I rolled over and collapsed onto the bed beside the stranger who had just fucked me again. Marto leaned over the bed, grabbed his jeans, and began to dig through the pockets.

“What do you do here in Venice, Marto?”

“Blow glass,” he answered as he lit a cigarette and blew the smoke away from me. He held the cigarette out to me, and I shook my head in the negative. “You told me last night that you had been in The Service.”

“Yes, I was,” I said.

“Was your Master nice to you?”

“He was. He paid me a lot of money to be at his sexual beck-and-call. And he called a lot,” I said, then chuckled.

“What it must feel like to be able to do that all day and all night if you want to,” Marto said dreamily. I was sure that he was visualizing himself fucking me again.

“You would make a good Master, Marto, with your chiseled body and your big horse cock.”

He blushed as he took another hit from the cigarette and eyed me. “I am not a wealthy man, Reed, but I could be your Master if you let me.”

I smiled, knowing that I would like that, at least for a while. But the humane thing to do was not to let Marto get his hopes up. I had to be blunt and let him down firmly. “I’m afraid that having a Master for the past four years has made me not want to have one for a while.”

He sighed and took another drag from the cigarette. “Such is my life, Reed. A few hours of heaven and then back to the grind.”

“Well, thank you for the heaven part,”

“No, thank you.” He put out his cigarette in the ashtray on the nightstand and asked, “Would you like to get some coffee?”

“Yes, and something to eat,” I answered as I heard my stomach growl.

“Did your friend come from The Service also?” Marto asked, changing the conversation so quickly that it took me a second to realize that he was referring to my friend, Roger, who was traveling with me.

“You met Bambam?” I asked him in surprise.

Roger ultimately went by the name Bambam because he almost totally resembled the cartoon character of Barney Rubble’s son.

Marto looked at me like I was insane. “You really don’t remember last night at all, do you?”

“No,” I admitted with a snort.

“My friend, Giovanni is fucking Bambam right now next door. Can’t you hear them?”

I listened carefully and heard the familiar tapping of a headboard being rocked against a wall next door. I smiled devilishly and said, “Let’s go climb in bed with them.”

“Gio will be pissed,” Marto said, “so, let’s do it.”

I jumped up, went to the door connecting my room to Bambam’s, and turned the knob. It was unlocked, so I pushed the door open wide. The sounds of fucking got much louder. I heard the sticky slap of sweaty balls against skin that was ticking like a metronome.

I peeked into the room and saw that Bambam was lying on his back on the bed while a tall, dark man with olive skin and long flowing black hair was rocking his world. I sprinted to the bed and jumped onto it so that I landed right beside Bambam on my back.

“Hey, Bambam. Whatcha doing?” I asked when both he and the guy fucking him looked at me in shock.

“Reed! I’m trying to get my fucking rocks off here,” he said in his deep voice.

Bambam was short and muscled from head to toe. He had the hands and feet of a much larger man and a shock of blond hair on his head that was currently cut into a Mohawk.

Bambam and I had met at The Service Academy when we were sixteen. We arrived in Richmond and were fucking each other within the week. We got along famously from the beginning and had been good friends ever since. We both got called into The Service right after graduation and despite me being away for four years, stayed friends throughout.

The Service Academy was a school that taught marked men like us how to satisfy a non-marked man in all matters sexual. Wealthy non-marked men, or NOMARs as they were called, could contract with The Service for a marked man to become their sexual surrogate for a term of one year. That term could be extended indefinitely if both parties agreed.

Thanks to our time in The Service, Bambam and I were both independently wealthy now. The first thing we talked about when we reunited after our stints in The Service, was our dream of visiting Europe. We both had decided to travel right away. We had flown to London, traveled south to Paris, visited Geneva, stopped in Milan, and now were in Venice.

Bambam and I had no schedule or plans. We stayed in the city until we felt like we had gotten the most out of it—seeing its treasures, sampling its food, and meeting its people. When we were done, we moved on.

Unlike other twenty-three-year-olds, we were not backpacking or hitchhiking our way across Europe. Neither were we staying in dirty hostels or flea-bag motels. No, we rented cars or private cabins on a train and only stayed at gorgeous, boutique or historical hotels.

“Marto and I are finished. With our rocks that is…” I said sarcastically. I reached up, put my hand on Giovanni’s hairy butt, and pushed it down toward the bed. “Keep going, Johnny,” I goaded the hairy Italian. “We want to go get coffee and something to eat.”

“Nothing like a little pressure,” Bambam said dryly to me. I watched as he looked up into Giovanni’s face, with long curtains of black hair hanging down, and said, “Finish us off, baby.”