A gay sex story: Malta Intervention
It was Giorgio’s own fault. Really. Sandy and I were quite happy to do our part. But if Giorgio hadn’t been such a snotty little bitch, we would have never done him that way.
For three glorious years Sandy and I had thought we’d found paradise on the Mediterranean island of Malta. We’d managed to live well on his stipend from the British Royal Navy and were quite pleased with our pleasant little art gallery on the St. Julian’s waterfront.
And we were more than pleased with our association with Rocco and Sebastien, both professionally and as partners in bridge, travels, and just sitting in the cafés on the promenades of whatever quaint Maltese seaside town or village we were exploring on any given day and making catty remarks about the passing tourists.
Sandy and Rocco were of an “age” that neither wanted to discuss any more and Sebastien and I were much younger but fully satisfied by our respective “daddies.” We were still somewhat different, however, because Sebastien enjoyed serving under his master whereas Sandy preferred me riding his waves. The differences all made for conviviality and some very torrid and amusing conversation.
From the beginning Sandy told me that we were destined to last longer than Rocco and Sebastien and to lose them as friends and coconspirators—and he was right. But he wasn’t right for the reasons he supposed. He continually told me that when the top was older, the fire would burn out quicker; that as long as I was young and vigorous, however, we could fuck until Sandy was senile and incontinent. But Rocco and Sebastien had their break a long time before reaching that stage. Both Sandy and I felt the loss greatly when our little foursome broke up. And the split came on artistic differences, of all things, rather than any diminishing of their sex drive or ability to perform.
Rocco was the fine artist. We met him when we started to fill our gallery with his charcoal pastels. And we had started carrying his art before we realized that he lived in the old stone villa high on the hill on the road from St. Julian’s to the capital city, Valletta. Sandy and I had often remarked on how intriguing was the villa’s blood-red double-entry door and garage door set in a solid wall of ancient gray stone broken only by a curly-rodded black iron balcony over the door guarding a single French window in the second story. The front of the house was right up against a curve in the road, and once you cleared that wall on your way back to the sea, the east coast of Malt opened up in a breathtaking view. Until we met Rocco we never could discern how good the view was from the side of the old house that faced the sea. And after we met him we fully understood what inspired his art as he worked in the room behind that French door to the street, but with broad windows open to the view of St. Julian’s harbor.
When we were first invited to enjoy that view and he introduced us to his “other,” we realized that we had known his resident lover, Sebastien, even before we ever heard of Rocco or his art. Young Sebastien, at once sensual and high strung, was the art critic for two Valletta newspapers, the “It Torca” in Maltese and the “Malta Today” in English. He had the best of art credentials from the Sorbonne and had even worked at the Louvre for a couple of years despite his young age. He had come to the Mediterranean for his health and had hooked up with the best artist he could find who was inclined in his direction.
It seemed an arrangement made in heaven, but it proved to be their downfall. Just when Sandy and I thought that our foursome could not get any better, there was a bitter battle royal in the old villa above St. Julian’s that we could hear down at the art gallery in the harbor. Sandy and I made a mad dash up the hill in his Alpha Romeo, but we were too late. When we got there, Sebastien had already packed up and was gone.
Rocco met us in the doorway waving a copy of “It Torca” in his hand.
“Did you see what that little turd did?” he yelled at Sandy.
“Could I have been knifed in the heart by any greater treachery?” he turned and yelled at me?
Sandy and I were both mystified. Neither of us spoke Maltese, so there wasn’t a prayer we could read the paper he was waving at us—and we were quick to remind Rocco of that.
“No problem,” Rocco yelled again, and he disappeared into what functioned as his main-floor parlor, a particularly nice, warm-colored room overlooking a hillside terrace and a small, but inviting swimming pool. We could barely see the rim of the St. Julian’s coast beyond the boxwood hedge marking the lip of the hill.
“No problem,” Rocco screamed again, as he rushed from a back room with yet another newspaper, this time the English-language “Malta Today.”
“It wasn’t enough for him to have stabbed me in Maltese; he did it in English as well.”
Sandy and I gathered around and read the article in the newspaper, as a steaming Rocco fiddled around behind his bar, looking for some scotch to douse on the flames.
I could see Rocco’s point and said so, in a way. Knowing something of art by now, I could also see Sebastien’s point. I didn’t want to see this break, though, so I tempered my comment. “I’m sure he didn’t—”
“No, I’m sure the little prick didn’t given two thoughts to my feelings, either,” Rocco said as he moved back from behind the bar, scotch sloshing out of a glass far too large for anyone’s safety.
That wasn’t quite what I meant to say, but I let it ride. Sebastien’s article praised Rocco’s work but suggested that his talents were wasted on charcoal pastels—that he would develop his skills much farther by moving to colorful acrylics and that a place like Malta was just begging for him to do so.
“I don’t think—” I started. Sebastien had been unthinking and not a little disloyal, I had to agree, to put that in print, but . . .
I didn’t get any farther. Rocco gave me a murderous look and sank down into an overstuffed chair and began to blubber. The glass of scotch, still largely untouched, teetered on the edge of a glass-topped coffee table.
Sandy leaned down and moved the scotch to safer ground and put his hand on Rocco’s shoulder. Rocco huddled even more into himself, however.
“We can stay if you like,” Sandy said. “Whatever you like. If you’d like to be alone, however, we’ll return to the gallery and wait for you to call us. Whatever you like. You know we will be here for you when you need us.”
Rocco continued to sob, but he did mutter his thanks and say that, yes, he didn’t like for us to see him this way and it would be best for him to be alone for a while.
As we shut the blood-red double doors behind us and climbed into the Alpha Romeo, I whispered, “Is it really safe to leave him like this? Do you really think it’s good of us to?”
“We had to leave just now,” Sandy answered grimly. “You were tipping over the edge of saying the wrong things, and if I had remarked, I most surely would have said the wrong things too. It was disastrous for Sebastien to write that, but he’s been trying to tell that to Rocco to his face for months now, and he’s absolutely right. Rocco is limiting himself with the pastels. And they aren’t selling well—or at least as well as his work should sell. His talent goes beyond that. Sebastien was right; he was just a stupid prig about it. And I didn’t want to join him in that. And neither did I want to lie to Rocco.”
That night, after the gallery closed, Sandy and I went up to the roof of the gallery with a futon and a triangular bolster, and we made wild, exhausting love under the stars and clear skies. Sandy wanted me rough and hard and deep inside him, repeatedly, and I obliged, pushing him first belly over the bolster and fucking hard down into him from the rear and then turning him with his back on the broad side of the bolster and rocking him on my cock back and forth on the edge of the triangle until we collapsed in a satiated heap. We fucked as if it was our last time, both of us thinking of the unfortunate split between Rocco and Sebastien—and feeling very vulnerable and sorry for ourselves as well. We kept looking up the hill to the old stone villa that was usually fully lit up at this time of night and alive with the sound of conviviality. But tonight it was dark and brooding. And then with nothing else I could do, I centered my frustration on twisting and turning and churning my cock inside Sandy until his cries for more subsided into whimperings of being well and completely undone.
The situation remained dark and brooding for weeks, as Rocco sank deeper in his depression. And often he was not there when we went up the hill to check on him. When he was there, we saw that he wasn’t working on anything in his studio. He didn’t even have his charcoals out and set up. But there was a mounting collection of empty scotch bottles lined up on and behind his bar. He was polite and welcoming to our presence, but in a absent, quiet way he had never displayed before. For a brief time then we thought that he was coming out of his depression. There were signs that he was painting again. And when his first post-Sebastien work was delivered down the hill to be hung in our gallery, Sandy’s eyes flashed with pleasure. It was an acrylic painting; it caught the gaiety of St. Julian’s harbor and the separate blues of the Mediterranean and the bright sky perfectly, and it was far better than the charcoals Rocco had been doing before. And, justifying much, it was snapped up at the asking price by an oohing and ahhing buyer within days.
But then no more paintings came down the hill and we saw little of Rocco for two weeks. It wasn’t long after that before we heard where he was going most evenings and what was absorbing his time. There was a new bartender from Venice at Tom’s Bar in Floriana. Sandy dragged me over there one night just to check the rumor out and it was confirmed and we were totally distressed. Rocco was sitting there at the bar mooning over a swishy little transvestite who was serving him scotches. Giorgio was a cute little trick, but not something that we’d ever seen attract Rocco before—and he certainly wasn’t any Sebastien. Sebastien was elegant and glib and had a great sense of humor. This Giorgio was pretty all right, but he was also coarse and a little piggish and reminded me of a ferret searching for food to steal.
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