Lexington Black (11 page)

When he could not possibly do any more
chores, he sat in the chair opposite and stared at it as if it were
an unwelcome relation bringing bad news.

Maybe he wasn't ready.

He was a grown man and if he wasn't ready, it
didn't matter.

But he was a grown man, and he should be able
to cope with things like that. Cope, deal with it, and move on.

As he went to break the seal, his phone rang.
He threw the tube on the sofa and went to answer it.

It was Geri, making sure he had packed
everything, and no doubt, to try and convince him not to go. She
hadn't been as relentless as she usually was. Maybe she realised
that she wouldn't be able to sway him. As they talked, he put the
cardboard tube in his suitcase, and zipped it up. He would better
be able to deal with it when he was 3,000 miles away.

Lex called to confirm flight details, and to
tell him to meet him at The Blue Bayou at 8 o'clock the following
evening. Other than that, there was little conversation, as he had
just stepped out of a meeting. He sounded weary, and relieved that
Rob would soon be there.

I'm in your hands
, Rob thought, as he
went to sleep.

CHAPTER 7
- An Ego Is Born

For a long while, I believed that Lexington
Avenue had been named after my parents' one and only child. After
all, they were obscenely wealthy, thanks to their forefathers
prospecting on the property market. My grandfather carried on the
tradition, owning large tracts of Manhattan, which he filled with
skyscrapers. My father managed them, eventually building one of the
largest investment companies in the city. I was expected to carry
the mantle forward and so far, I had not gone against his wishes. A
multi-million dollar trust fund tends to focus the mind. Even so, I
intended to leave it all behind one day and live where I could
smell the tang of the sea again, and drive into the mountains where
the air was so fresh it turned my lungs inside out with a single
breath.

Yet I love skyscrapers. When I was much
younger I wished I was Peter Pan so I could fly around them,
watching snapshots of people's lives, alighting on the very
pinnacle of the Chrysler Building and admiring the facetted glass
panels and art nouveau design close up. I wished I could have been
there in the 1930's when it was being built, and feeling the awe of
something that had never been accomplished before.

So I loved skyscrapers and hated them too for
taking me away from the libidinous life I had in California. My
father's stroke put paid to my fun. Suddenly, I had to grow up, be
responsible, make expensive decisions. Just as well I was good at
it.

There were some compensations, though. My
home was at the very top of Black Tower, fifty stories above 5th
Avenue, with a spectacular view of the city and an infinity pool
that was the envy of most other penthouse occupiers, and I had a
team of people to deal with the necessary irritations of life.
There were maids to run my apartment, keep it clean and keep me
fed. I had two chauffeurs on call, both trained helicopter pilots
so when they weren't driving the company limousine they could fly
me to wherever I wanted to go. My PA, Jonathan, was my carotid
artery at work. He was a master negotiator, planner, organiser of
almost every aspect of my life. I paid them all well, looked after
them, and in return the service was exemplary. My life was as
seamless as I wanted it to be, except for one thing.

Love doesn't come easily when you are heir to
vast wealth. If you're a handsome fucker like me, it's even worse.
An ugly man will know that their potential partner is likely to be
more about the money than the love, but a good-looking bastard like
myself will never really be sure. My therapist says I have trust
issues. Well, hold the fucking front page, mister.

Okay, so here's the deal. In the mirror I see
someone 6'4" and well-built, (thanks Irish Dad) with pale blue,
almost grey eyes and sharp cheekbones in a long, oval face, topped
with straight black hair (
ciao
, Italian mom.) They also
imbued me with a gigantic sense of self-worth. When I asked why I
didn't have any brothers and sisters, my mother told me that
perfection could not be bettered, and for years I believed her.

What an arrogant asshole I was, until
Melville School cut me down to size.

After I came out of the closet, I had no
patience with people who hid their true nature. I valued honesty
above everything else. The wealthier you are the more it counts. I
can't understand celebrities who are afraid of ruining their
careers by coming out. Ditto action movie stars. Everything they
are afraid of is bullshit. Once I informed my father and seen his
world come crashing down around his feet, I made no attempt to hide
my sexual proclivities. After all, at the time I thought my
inheritance was dead in the water anyway.

I work by day in my office on Madison Avenue,
overseeing the staff of Black Tower Investments, Inc., acting as a
benign, and sometimes not so benign, presence that people can come
to if they need help. I have a vast, glass-lined office, in which I
break all the rules and smoke Cuban cigars when the mood takes me.
There is Grand Marnier VSOP on an antique card table that was sent
over from England soon after I returned home when I was eighteen.
As the years go by, I know I am morphing into the man who has
haunted my thoughts for years. I know it, but I don't want to stop
it.

And now I cannot stop thinking about Robin,
his beloved middle son.

Robin Martyn. Just rolling his name around my
tongue makes me hard. Crude, but it's true. As soon as I saw his
beautiful face, I knew I had to have him.

I was drawn to him whilst he was polishing
the white Audi, giving the car loving, almost sensual attention. I
was transfixed by the way his muscles moved under the white cotton
shirt, his brown wavy hair and long, lean limbs. Of course, I
didn't know who he was then. My eye had just been caught by an
attractive man caressing the hood of a beautiful car. I watched him
under the pretence of admiring the vehicle, but when I saw his face
fully for the first time, the breath was snatched from my body. I
knew that face almost as intimately as my own.

At that moment, my feelings on honesty
changed. I would have to lie like the devil if I wanted that man in
my bed.

******

When I was twelve, my mother got it into her
head that the only decent education I would get would be in
England. No-one considered asking me what I thought of the matter.
I do remember protesting wildly, and sobbing into my pillow on the
first night at school whilst the other boys whipped me with socks
to get me to shut up. It took a year for the torment to stop, and
it only did because I grew about a foot in that time and learned
how to tackle.

At the age of fourteen I became friends with
two boys who had been boarding at the school since they were six
years old. For all that time, they had been inseparable, and now
they were in senior school, their devotion to each other had taken
on a different dimension. Their names were Peter Wyngarth-Jones and
Gavin Farquar, but we knew them collectively as "The Queens" due to
their sarcastic, effected speech and camp mannerisms. They were
constantly bitching about other people, as well as each other, and
were so incredibly intelligent that they could have run the
country. Because of their academic prowess and vicious tongues,
they were left alone, which made everyone's life slightly
easier.

I guess they must have sniffed out something
about me because they became solicitously friendly. At the time, I
had no idea of my sexuality. I hadn't given it a thought.

Actually, that was a lie, but I had gone
along with the assumption of everyone else that I would find girls
attractive. It wasn't until I was fifteen that I admitted to myself
they did nothing for me.

The Queens had already suspected though, and
one day when we were talking in their room, Peter produced a
magazine from the bottom of the trunk at the bottom of his bed. We
all had them, filled with personal items that no-one else was
allowed to touch, on pain of extra homework or detention.

To my surprise, it was a copy of Hustler. On
the front, a pretty blonde girl with big breasts pouted out at
me.

'We're doing a scientific experiment,' Peter
explained, handing the magazine to me. 'Have a look at that.'

'A scientific experiment?' I was sceptical,
as the Queens were known to play cruel tricks on those they
despised, which was just about everybody.

I started to flip through the magazine. Tits,
tits and more tits. I had seen magazines like this before,
well-thumbed and pored over by my room mates, but they didn't do
anything for me. I shrugged and threw the magazine on the bed.

'Good. Now this one.'

It was a catalogue selling men's underwear.
The men were all tautly muscled, with big packages filling tight
briefs. I began to feel slightly uncomfortable and shifted my
position.

'Hah! Thought so,' Gavin crowed, snatching
the underwear catalogue from me. 'You're one of us, Lexi. You
belong to our very exclusive club.'

'Sorry, I don't get it.'

Peter sighed dramatically. 'You're queer,
darling. A poofter. Just like us.'

Considering I was over six foot by then and
quite capable of knocking them senseless with one blow, it was a
brave, if not absolutely foolhardy, trick to pull. But as they said
it, everything made sense. I had begun to worry that I just wasn't
interested in sex. It turned out that I was, just not with
girls.

The Queens were happy to keep quiet about it,
on account that I had stood up for them on occasions when newcomers
thought it was funny to bash the girly-boys. I was their tame
muscle man, and they were happy to be discreet for me. Not that
there was anything to be discreet about. During my time at Melville
I wasn't buggered, sodomised, abused, gang-raped, Svengali-ed,
seduced, groped, squeezed or anything else for the whole five
fucking years I was there. For a country whose closet had been
nuked wide open at least two decades before, whose male population
was, it was said, to be inherently gay, there seemed to be
absolutely no male tail to be had in the whole goddamned school.
Apart from the Queens, who were like sisters to me and therefore
strictly off-limits, everyone, every-fucking-one was straight.

Yeah, right. And I was fucking Snow
White.

As my hormones went into over-drive, so did
the callouses on my palms from all the jerking off in the dead of
night. The beginning of each term meant fresh porn, brought in by
the Queens. God only knew where they got it from. It was pretty
strong stuff and if a teacher had discovered it, it would have
meant instant expulsion. That formed the basis of my sexual
enlightenment. As far as cock went, I wasn't fussy. Cut or uncut,
it didn't matter. I didn't dig hair on any part of the body apart
from the head or the pits. The thought of chewing on pubes didn't
float my boat at all, yet Peter thought it was the hottest thing
ever. He was into big bears of men, guys who could gather him up,
nurture him and pound him into the floor. Gavin, the hairiest
motherfucker I'd ever seen, was into pretty, smooth-skinned boys.
They were ideally suited to each other.

Me? My ideal porn playmate would be dark,
brooding, toned and devoid of groin forest. I lost count of the
amount of heated discussions we had about finding a dark-haired man
who didn't have a positive thatch going on down there. Peter said
they didn't exist, and if they shaved, it would just look
weird.

I would say that wanting pubes in your teeth
was weird. I mean,
crunchy.

The conversation would almost always head
round to my ideal man, and there was only one person I had in mind
for that role. In a school where secrets were hard to keep, this
was mine, the object of my lust. And because I was Lexington Black,
I aimed high. I aimed for the fucking top.

Mr. Martyn joined the school the same year I
did. I remember sitting near the front of the school assembly. The
younger boys all sat on the floor, being kicked by the older ones
in the chairs behind them. I remember two things from that first
assembly. My ass, numb from all the kicking, and the tall,
brown-haired man with hawk-like stare, scowling at us in a way that
made my balls shrivel. The old Head had retired. He was known as a
kindly soul whom all the boys adored because he let them get away
with murder, but this new Head was the most terrifying man I had
ever seen. He wore a black suit and tie, as if going to a funeral,
and he wore his black robes with elegance. As he fixed each of us
with a glare we all shrank back as if to try to hide from his
steely gaze.

We soon discovered he was a hard taskmaster,
and would give detentions for the slightest misdemeanors. He never
raised his voice, and because of that, he was all the more
frightening. The coldness in his tone as he chastised us in our
maths class was enough to ensure acquiescence. I was totally in awe
of him, but it wasn't until I realised I was gay that my admiration
took on a decidedly sensual piquancy.

I wasn't particularly academic but I knew how
to bullshit almost from day one. And it helped being good at rugby.
My coach was frustrated with me because he knew I was better than I
was letting on, but I was happy to be in the B team, without the
total commitment needed to the game that the A's were expected to
have. I did get hauled up before Mr. Martyn a few times because of
unnecessary aggression on the field, and those were the best days
of all, because I knew I would end up in his office, alone, able to
breathe him in and bask in his disapproval. After all, any
attention was better than no attention at all.