Trading Partners

By Habu

A Gay Romance for Valentines Day.

It's coming up to St. Valentine's Day, and Avery, a handsome, hunky, and highly successful Richmond lawyer is, or so he’s convinced himself, on the cusp of a big lifestyle change—driven as much by his own sense that he’s aging out of the game as that anyone else is telling him so. He has always had it all and skimmed along the top with everything going his way, whether it’s burnishing his public image by being pictured in the society pages escorting pencil-thin models to gallery openings and concerts in Richmond or picking up young men for rough-sex, one-night stands in Virginia Beach.

With his fifty-fifth birthday looming, he has been trying to settle down with a one-and-only young man, living very discretely in his Fan district colonial mansion. His latest attempt to do so with VCU graduate art student, Dominick, goes sour when the flighty and effervescent Dominick shows signs of restlessness. Avery is shocked when Dominick suggests a couple’s swap date to spice up their life. He drags his heels despite his growing attraction to Kelsey, chosen for him in the swap, as his plans for his future start to spiral out of his control.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BarbarianSpy
• Release date: Jan 23, 2014
• ISBN: 9781922187857

Habu

Habu is one of the pen names of a former supersonic spy jet pilot, intelligence agent, male model, movie actor, and diplomat. A wild youth in South East Asia was spent enjoying whatever sexual opportunities came his way, and much of his gay male writing is about recalling incidents from those days and inventing ones he’d perhaps have liked to experience. He now leads a very quiet and ordinary life.Check out our blog and get free stories. Feedback and reviews are always appreciated.

Book preview

Chapter One: Avery and Dominick

Avery moved faster than he normally would have from the jewelry store toward the men’s department of Dillards, in Richmond’s Regency Square mall. It had taken longer to buy the Gucci watch Dominick had been bugging him for for months. Not just any watch would do for Dominick’s birthday either. It had to be a Gucci Timeless Stainless wristwatch. Of course, having scrutinized and categorized the well-dressed and very presentable Avery and seeing how expensive the watch was that he had asked about, the salesman had tried to sell him an even more expensive timepiece. That had eaten up more time than Avery had planned spending on this purchase.

Avery wondered if Dominick even knew how expensive such a watch was. They hadn’t mentioned price. What Dominick had mentioned was that he was restless in their relationship. In response, Avery was doing what he could to keep Dominick’s attention focused on how good life was with an indulgent corporate lawyer, and Dominick certainly seemed to know what sort of toys and clothes would maintain his attention.

That was what Avery was afraid of—that he’d left Dominick to his own devices too long in Dillards men’s wear department while he was doing a surprise buy of the watch.

Dominick was something of a last hurrah for Avery, who was turning fifty-five the week after Dominick turned twenty-two—not that Dominick would notice that Avery too was having a birthday.

Avery thus far had successfully negotiated a double life. For the decades of his thirties and forties, his days had been spent as a highly respected, and paid, corporate lawyer in Virginia’s capital. His evenings had been spent wining and dining and attending concerts, the theater, and gallery openings in and around the Fan District, where he lived in a large Queen Anne brick house with pillars and balconies on a quiet and fashionable tree-lined street. For those evenings he always had a stylish, model-thin lady on his arm—rarely the same one more than a couple of times. And in his late thirties he briefly was married to a politician’s daughter. But only briefly. Long enough, though, that no one at work and in his social circles questioned his sexuality.

He was a handsome man, with an athletic build, maintained by tennis, squash, golf, and regular visits to the gym—and he aged well; he perhaps was even more handsome as he turned gray and his build became more solid than trim.

It was only on long weekends, when he was younger and establishing himself on the desirable bachelor list in Richmond, that he traveled two hours toward the ocean, to Norfolk, to party in the gay district around Granby Street and make use of the studio condo he had in a high rise on the ocean in Virginia Beach. In stark contrast to his Richmond persona, in Virginia Beach, Avery had been a forceful, dominant lover, seeking out smaller, compliant men, who he fucked cruelly to exhaustion in one-night stands.

In his late forties he spent more time in Richmond and less time partying in Norfolk and Virginia Beach. He did less cruising the gay bars for one-night stands in his Virginia Beach apartment and moved to longer-term affairs with personal trainers and handymen working around his attention-demanding Fan District mansion.

By the time he hit fifty, Avery was ready to settle down to a more stable and committed relationship, and his interests returned to smaller, compliant men. The equally strong and hunky men he had gravitated to in his mid and late forties had worn thin with him—and, truth be known, had raised a scare in him. As he had grown older, such men had started to try to change him to the subservient role, to slip him into the position of being the one more grateful and yielding to a stronger, more virile man.

This slow change scared the stuffing out of Avery when he had stopped to analyze what was happening to the secret sexual side of him. He was managing to keep his confidence and commanding control of his Richmond corporate attorney life, but he realized, with alarm, that he was losing control of the secret gay-lifestyle side of him. The insecurities of growing older didn’t appear in his legal