though, it was arousing.

I shared that I was American, from New York, on an exploration holiday—by myself—to take in the fantasy castles of mad King Ludwig, one of Richard Wagner’s sponsors. These included the fairytale Neuschwanstein; the upscaled Versailles on an island, Chiemsee; and his magical residential Baroque villa, Linderhof. Myra and Hari shared that that was their itinerary here as well. I was staying at the Hotel Rheinischer Hof on Zugspitzstrasse, and they were booked just down the same road at the Hotel Edelweiss.

The show was exceptional and I was in a party mood. I didn’t want the evening to stop, and, I didn’t want it to stop with Myra and Hari either. Hari, at least, was in the same mood. I don’t know which of us suggested a bar crawl after the nightclub show was over. Although all smiles, Myra said she was tired and had a slight headache.

“But you boys go ahead and go. Don’t mind me. The night is too young to kill a party mood when you’re on vacation.”

And so we did, Hari and I. We kicked up our heels and sustained the party mood. Hari had party favors too and he knew of some good bars to go to. We smoked joints at one crowded bar, where a good mix of good-looking women and men shared our good mood with us and we both, Hari and I, were admired for our good looks, our conviviality, and, as two young women sitting with us on a couch declared, our good bodies and the roving of our hands—and theirs.

We did not get bogged down there, though. We moved on, eventually arriving in a basement club in a rougher part of the town, where the clientele were all men, Hari produced some pills to go with our drinks, and men, some young, some not so young, all interested, shared our good mood with us and we both, Hari and I, were admired for our good looks, our conviviality, and, as two young men sitting with us on a couch declared, our good bodies and the roving of our hands—and theirs.

The night was moving on, and I was going hazy. I have some recollection of the man on the couch with an arm wrapped around my shoulders, kissing me and unzipping me and moving his hand into my fly, while Hari was doing the same, sitting beside me, with another young man. Then there was some sensation of Hari kissing me.

And then, we were in my hotel room, Hari and I, and I was kneeling in front of him, taking his cock in my mouth. Not minding that he was an Indian at all.

I woke up later in the night, in the dark, a body stretched out beside me—Hari’s body—and Hari’s arm slung over my chest. The next time I woke, it was light, and I was alone in bed. Most of the morning was gone. Hair had disappeared while I was in the bathroom. I’d missed the complimentary breakfast buffet but went to the dining room and had a big breakfast anyway.

I was embarrassed that I’d lost control and had gone all out the previous night. I didn’t so much feel remorse for having let Hari fuck me, although I still was a bit disgusted with myself for having given it to an Indian. I wasn’t over that prejudice yet, although Hari had been unlike any other Indian I’d ever known. But I did feel remorse that I’d let Myra’s husband fuck me. I’d liked Myra. It was Hari’s betrayal of her, not mine, but that didn’t mean I didn’t feel some guilt. The only good thing about the evening was that whatever the pills had been that Hari had given me, they didn’t give me hangover. The liquor and joints slowed me down a bit, but not much, considering how wild the evening had gotten.

Whatever the embarrassment of letting myself hang out like that, at least I probably wouldn’t run into the couple again. Today I planned to go north to Oberammergau, with its Roman history and where a live passion play had been put on for centuries—every ten years since the middle of the seventeenth century as thanks to God for the village having been ignored by a plague in the region—and then to the Ludwig castles to the west of Garmisch the following day—and then on, to the east to Berchtesgaden. I’d be too busy to play with Hari again and to deceive Myra.