If Rocco were happy and if he was making the most of his art, Sandy and I would just have left him alone. But even though Rocco thought he was happy, we could see that he was growing older by the moment and losing his health. He had bags under his eyes whenever we saw him and seemed a little dazed. We decided that Giorgio must be giving him drugs. And there were no artworks coming down the hill, either pastels or acrylics.
We achingly missed the company of Rocco and Sebastien together. We even briefly considered selling the gallery and moving on to someplace else. But then we got angry. We didn’t think we were wrong that Rocco was coming out of his depression before he was taken over by Giorgio and even was coming around to a reconciliation with Sebastien. Premier in our thinking in this direction was that he had painted an acrylic masterpiece, as Sebastien had been after him to do, and that he couldn’t have been unaware that the acrylic was far superior to the pastels—that Sebastien had been right and had been trying to help make him the best artist and happiest lover that he could be.
Sandy and I decided to save Rocco from himself—and for us. That meant Giorgio had to go. No guilt there; he had declared war first, and had conducted dirty maneuvers. We would have made room for him even if the quality of the foursome obviously was going to make a nosedive. He was the one who had struck first and hardest. We had to intervene.
It turned out quite simple really. We arranged for a cousin Rocco cared for who lived on the sister island of Gozo, in Victoria, to be conveniently indisposed and needing to see Rocco just in case this was “it.” Then we arranged for another friend to pick Giorgio up at Tom’s Bar in Floriana, near Valletta after closing for a well-paid fuck. We were sure that Giorgio was still taking tricks on the side when he could, and we weren’t wrong. We even had the friend specify that Giorgio would probably be servicing several men that evening—and Giorgio hadn’t blinked an eye at the prospect.
The friend brought Giorgio in through the back of a leather bar in Valetta, to a private pool room, where we had gathered a smattering of leather-swathed toughies.
While Giorgio screamed out his indignation—presumably wholly because he spied Sandy and me—we laid him flat on his back on the pool table. Sandy held his arms and our friend and one of the leathermen each held a leg wide with strong fists around his dainty ankles. I then slowly unbuttoned his blouse and his bra and pulled them open and hiked up his skirt, all the time telling him that Sandy and I just wanted to become better acquainted with him. He had black silk stockings attached to a garter belt, but he wasn’t wearing any panties, no doubt ready for the after-hours extra money he planned to make.
To bring home our regard for him, I took my wallet out and fished out a few lira and flipped them on the table beside where he was laying. I told him that Sandy and I would certainly pay him for his time, just as he had expected would happen—just as we would make sure that Rocco heard was happening—but that I thought a few lira was all a whore like him was worth.
Then I stripped; rolled on a condom that had been proffered to me; got up on the table, my knees under his butt cheeks; and in front of a cheering audience, I began to work my tool inside the writhing body underneath me. I had learned to be very good at what I did, and it wasn’t long before Giorgio’s curses of indignation turned into more passioned pleas to ride him hard and deeper. Sandy, still standing above him, let others hold Giorgio’s arms and unzipped himself and presented his cock for sucking, and Giorgio readily serviced him with his mouth and his ruby-red lips. Giorgio didn’t seem to mind now at all that Sandy and I were involved in his taking.
Giorgio’s cock was getting bigger and bigger and he begged to have a hand released so he could pleasure himself. When we refused him, he begged for one of the spectators to oblige, but we refused that too. I just kept pumping and pumping him at one end, as Sandy was doing at the other.
When it looked like Giorgio’s cock was about to explode, Sandy gave a command and I stopped pumping, Sandy withdrew his cock from Giorgio’s mouth, and the other handlers held Giorgio very still, not letting him move a muscle until the surge toward ejaculation had subsided. We then started working him again, and, each time he was about to come, we stopped and held him off from release. He was whimpering and moaning now, begging us to finish him, crying that his balls were aching from the built up, unspilled seed. But we didn’t allow him to release.
After the fourth standoff, I pulled out of Giorgio and Sandy joined me on top of the adjacent pool table, and we made Giorgio watch as I turned Sandy, stretched out, onto his belly, pulled his hips up with my hands, positioned myself between his thighs on my knees, and fucked him deeply and vigorously to our shared, passion-filled release.
Then, giving Giorgio a contemptuous look, we had him released, and we all just filed out of the room.
Needless to say, we never saw Giorgio again. He left Malta the next day, having cleared out of Rocco’s villa that night before Rocco returned from Gozo.
We went to see Rocco the next day, and although he seemed sad and distracted, as well as we knew Rocco we could also see the underlying, unspoken relief. We found him sitting on the terrace, clothed and in front of an easel.
After we’d said our good mornings, Sandy, the cleverer and more sensitive conversationalist of the two of us, said, “What are those paints in your paint kit, Rocco?”
“Acrylics,” Rocco said simply, offering no further explanation.
Not needing any, Sandy merely said, “Good. You know the one you did more than a month ago sold quickly at the gallery.”
“Indeed?” Rocco said. He returned to dabbing his fast-drying paint on the canvas. But he was smiling.
“We found a telephone number for Sebastien in Nice,” Sandy then said. “Hank and I miss him and are thinking of inviting him over for a weekend for a café crawl. Would you mind terribly if we did that? Of course, we won’t if you mind.”
Silence for a few seconds, and then Rocco said, “No, no, I wouldn’t mind that at all.” He was still stroking his painting on the canvas and looking squarely at what he was creating there. But he also was still smiling.