Warning: BarbarianSpy Xtreme Romance: unsafe sex, drug references and sounding.
This Christmas offering is for you if you like your gay male Christmas Romance stories strong, not saccharine, and if you’d like to see how a romance can be raw and infused with the extreme gay male fetish of sounding.
Young Ben is taken off the streets, where he’s been hustling johns, in the bleak of winter the week before Christmas by lumbering Art, the bouncer and manager of a jazz club. While finding what hulking but hopeful Art can give him more than satisfying, Ben swiftly finds himself coming under the sway of toughened and jaded saxophonist, Lenny, who is steeped in going to the edge with drugs and barebacking and the desire to practice the extreme fetish of sounding on young men.
Can Ben choose between these two very different men at Christmas and, more precisely, can he survive to make the choice?
“He sounds good, don’t he?”
I turned my head at the sound. I’d been so mesmerized by the smooth saxophone playing, though, that I hadn’t heard what Art said. I gave him a glazed look.
“I said he makes a good sound with that saxophone, don’t he?”
“He sure does,” I answered. Beyond good. So good, it made me go hard. Smooth jazz got to me that way. Of course, the saxophonist was part of that package. A bit morose and thuggish looking—and older—but that was a turn on for me. Something about him drew me in. Like there was something deep and deliciously illicit inside him.
Art was behind the bar at the House of Blues, cleaning glasses, getting himself ready for the crowd that would appear later in the night. The club didn’t normally start to fill up until nearly eleven, the peak was at midnight, and it was deserted again at closing time at one. Mostly regulars showed up—and then just for an hour or two to get their fix. It was Friday night. Lenny’s night to shine on the saxophone, with piano backing. Other nights Lenny was playing somewhere else. He was so good that Friday night was the big night at the House of Blues.
I was standing in front of the bar, drying the glasses as Art washed them. He’d noticed I’d stopped drying as soon as Lenny started playing.
He’d come in only about ten minutes earlier, right before his first set at eight. A young blond guy, probably a college student, and probably rich from the looks of his preppy clothes, had come in with him. The ebony-black piano player, with the look of the ages about him, Thaddeus, who provided the regular backing throughout the week, had started playing an hour earlier. Lenny just sauntered in, the college guy following him, and slouched onto the stool next to the piano, took the sax out of its case, and worked his way naturally into the tune that Thaddeus was playing. The blond sat at a table in the first row, leaned an elbow on the table and his chin on his hand, and listened, instantly transported. He look clean, vulnerable, and innocent sitting there, with the gnarled black and the somewhat sinisterly jaded-appearing musician in the background.
The young blond sat, mesmerized by the music, just as I was, as if it didn’t appear that he had temptation sitting on his shoulder. I had never heard music that smooth and sexy before in my life. . . .
At the first break of this Friday, Lenny got up from his stool and stretched. It was then that, without his sax hanging from his neck in front of him, I got my first full look at the physicality of him. He was butt ugly—at least on the first look. But looking at him longer brought everything into balance and he suddenly was charismatic and arousing. He was of above-average height and was lean and wiry. His arms were well-muscled and so lean that I could see the blue of the veins popping out and running close to the surface—at least on one arm. The other one, his right, was covered with a swirling, multicolored tattoo that ran down to his wrist and then v’d down on top of his hand to swirl around his middle finger. His fingers were long and sensuous. He wore a tight muscle T-shirt that v’d deep in front. His pecs bulged prominently as did his crotch in his tight, worn-nearly-white low-rise jeans. He had a gold chain choker necklace, and he was as bald as a billiard cue. . . .
After he’d stood up, I saw him look at the blond guy and incline his head and then turn and walk back to the beaded-curtain covered doorway at the back edge of the small stage. The blond stood up from his table and followed Lenny into the back.
Not more than fifteen minutes later, Art sent me into the back for another tray of glasses. The door was open to the break room as I passed and I was so surprised by what I saw that I stopped, withdrew into the shadows across the corridor from the door, and continued to look, trying to figure out what was going on.
