(Foreword: '2001 Nights' contains stories that build on the spanking theme while exploring the gay [and universal] dilemma of desire and loss, acceptance, coming out and jealousy, and the ethical questions of marriage and procreation. If alternative lifestyle ideas offend you, you're on the wrong page. Otherwise, stay on and enjoy the ride. If salacity is your desire, sorry, not much will be found here:-)
As for the nice letters, thanks, and in answer to some FAQs: No, I haven't gone into retirement(!). I'm just posting less but I hope to find time to post at least 2 stories a year. My homepage? It's still under construction...
'Tears For Fears' was inspired by actual events but the characters are fictional. Comments and suggestions, as always, are welcome.)
This one's stayed in his mind forever. As with any form of nostalgia that venerates a respected past, Jeff digs it up and reminisces, particularly when he thinks Brad's too busy for him.
Maritha Sherwood passed on one day after a valiant seven-year struggle against the big C. That was a year ago.
Jeff had come to know Nurse Sherwood during his internship at the university hospital. In the last six months leading to her death, Jeff had been looking after her on and off when she'd been out of remission. Jeff always used to laud her to Brad. She was a courageous woman who had dedicated her frail life to making adjustments to the hospice traditions. She had been exemplary in her levels of conviction and perseverance, and urging others to seek their own. She had also been an inspiration to Jeff in the days that he would be kept on-call for the hope of the deteriorating masses of a battered world, a world more and more void of standards.
Her death had been for Jeff a digestion of holiday dinners. He'd lost his beacon, someone on whose suppliant heart he'd depended and under whose shelter he'd now have to come out. Afterward a gloomy specter had descended upon the ER. He had seen so many deaths in his young life that he found himself desperately debilitated by all that relentless pummeling into sanctioning an idea far beyond his finite experiences to grasp.
"They'll not go gently into their goodnight," he yelled one evening, raising a fist to the bitter winter sky.
At the end of the week, Jeff had sounded his last battle cry on merciless death, feeling defeated and downcast on his way back to the luxury town house he shared with Brad.
All the way on the train, he had remembered his mother and how her own passing had seemed as though it had occurred just yesterday. Keeping busy had, the past four years, been indispensable for the invocation of senility concerning his mother, but the emperor-has-no-clothes pretense, far from suggesting it was harmless, was proving threatening to his sanity. He shut his eyes to obliterate the mourners around the brier.
Alas, would that home with its comforting apanage be merciful reprieve. Jeff crossed the foyer quietly to avoid his husband who he knew would be in the Study preparing his summation for that important case. But all of Brad's cases were always important.
He avoided Yousuke also. Yousuke was in the kitchen, making dinner as usual. And as usual, he'd be flashing that cute butt plug barely concealed in his even cuter asshole underneath his white cotton apron.
It had been his gift to Brad – their mail order housekeeper. The gorgeous and tacitly sultry Yousuke, of Japanese American parentage, managed their house wearing just a cotton apron with nothing much else under it – save the butt plug. The all-day nudity and butt plug had been his idea, too, to keep the insatiable Brad happy. Yousuke was, however, limited to providing only ocular satisfaction, for right from the get-go, Jeff had been adamant that he and the erstwhile-bachelor Brad took a serial monogamous position concerning their marital partnership.
But with Yousuke to balance the domestic demography, he could get away with leaving Brad on his own while he posed as a champion of the infirmed and the indigent at the ER. All because Brad conducted his business from the house and would be alone when he, Jeff, was working. And being home alone was something Brad loathed en clair.
And therein lay his reason for engaging the services of an underground housekeeper, a kind of de jure _s_e_x_ slave of volition.
Jeff was grateful for Yousuke. And he resented Yousuke.
The halogen light in the master bedroom came to life by remote control. Jeff changed into his shorts and oversized flannel shirt and crawled into bed: a nap had seemed the welcome enjoinder for bruised emotions. Besides, sleep had never been separated from the act of mourning.
But contrary to being healed, in the accustomed way, by the restorative properties of sleep Jeff awoke with a deep sense of despair. He saw his life freefalling into a vertiginous maelstrom. He felt he had no goal or direction, and no purpose. He thought about his life, the choices he had made so far – being a doctor in a public hospital above that of a partnership of a private clinic, which would have guaranteed him a six-figure salary. And about his life with Brad, to which he returned everyday from hospital and stripped naked to the bidding of the latter's flights of homoerotic fancy.
And then the more he thought, the more he despaired till finally he despaired about not ever being able to father any offspring.
It always came back to this. How often had he woken up beading in sweat and articulating on Brad's shoulder about this same melancholic theme?
Suddenly hyperventilating at the burden of baring his soul, Jeff shot out of bed like a spooked bunny and fell down the stairs. He had to find Brad. He wasn't sure he knew what Brad would deliver to him in order to smooth over his chaotic mix of emotions – assurance, comfort, a spanking, whatever, but he had to find Brad and hear Brad tell it to him again.
Tell him for the thousandth time that his life was not going to amount to emptiness and meaninglessness.
To nothingness.
He found Brad in the Study as if he had never moved from his place on the leather wing chair. He halted at the doorway, leaning by the hinges. He knew better than to interrupt Brad whose air of concentration was now conferring upon him a facsimile of aristocratic conservatism.
Work was work, Brad had always maintained, even at home. So, propriety of behavior was an absolute.
And he needn't say anything, either. He knew his older lover, his always-beloved master and oft-cruel tormentor, who thought, saw and felt everything, would have sensed him.
And he had. Brad looked up from his thick book.
"Busy?" Jeff asked, knowing the answer, but feeling glad for the attention.
Brad nodded. "This is proving to be the hardest case yet, sweet cakes," he said, always laboring to lose that novel tone of restraint in speaking with the more passionate and impassioned Jeff, "but I enjoy every bit of the challenge. Is there something you want?"
Jeff shook his head, casting his eyes on the space between Brad's thighs. It'd been weeks since Brad had asked to be serviced.
"Not really," he replied. "At least, nothing that can't wait."
Ah, he had defended his dignity with a heroic answer.
But his wavy convictions gave him away.
Brad seized this as an excuse to challenge his boy husband, waving him over with a hand. At the same time, he shifted a bit to make some space on the chair.
But Jeff ignored the space, preferring Brad's knees instead. They held each other in silence.
Too soon, Jeff would feel Brad's handle relaxing.
"Okay, pretty one," Brad asked, "what's the matter?"
Of course, Jeff longed to talk, but what was Brad able to give him? Five or maybe ten minutes of his time? What he needed to do was talk through the night for there was so much on his mind and it was all getting very complicated.
But Brad had heard it all before, hadn't he, and it was too trivial for a meaningful, even philosophical, all night intercourse.
Not fair to load it on the erudite nonpariel.
And so he forced a smile, kissed Brad on his cheek, after that his regal aquiline nose and lastly his moist lips, lingering awhile there, before getting up and saying that he had missed him, that was all.
Triumph of tact and manners.
Two minutes later, he heard Brad enter their bedroom. He felt him slide under the covers beside him and in a seamless execution, not of his invention, he was lying facedown on his supine master.
"Hey," Brad whispered, furling his arms around the waist of the boy he so completely loved, "you look like you need a hug."
Cocooned now in each other's arms.
"Who hurt you?" Brad finally asked.
"No one's hurt me, sir," Jeff replied, braving a second semismile for his de facto.
But seeing through the inoculated response, hardly perceptible to the general company but not lost on Brad, the older gentleman gripped the boy's buns and commenced ripping open the cycle shorts, tearing the lycra along the seam of the seat. He was doing so slowly, emphatically, preempting the moment based on a primitive understanding of the act. This deftly accomplished, he did the same to the day-old sweaty strap, ripping it off Jeff's backside.
There was no avoiding a spanking. Jeff would talk before the night was over.
Brad kneaded the bared buttocks under his hands, squeezed the pliant cheeks, and then raising his right hand, he delivered a resounding smack to those same cheeks. Two more followed swiftly.
SPANK! SPANK! SPANK!
Jeff yelped.
"The truth, Jeff," Brad persuaded tenderly, his left hand reaching beneath to grip the boy's penis and testicles together. "Now."
Jeff grimaced. "Maritha died," he blurted, the first tears drawn. They were for Maritha as much as for the release of his pent-up grief.
Brad listened, nodded and delivered five more smacks, packaged in succession so that they inspired incisive pain.
SPANK! SPANK! SPANK! SPANK! SPANK!
The boy hollered poignantly, pushing himself up but in vain against Brad's iron grasp.
"More, baby," he heard the order.
And so, atop the smarting breaking out in his buttocks, Jeff availed the rest like a bumper sticker T-shirt: his mother's death, his regrets, his fears about ending up with nothing and no one and nowhere to go.
"I'm not going to have kids," he added, weeping on his husband's nipple, but conscientiously suppressing the impulse to be dramatic. "Isn't this what life's about? Having children, as they're the only things that bear testimony of your own existence on earth, bear testimony of a truly fulfilled and accomplished life after you're dead and long gone? Are they not the cogs that keep the wheel of life turning, that even sustained life itself? Without children, there would be no life. In the end it is they that matter.
"I'm sorry, Brad, I know we've talked about this before, I'm sorry to keep harping on it. You don't deserve to be made to put up with all this _s_h_i_t_...."
Smarmy civilized manners, Brad thought, more concerned about the content rather than the form of Jeff's behavior. What were abject apologies to Brad? He would have none of that fustian display from his boy. And neither was gender gallantry an affectation of their relationship and marital arrangement.
For what Jeff needed was to cry long and hard and shamelessly, cry for Maritha and for all the fears that rankled him.
He raised his hand high once more.
SPANK! SPANK! SPANK! SPANK! SPANK! SPANK! SPANK! SPANK! SPANK! SPANK! SPANK! SPANK! SPANK! SPANK! On Jeff's buttocks, Brad retained an implacable rule. And on his fears and insecurities, he retained an open declaration of war.
SPANK! SPANK! SPANK! SPANK! SPANK! SPANK! SPANK! SPANK! SPANK! SPANK! SPANK! SPANK! SPANK! SPANK! Brad's spanking arm held up remarkably well despite the passing of the half-hour and the awkward posture, as well as the boy's unvarnished confessions, which were being rattled off so profusely as to permeate the floor to filter into Yousuke's ears.
Yousuke smirked unseen. He knew dinner was going to be delayed, maybe even cancelled.
SPANK! SPANK! SPANK! SPANK! SPANK! SPANK! SPANK! SPANK! SPANK! SPANK! SPANK! SPANK! SPANK! SPANK! The claps ricocheted off the woodwork.
"Please, sir, please stop," Jeff pleaded finally and for the last time, his legs enervating on Brad's thighs, his words choking on his soul-searching exercise.
This was not an appeal to be satirized or undermined anymore, Brad knew.
"Easy, baby," he cajoled, taking pastoral care of Jeff as he had done all his former spanked boys, from the pedigreed variety to the haphazard versions.
"And never apologize superfluously. If you need to talk about the same thing a million times, you need to talk about it a million times," he continued, hushing the crying boy on his chest. "That's all there is to it. I've told you before."
The requisite objurgation delivered, Brad raised the boy up. Jeff was still weeping, still searching for answers to his eternal questions, for Brad never promised he had all the answers, but he allowed himself to be stripped of the rest of his clothes. Now completely naked, he lay back down, this time over Brad's lap, his head collapsing on the soft downy pillows.
It was time to receive another kind of attention. Brad reached for the rectal thermometer and jar of KY in their usual place on the nightstand.
"Sleep now, darling," he entreated the boy while he reverentially nourished his precious anus with the lubrication. The boy's anus now supple and beckoning to meet the occasion, he carefully maneuvered the tube deeply into his rectum.
Jeff felt a mood shift and purred in his man's arms.
Sweet the beginnings of a healing.
© 2001 JRK