B & G

Chapter 2-1

Chapter 2Sherry

When I applied for a job with B & G two years earlier, I don’t think the director, Frank Hudak, wanted to hire me. I had two strikes against me. First, I’m quite short and also pretty thin, so he probably wondered whether I could do the work. Besides, who ever heard of a woman electrician anyway? I’m pretty sure it was Gabe Sutton who talked Hudak into giving me a chance. Well, I proved I could fish a wall and pull wire with the best of them. Now everybody treats me like one of the guys. At first sometimes one of them would swear in front of me and then apologize with a snarky grin. I’d just tell him to shut the f**k up and get back to work.

You can imagine I was grateful to my new supervisor, Gabe. I also thought he was really hunky. I was always getting distracted looking at him. So after I’d been there about a month, I asked him after work if he’d like to go someplace for a beer. He surprised me when he grinned and said, “Why not?” A week or so later he was the one doing the asking. After that, we sort of got into the habit of socializing.

We talked about work mostly, sometimes sports, “guy stuff.” He never made me feel uncomfortable, but I thought he knew about a lot of things he didn’t talk about. Somehow he was different from the others, though they all liked and respected him. For example, he was the only guy at B & G that went to the concerts and plays on campus, and I had the impression he read a lot.

Gabe came across as a good guy, all man, but not like any of the others I worked with. Like I said, he was really nice, fun to be with, but holding something back.

I suppose I should also admit he was about the sexiest stud I’d ever seen. I dreamed of him asking me on a real date, but who was I kidding? He could get any woman he wanted, except maybe for some of those my-s**t-smells-good women professors. It seemed funny, though, that he didn’t seem to be dating anybody.

* * * *

Brent

One morning about the middle of the fall semester I was sitting on the front edge of my desk, talking to my class about Brahms, I think it was, when a terrible racket commenced in the hallway outside the classroom. It was obviously some sort of electronic warning, a kind of klaxon. One of the guys grinned and said, “It’s the smoke alarms. That happens sometimes.”

“So,” I asked, “what do we do?”

“Well, it’s too noisy to take a nap,” he said, still grinning. “It’ll be about ten minutes before they can get ‘em turned off.”

I certainly couldn’t go on with our discussion, so I just sat there, swinging my feet back and forth. Some of the students tried to chat with one another, but most just relaxed and waited. After a while I went over, opened the door of the classroom, and stepped into the hall. Coming toward me at a pretty good clip was Gabe Sutton, followed by a small woman dressed as he was in khaki work uniform and work boots. She was practically trotting in her effort to keep up with him. I hadn’t seen her before, but I read on her khaki shirt, “Sherry Narbone, Electrician.”

Gabe grinned at me and said, without slowing down, “Sorry, professor. We’ll have this taken care of in a couple of minutes.” Sure enough, in a minute or two, there was silence. I looked at my watch. The period was almost over, so I let the class go, reminding them we’d have mid-term review the next time.

Just as I had gathered up my notes, class roster, and textbook, Gabe and his diminutive assistant were coming back down the hall. He paused a moment by my door. “Whoever chose that brand of alarm made a big mistake. Those things are hard-wired, and when one goes off, they all do. They’re super-sensitive, so they go off over nothing sometimes.” He grinned. “Oh, Dr. Collins, this is Sherry Narbone, a member of our staff.”

She shook hands, and her grip was enough to make me wince. “Nice to meet you, professor.”

“Same here, Ms. Narbone.”

“Oh, by the way,” she said, grinning up at us, “I hear it was Gabe that picked out those smoke alarms.”

He winked at me and then turned to her. “Narbone, your mouth is going to get you in trouble one of these days.” With that, they were off. Even from that brief encounter I was pretty sure Ms. Narbone had a case for Gabe. I hoped desperately he didn’t have one for her.

University professors, I discovered, had busy lives, but not as busy as those of teaching fellows. At Columbia I’d had to worry about the courses I was taking and the ones I was teaching. At least now that I was a full-time professor, I could relax a little. I had more time to practice my horn, for one thing. And more time to think about my monk-like existence.

Almost without any volition of my own, I found myself spending a fair amount of time with Rae Menzies. She was always the one who suggested doing things, but I usually agreed. She was intelligent, talented, good company, and wonderful to look at. Even though I had no s****l interest in her, I did enjoy her beauty. We usually got together after concerts or recitals at the con. Occasionally on weekends we’d see a film. Sometimes we’d go to her place, sometimes to a bar, and occasionally, when the place was picked up, I’d ask her back to my apartment. Her quaff of choice was scotch, of course. Single malt. Of course. I’d begun to keep Laphroaig on hand.

I began to worry about our relationship, if, indeed, that’s what it was. I wondered whether I was using her to hide my homosexuality and decided not, since I really did enjoy her company, as she seemed to enjoy mine.

At night, in my bed, it was Gabe Sutton whose face and body were in my mind’s eye as I m*********d. My s*x urges had come back from wherever I’d banished them, strong, hungry, demanding to be satisfied, always asking for more, more. I went online and ordered dildos in a variety of sizes.

After never having had any kind of s*x except with my hand, I became a hungry slut to my new toys. Several times a week I’d lube my d**k, my ass, and an ersatz p***s, get on the bed, and f**k myself while I pumped my swollen rod. This was better than anything I’d ever experienced before. I moved from the smallest through each one in turn to the largest dildo, as my anus stretched to accommodate the increasingly larger substitutes for the c**k I wanted there, the c**k of Gabe Sutton. Whenever I had these dildo sessions, I was thinking, always, about the beautiful, hot, sexy man I lusted after but couldn’t have.

Gabe, why can’t you be gay? Why can’t you tell me you want me? Please, come to me, f**k me, let me f**k you! Pull me out of this quagmire of lust and longing. I need you!

But Gabe and I continued to have a glass or two of wine after some of the recitals and concerts, at least when Rae hadn’t hauled me off somewhere. I got to the point where I wished Gabe would get to me first. Yet I never quite realized I had any say in the matter. My will apparently paralyzed, I seemed to go with whichever one of them got to me first. But I wanted Gabe to be the one who asked me out. I wanted Gabe to tell me he wanted me, wanted my body, wanted us to have passionate s*x together. But he didn’t.

In other matters, however, I was enjoying life that fall. The students in my music appreciation classes were a mixed group, some there because they wanted to be and some merely to satisfy a liberal arts requirement. Those in my section of music history, however, were all music majors, nearly all of them interested in the matter of the course. They read their assignments, listened to the music required, and wanted to talk about all of it.

Another pleasure was the rehearsals for the Konzertstuck. I was given the fourth horn part, but that was fine with me. Obviously Roger, the professor of French horn, wanted to spotlight his students. The better of the two, in my judgment, was a cute redheaded guy named Ian O’Malley. The other one, Gretchen Bliss, was certainly no slouch, either. It would be easy to dismiss her because she looked like the actress who’d starred in Legally Blonde, but she played very well, especially for a university junior.

There were the usual discussions of tempi, dynamics, and phrasing, of course. Sometimes Roger and Colin, the conductor of the orchestra, had fairly intense “discussions” of those matters. Like Gretchen and Ian, I didn’t participate in these contretemps. I had my own ideas, of course, about how things should go, but, like the students, I didn’t think it was my place to say anything. I was the new guy. Being asked to be a part of the quartet was a kind of recognition, and I wasn’t going to make waves. The disagreements seemed to be that Burton was primarily concerned with making the horns prominent, and Fiske was more concerned with the total effect, the ensemble of horns and orchestra. Even though I was one of the quartet, I was inclined to agree with Fiske. As I said, however, I kept my mouth shut.

Miraculously, it all came together. The orchestra was better than I had expected. I think I might have picked up a little NYC snobbery at Columbia. You know, the idea that everyone west of the Hudson is brain dead, or nearly so? At any rate, the orchestra was more than adequate to support the quartet in the Konzertstuck.

One evening I dropped by to listen to a rehearsal of the Symphony. Romantic that I am, I’d always loved the second symphony, the C major. My favorite recording was a CD made from an old Szell/Cleveland Orchestra LP. I sat in the darkened auditorium, watching and listening as the students on the brightly-lit stage played under Fiske’s direction and was mesmerized. There weren’t as many strings, and they weren’t as lush as in a major symphony orchestra, but the brass and woodwinds were fine, and the strings sounded lovely, if a little thin.

As I listened to Fiske rehearsing the Manfred Overture, I thought what a good selection it was for the middle piece in the program. It was darker, more somber. It fit perfectly between the ebullient Konzertstuck and the sometimes dramatic, sometimes lyrical, and always romantic symphony.

I left the concert hall happy to be a part of the forthcoming concert, happy to be at this university, doing what I was doing. If only I weren’t so lonely. And so f*****g horny!

* * * *

Gabe

Sexy Brent not only performed in the Schumann concert, but he also wrote the program notes. As I’ve said, his notes were succinct, clearly designed to help us understand and appreciate the music, whereas those of his predecessor seemed meant to show off the writer’s vast knowledge. Brent mentioned that the year 1849 was one of deteriorating health for the composer, but one in which he composed something like thirty new works. As Schumann himself described it, it was a “fruitful year.” Brent went on to describe the three movements of the concerto:

The first, marked Lebhaft—lively, vivacious—has a vaulting, fanfare-like theme that is developed by the soloists in passages that are technically very demanding. The second movement, marked Romanze, is much more intimate and subdued. It contains, however, a theme that is changed slightly and used in the finale, marked Sehr Lebhaft, where the efforts of the winds and strings contrast with the flights of the horns. A lovely dialogue between soloists and orchestra ensues, and then everyone gets back together in the coda. Perhaps out of modesty, Brent devoted a good deal more space in his notes to “Manfred” and the “Symphony in C Major.”

As I finished reading, the orchestra completed its tuning up, and the four hornists came onstage followed by the conductor. They all looked great, but I couldn’t help but think how stunning Brent was in his tails. Yes, stunning! He was a beautiful man. I thought again that he had a perfect model’s body. He wore his clothes well. With his pale gray eyes sparkling in anticipation of the performance and his light brown, wavy hair shining from the stage lights, he was incredibly good to look at. Gretchen Bliss was wearing a floor-length taffeta gown in a sort of cranberry color. She looked spectacular with her three black-clad male colleagues, but my eyes were on Brent. I couldn’t help wondering what he looked like naked. I visualized him there, naked, playing his horn. As I imagined him, he had some light swirls of hair around his n*****s, and some between the pects. Then there was the nice trail from his navel to his full bush. I forced myself to open my eyes and watch as well as listen to the performance.