The Gully
An unexpected encounter on a Hawaiian vacation.
Written by Tom
Adam’s feet were cooled by an expiring frothy trickle of the North Pacific, funnelled to the beach through south Oahu’s gnarled coral fingers. Far out on the horizon, kite surfers played the emerging waves. Small, tame doves scuttled almost to his nose for passing seeds.
Above him, a lighthouse commanded sandstone cliffs scarred with plastic sheets and makeshift tents and the associated litter of homeless people.
His naked body was an improbable link between a vast and unfathomable ocean and the humblest habitat of man.
“Hi, how’re you doing. You gotta watch your stuff here. Just so you know, those guys up there ain’t sweet. I’m Michael. I’ve never seen anyone swim off here like you.” An older man with long, faded grey-blonde hair smiled broadly down at Adam. Not a creepy smile, but a big, open American smile.
“Thanks, I don’t have much anyone would want to steal, to be honest.” Adam observed the contrast between Michael’s deep Hawaiian tan and his own English dirty-windowsill-grey whiteness.
“You Aussies! Just love that accent.”
“I’m too white to pass off…”
“Aloha mister!” interrupted Michael, dipping down briefly, with an even broader smile to ruffle Adam’s hair.
Adam grinned with surprise, momentarily shaded by Michael’s salt-streaked body, its free-swinging penis and low-hanging balls silhouetted in the Hawaiian sun.
“I’ll be seeing more of you, my friend, for sure!” Winking, Michael rose and strolled along the sand and basalt beach before veering out of sight into a nearby gully.
Adam hadn’t noticed the gully until then, shaded by overhanging branches.
He returned to his book, a biography of Bruce Chatwin, lingering over passages in which Chatwin’s character evoked some unflattering traits in himself.
He connected with Chatwin’s nomadic lifestyle and thirst for knowledge, yet also with his denial of truth about himself, the consequent holding back in personal relationships, and the hiding of darker obsessions.
Men walked this beach as all gay beaches. Some strode briskly, as if in pursuit of urgent business, betrayed by an unnaturally fixed gaze ahead. Some were a gay parody, seeking attention for their exaggerated flamboyance, but a majority looked downward and inward, detached, probably torturing themselves in ways known only to them.
A yellow vest and red shorts, still ill-defined in Adam’s peripheral vision stopped a few feet away, on the other side of a basalt rock. Much younger than Adam – perhaps mid-thirties – the new arrival quickly tugged off his vest and pulled down his shorts, kicking them neatly onto the rock.
Now it was Adam’s turn to focus unnaturally on the pages of his book. Supple tea-coloured limbs and the sense of rounded, firm and squeezable buttocks had made their mark on Adam, even if still in distorted Picasso form in the corner of his eye. By avoiding direct eye contact, Adam sought to preserve some thinking space, for he had the impression that the new arrival was watching him. He felt oddly disconcerted by the younger man’s attention; at sixty-three, that was a rare occurrence.
Adam allowed himself at last to look beyond Chatwin. Glistening before him, stretched on the sand, was the body that his peripheral senses had accurately predicted as real in its intoxicating properties. Rounded, athletically hewn buttocks of classical beauty shone and sparkled with amber down. Were he a tame dove, Adam would already have flown there, pecking deep in search of the most sublime beach-blown seed.
He tried to find his place in the book, only for the man before him to rise, recline on one elbow while looking his way, and tug at his golden penis, swiping bits of sand from swirling black pubic hair. Making fleeting eye contact, there erupted a power of obsession in Adam that even the North Pacific would at that moment have been incapable of subduing.
Adam’s penis had already asserted its autonomy. His object of attraction had further aroused and commandeered its sexual energy with dark eyes and slightly parted lips.
Adam’s own eyes were already full. He could look no more. His throat ached. He could barely swallow. This must be unattainable beauty; a trick of some cruel Pacific god. The words in his book that had absorbed him minutes before meant no more. His brain seemed drained of rational power.
The man sprang to his feet, with the quick-footed assurance of a footballer, and took a couple of steps to the edge of the rock, right before him. Pulling at this penis he started to pee; a glittering lemon-white arc hit the hot black basalt, evaporating in a mist of cruel seduction. He looked down at Adam, not enticingly, not hard or detached, but with unwavering natural confidence and a halo of warmth. His olive skin, deep-set dark eyes and lush jet hair were more Latin than Polynesian.
With the faintest of smiles, he retrieved his shorts and slipped them on, looking intently at Adam. Slinging his yellow vest over his shoulder, unfurling its arched BRASIL lettering as he did so, he turned and walked away, momentarily glancing out to sea, before disappearing into the gully.
Adam was possessed with a passion that had never before gripped him with such debilitating force. Without thought, he squashed his sandy belongings into his rucksack, got to his feet, slid into his sandals and danced between rocks and naked sunbathers towards the gully.
A small stream came down to the sea from a dark recess, framed by an archway of shrubs. Adam couldn’t see much beyond that, though it exuded a coolness and fragrance that contrasted with the parched, sun-scorched beach.
Slowly, he walked into the shade of the gully. The sandstone walls narrowed to almost the width of a man, shrouded in overhanging bushes, high above. Now and again beams of light flooded down, only accentuating the surrounding deep shade. He rounded a corner, his eyes still fighting the contrast between light and darkness.
“I told you we’d meet again mister!” Michael’s familiar voice echoed close by, in a dark recess in the wall. As he turned, Adam felt his crotch stroked by a large hand which tugged him to an embrace with Michael’s warm body. Wet lips engulfed Adam’s mouth, as an over-eager tongue hoovered up his tonsils. Another hand ruffled his hair again and he felt a big, hard penis explore his perineum. It was only then that Adam realised they weren’t alone. Encasing Michael’s chest were another pair of arms, dark and strong, and it was clear from Michael’s now breathless, distracted and staccato speech that he was the subject of an increasingly vigorous, if obviously fulfilling fuck.
Adam’s penis was hard against Michael’s stomach, as it simultaneously reverberated with the aftershock of thrusts from behind.
But Adam’s obsession with the other possibilities of this Hawaiian Hades ran deeper. He gently released himself as Michael, ever more distracted, began to fall forward, panting hard, his gully stuffed to its limits by an unseen power in the darkness.
Adam moved on towards another pool of light, his right side a brilliant white and his sinister, colourless left in the shadows. He turned again instinctively to the shadows, in search of the obsession that now gripped him.
As his eyes adjusted, they were rewarded. Astride a rock, half leaning with his back to the wall, and running a hand across his groin was Pele, fire goddess of Hawaii, sublime footballer and dazzling piss artist; Adam’s apple in this otherwise sombre anti-Eden.
Adam floated to him. Entranced, he stroked the warm supple skin he had admired from afar. He ran his hands through the hair on his forearms and then deep into thick, glossy headlocks.
“I guessed you would come. You are shy. But I saw your penis say hello to Daniel. I could see your eyes. You like Daniel, yes?”
Adam’s throat barely let him utter an audible reply: “like Daniel? Daniel’s a god.”
Daniel shifted further back and opening his muscular thighs wider while still stroking his groin. With one hand on Daniel’s chest, Adam slowly pushed a finger into his anus, finding a warm cavity, and then a firm but pliant muscle opening to a warmer, juicier place beyond. Adam felt he was gliding under the ocean, hypnotised by red sea anemones convulsing in the tide in rhythmic unison. He found Daniel’s lips; less the engulfing trough presented by Michael, and more an amuse bouche; a sip of champagne and taste of oyster. Riding up the rock, Adam’s penis, so moist and eager, slithered to its goal, finding the first cavity and gently pushing through to a virile male womb beyond.
Adam felt immersed in Daniel, obsessively so, in a way that was sensual almost to the point of narcosis. In their embrace he reached a climax that wrenched his body, in his own tricking mind, into the contorted Picasso shapes that had first depicted Daniel in the corner of his retina. They stayed like that for an eternity in Adam’s obsessive and ecstatic trance.
Adam’s awakening was a shock for which he was ill-prepared.
“Gotcha mister! Wondered where you’d gone!”
Adam felt Michael’s strong arms haul him from the rock and post-coital Elysium.
“Just love that cute white ass!” One hand ruffled his hair with obvious delight and the other caressed Adam’s buttocks.
“You weren’t gonna leave poor ol’ Michael now were you?”
“I was…”
Adam’s mouth was muffled by Michael’s hand and thrust back towards the rock. Daniel leapt aside, as Michael’s hard penis scored a path up Adam’s crack. A searing pain hit Adam as it entered him with urgency.
“You know what? You’ve become quite an obsession of mine mister Aussie guy.”
Adam was in too much agony to reply. He pulled himself down from the rock and from under Michael and ran, gasping to the entrance of the gully. Blinded by the light, wracked with pain and exhausted, he fell face down in the sand.
Facing the ocean again, he felt its safety. A trickle of blood passed his nose in the gully stream on its way to the sea.
This story was written as part of a Naked Men Talking Writing Workshop, in response to the prompt "Obsession". Copyright remains with the author - this story cannot be republished or distributed without the consent of the author.
Gareth Johnson