Chapter 18

I wove through the tangle of guests and students almost in a dance, seizing Grant’s hand when I reached him and giving him a warm kiss. I was glad to see the hanging cage was still empty. I’d been told they would wait until all of the students were in the hall to watch, but I’d been worried nevertheless.

I looked at Grant closely. “You look tired, hon. Everything okay?”

Grant sighed and gave me a smile. “Oh, no problems. I just haven’t done three in the same night before. Why the hell aren’t you tired?”

I giggled. “It’ll catch up with me later. I’m just too pumped right now. I’ll tell you all about it later.” I beamed at Shawna, who was standing nearby. “How’d it go monitoring Lucas?”

Shawna grinned and sighed. “I am so horny right now, watching him for three hours.” She was about to go into greater detail, but turned as she saw everyone looking toward the entrance to the hall. I turned to look, and saw Gil standing in the doorway, his bright red graduate’s uniform indicating that the evening’s culminating event was about to begin.

Gil looked over at the entrance to the privacy pavilion, where Bruno was standing. He looked at Bruno questioningly. “Everybody out?” He returned Bruno’s affirmative nod, and looked out among the guests and students. “Does any host not see their monitor here?”

Several of the students looked around to confirm that their monitors had indeed arrived. Guido raised his hand. “Mine was Garrett. He’s not here yet.”

Gil nodded. “He’s with Perry. Anybody else?”

I raised my hand. “I’m not seeing Darrel ... Oh, okay.” Darrel had squeezed apologetically past Gil and into the room.

“Is that everybody?” From the silence I knew I’d been the last one out of the pavilion. I could have got done sooner if Grace hadn’t wrecked my makeup with her juices. I spotted Grace at that moment, getting another drink from the bar. Grace noticed me at that same time and gave me a friendly wave, but made no move to come over. I smiled and waved back. Farther to the right, I saw Benjamin. I beamed at him, held up Grant’s hand with my own and pointed to him with the other, rubbing Grant’s shoulder with my cheek. Benjamin grinned back and gave me a thumbs-up signal. Andrew seemed to have left. Too bad. Maybe my little playacting at the end hadn’t quite worked. That was a problem to worry about later.

Grant looked at me curiously. “What was that about?”

I chuckled, “Later. Everything later.”

Gil smiled at the assembled crowd. “I know you’re all eager to meet our group entertainment for tonight. Academy students and honored guests, please welcome Perry Kimball, who will be hanged by his roommate, Garrett du Clerq.”

From the outer hallway, Perry stepped into the doorway, wearing a long, form-fitting robe—an ordinary one, in white, not one of the prop robes for the Princess scenario like Miranda had used. Perry was a cute boy, a little shorter than average, with his hair combed mostly back behind his ears. He grinned and started to wave to the crowd, then started giggling and put his hands over his face, suddenly self-conscious, as the room burst into applause. Garrett, dressed as the executioner in a black cloak, stepped in from the side to stand beside Perry, his hand on Perry’s hip.

In a moment, Garrett waved his hands and put one finger to his lips in a shushing gesture. Everyone quieted down.

Perry lowered his hands from his face, took a deep breath and grinned. “I just had a couple of things I wanted to say. I’ll really glad all of you could come and watch me hang.” He suddenly giggled again. “I’m sorry, this is almost like I always dreamed it. Now please, you’ve got to promise to remember, I’ve only been in training for two months, so this won’t be anything like a show that a graduate would put on...” He paused as several people offered quiet sounds of encouragement, one of them close enough to Perry that he grinned and thanked the woman who’d said it.

He continued, “In fact, I’m not going to do any sort of fictional scene to lead into it. They tell me a lot of the students here do something like that, to make it more like what a graduate would do, but since I learned just a few days ago I’d be doing this, I’ve been working on making my technique as good as I could, and there wasn’t really time to plan a show or anything like that. Okay?” Perry bit his lip and looked hopefully, as if fearing to see disappointment on the faces turned toward him. He beamed when he detected none.

“Anyway, to make up for it, I promise to make the hanging really good. I really, really want to thank Grant and Shawna for helping me with that.” I looked at Grant, who blinked in surprise. I knew Grant had stopped by Perry’s room a few times in the last few days, though not as many times as Shawna had. Grant clearly hadn’t expected any public recognition for it.

Shawna whispered to me, “I told Perry he could be the first one to show off some of those new techniques we’ve all been working on, kind of hint to everybody on the outside what was coming up in the future from Academy students. He got really excited.”

I whispered back, “I see that.”

Perry seemed to vibrate in place without moving a muscle, like a flamenco performer holding a pose, waiting for that first guitar chord. I hadn’t understood why he was so pumped. All the students were aware that they might be hanged before graduating, and nearly all wanted to do it at a party rather than a class demo. The reason was obvious: the atmosphere of a party came much closer to what a graduate would experience. Still, being hanged at a party was flunking out. I’d expected to see disappointment in Perry’s body language, but there wasn’t any.

Perry went on, “And we have worked out a couple of things to make this a little different. Garrett has something special planned for the end. And for me...” Perry giggled once more. “I guess you can figure out I’m not one of the best at hanging, which is why I ended up here tonight. But I’ve been getting better. I’ve never gone six minutes before, but I’m going to go for it tonight. Garrett is going to count off the minutes for you while I’m hanging. When he gets to six, I want all of you to clap your hands simultaneously, so I can hear it. I’ll be just so happy if that’s the last thing I hear. Okay?”

As another round of applause started, and Perry burst out laughing, waving his arms for quiet. “No, no, not now! Do it then!” The applause quickly turned into laughter.

I knew that six minutes would be a challenge for a number of the boys. I had been improving rapidly recently, and usually went past nine minutes in practice. I didn’t know what Grant’s upper limit might be. Grant could go twelve minutes without apparent effort, and was satisfied to end a practice once he had done everything he planned for the session.

Perry turned to Garrett, his eyes bright, and took a deep breath. “I’m ready.”

Garrett gave him a quick kiss, then bent down to pick up something from the floor that had been hidden behind the doorway. As Perry walked into the room, toward the cage, Garrett following him, I saw that Garrett was, as one would expect, holding a piece of rope in one hand and, a long, thin box with the other. I was puzzled for a moment, and then realized what must be inside the box, and what Garrett had planned for the end of the event. I gasped and said, “Oh, cool!” Around me, I could hear similar reactions from other students. None of the guests knew what the small commotion among the students was about, and several asked the nearest students about it, but got only smiles and headshakes in reply.

The back side of the cage was a door, currently open. Perry walked proudly, his eyes glowing, to the cage, Garrett trailing behind, working hard to keep up with him while holding the awkward box upright to avoid banging it against anyone. Perry entered the cage, leaped up onto the platform in one smooth motion, and brushed aside the noose with his shoulder. Garrett set his box down beside the cage and waited.

Perry simply stood on the platform for a minute, slowly sweeping his eyes from side to side, his mouth half-open in a grin of wonder, wanting to drink in every sensation as the center of attention in his life’s greatest moment. All eyes were on him; the room was dead silent.

At last he reached down to loosen the belt on his robe. He shrugged it off his shoulders in a way he had no doubt practiced, and it fell onto the platform around his feet. He was already erect, his cock standing up next to his belly.

I couldn’t help gasping along with everyone else, even though I’d known what to expect. The spotlights focused on the cage gave Perry’s now-naked body, liberally coated with oil, the glow that I had first seen on Miranda—no matter how many times you see that, the first sight of it is always breathtaking.

Garrett entered the cage at last, stepping onto the platform behind Perry. I was always excited to watch a real hanging, and felt my heart beating faster as Perry crossed his wrists behind his back, and Garrett bound them tightly together.

Everyone in the hall seemed to stop breathing as Garrett performed his most crucial task: taking hold of the noose, he lifted it and dropped it over Perry’s head, tightened it to fit snugly around Perry’s neck, and positioned it properly. Perry’s control of his life was now, completely and forever, out of his hands.

Once it became clear which direction Perry would be facing, the audience redistributed themselves around the cage, each person taking the position he or she favored for watching a hanging. The crowd seemed to arrange itself so that nearly equal numbers stood on all sides of the cage; the guests had a wide variety of preferred angles for watching a hanging.

Garrett squeezed around to stand in front of Perry now, and some in the crowd looked away from this very private moment, while others watched closely, entranced. They weren’t acting out a fictional scenario and had no characters to maintain, so they could spend this moment as exactly what they were: two young men, who had shared their lives and bed for two intense months, now saying goodbye. Garrett gently rested his hands on either side of Perry’s head, careful not to disturb the noose, and put his lips on Perry’s for a long, intimate kiss. When they broke it off at last, they said a few words to each other that I couldn’t hear—until the very end, when each said, audible to those standing close enough, “I love you.”

Garrett hopped down from the platform. Perry closed his eyes and began breathing slowly and deeply, concentrating on his preparation. I saw what most likely only another Noosemeister would notice: the slight tensing of various groups of muscles, in Perry’s legs, shoulders, hips, in sequence, as he mentally rehearsed the moves he wanted to make.

In any case, most of the guests’ attention had probably been drawn to Garrett at this point. Perry’s roommate smoothed out the fallen robe on the surface of the platform. Perry lifted one foot and then the other to allow the robe to go underneath. They had probably got the idea from watching me do the same with Susan’s robe during her hanging.

Garrett stepped out of the cage and closed the door. For extra dramatic effect, he took a padlock and thrust it through the latch, clicking it closed to lock Perry in. I was pretty sure Garrett didn’t have the key.

At last, Garrett reached in between the bars and pushed the lever. The absolute silence of the room was broken only by the faint whirr of the mechanism lowering the surface of the platform. There were several sighs around the room, and a couple of slight choking sounds in sympathy, as the platform descended below the level Perry’s toes could reach and he swung free by the neck, beginning immediately to kick. A few drops of pre-cum formed on the tip of his erection.

After a few seconds, I frowned. Perry was kicking more or less randomly with his legs, not using any of the things Shawna must have been showing him. Shawna had both hands clenched into fists, raised to waist level, and seemed to be mouthing instructions she hoped Perry would hear on a psychic wavelength, looking progressively more frustrated. There was no prohibition against talking to Perry, assuming she could be heard over the growing murmurs from the audience, but I was sure Shawna wanted Perry to seem to succeed without help.

Perry did, of course, look sensationally sexy even so, with the spotlights picking out the quivering and tensing muscles in his legs, arms, stomach, buttocks, all glowing with the effect of the metallic powder. But the guests must be seeing it as standard fare, the usual semi-panic of any First Year boy being hanged.

Suddenly Perry seemed to relax for an instant, his body swinging to and fro—and then his body bucked in a long ripple from head to toe that included a sensuous forward thrust with his hips. Then he swung his legs out wide and toward the front in that hugging-his-lover move that had so stunned me the first time I had seen Grant do it. Around the room, the breath whooshed out of several of the guests, as if they’d each been kicked in the stomach. There were jaws dropping all around me. In the awed silence, everybody could clearly hear Garrett, down on one knee at the side of the cage, careful not to obstruct anyone’s view, say, “One minute.”