THE GENTLEMEN'S CLUB
Rupert

Written by Lady Poetess
egiggles at moose-mail.com
/~bbp

Please do not reproduce on any website without permission. This
story has no resemblance to anyone dead or alive.

ONE

Benjamin Bratt - now that was a fine specimen of man. Six feet
five, all rangy muscles, and a smile to melt the blues away. He
was also a no-good son of a bitch.

Naturally, Rupert had to have a history with him. He had a knack
for relationships with all the misters wrong in the world. He
could sniff out trade-only jerks and liars and cheats the way only
a pro could. Despite being burned so often, he really couldn't
outgrow his habit.

He thought Benjy was different. Benjy was sensitive and he took
his time in pleasuring Rupert like the generous lover he was, and
they were good. They had chemistry. Rupert, with all the giddiness
only a dumb twenty-four year old could muster, actually
contemplated forever after and china patterns.

Next thing he knew, Benjy got married to some woman with family
connections, dumped Rupert, and moved to Washington, DC to become
a prominent Latin American spokesperson and senator. He was one of
the youngest Democrat to be so high up the ranks.

Rupert would have cheerfully voted Republican if he was eligible
for the vote.

To be fair, Benjy had no hint of dirt associated with him. He was
a boring but well-meaning politician who actually did things
instead of practising fancy rhetorics. He had a lot of supporters
for all the right reason. And Rupert could understand how even
back in the 1980s a gay man could never go far up the ranks of
politics. If Rupert hadn't known Benjy, he could afford to be
cynical and said that Benjy just never got caught with his pants
down. But he knew politics were Benjy's first love. Rupert was a
distant second, a discardable second.

That hurt the most.

Rupert wasn't one for reminiscing over past histories, but he was
struck by a report in today's newspaper. Benjy's divorce with his
wife was finalized yesterday. Benjy was a free man. And that
thought made Rupert's treacherous heart skip a beat. As if he
cared, surely!

It was an amicable divorce, and both ex-spouses would share
custody of their three children, the eldest a fourteen-year old
girl.

At least she was more amenable at the end of the relationship,
Rupert thought pettily. He didn't resent her. He pitied her for
having to live with a man who would always put his work above her.
Maybe he would send her an invitation to visit his pub, Club
Abracadabra, and they could bitch about Benjy. All drinks would be
on him.

He was more affected than he would like if he was still sore over
a twenty-year history, Rupert realized. With determination, he
vent out his frustrations on his glasses. Benjy was history - he
was determined to keep the man there.




TWO

Benjamin Bratt walked down the street. He apologized absently as
he bumped into a woman carrying three Bloomindale bags filled to
the limit. Bloomingdale, he thought absently, well, he never liked
Bloomingdale. He never liked its forced cheeriness. He never liked
Starbucks or Borders or other fancy establishments catering to the
so-called modern generation either. His ex-wife Carmen loved them,
however.

He had been feeling guilty for so long, he never realized anymore
that he was consciously feeling it. It no longer seemed worth it,
this sacrificing all his heart's desires for a lofty ideals. He
had been too long disillusioned by politics, and he carried on
only because there were too few others to pick up his fight. He
wanted Latin Americans to be no longer the ghetto and jail
generation. He wanted them to live like he did.

Or did he live? Benjy never loved Carmen, and that guilt had ate
him day by day until he had a festering wound in his heart. He was
never unfaithful, but he could never make her happy. In a way, it
was a relief when she told him that she wanted out - she had found
a man who loved her like Benjy never could, a man who begged her
to fight her parents' wishes and run away with him. Benjy wished
her happiness.

His kids hated him. His parents and parents-in-law blamed him for
the marriage's collapse, and he wished they would all disappear
and leave him here in his darkness. He would dream of Rupert after
a long and hard day at work, and he would imagine that they were
still together.

Rupert. He had never fallen so hard for a man before. They met
when Rupert was an intern lawyer, a brilliant one who outshone
everyone in his perimeter, and joined Benjy's firm. Benjy was a
senior intern, and it took a case they worked on before they
succumbed to their mutual attraction.

Where was Rupert now? Rupert quitted the law after he left Benjy,
and the last Benjy heard, he was running a different sort of bar
altogether in upstate New York. A bar! He couldn't imagine Rupert
doing that. No, he could. Rupert was impulsive, brilliant, and
crazy - and he would open a bar just because nobody expected him
to.

Was he with someone else? Maybe he was in a long-term relationship
now. Benjy was still selfish enough to wish that Rupert was still
available. It was for Rupert that he took a month's leave. His
people thought that he was devastated over his divorce. In truth,
he was chasing a dim but wild hope that he would find a second
chance with Rupert.

If Rupert was no longer available... Benjy had nothing to live
for. Not anymore. He might just put that gun in his bedside drawer
to good use.

Rupert or death - either way he would finally earn his peace.



Rupert was as beautiful as he remembered. As a young man at twenty-
four, wild and wanton, he had a satyr-like sex appeal to him. Now,
at forty-four, his features had hardened with time, imbued with
devastating appeal of maturity and age, and he was still the most
beautiful thing in Benjy's eyes.

Benjy had found the pub easy enough. The doors said that it was
closed, but the doors were unlocked, so he walked in. And he found
Rupert in the backroom, taking down crates of glasses from a top
shelf in anticipation of a busy evening.

Rupert was wearing a tank-top that displayed his slim but rangy
physique, and his jeans clung to his shapely and taut curves of
his buttocks and well-muscled thighs. Benjy was surprised that he
could still breathe above the thundering of his heart.

"Rupert," he said huskily.

Rupert gave a yelp of surprise, and looked down from the ladder he
was standing upon. "Benjy," he said, his eyes wide in disbelief.
He composed enough soon enough, arranging his face into a visage
of a scowl. "We're opened at six. Come back by then," he said, his
voice only a little bit squeaky from his unsteady emotions. "What
are you doing here?" he finally asked.

"I want to see you," Benjy just said.

"That's sweet. You walk in after twenty years and expect me to
smooch you welcome. Well, you've seen me. Ta-da. Goodbye. Get
lost."

"You're beautiful." Benjy couldn't think of anything else to say.
Not now, when his brain wasn't working.

"And you're as eloquent as I remembered," Rupert said
sarcastically, trying desperately to tamper his irrational joy at
those words. He was pissed. Yet here was Benjy, looking at him
with those shiny beautiful eyes as if Rupert had bewitched him all
over again. It was making him soft, damn it, and he did not want
to be soft or forgive Benjy.

But Benjy didn't understand how things were supposed to work. He
just ran his his large but elegant hand up the inside of Rupert's
right thigh, and then climbed up the ladder to press his front
against Rupert's back even as his hand closed around Rupert's
cock.

Rupert gasped even as he hardened to attention immediately. "No,"
he whispered, but that touch that he craved even without knowing
it undone him. He could feel Benjy's cock pulsing against the arch
of Rupert's back even despite their clothes, and it was long like
the rest of Benjy, and thick too. Benjy had touched Rupert so deep
in their wild fucks, that Rupert's subsequent lovers had always
felt wanting.

He wanted Benjy irrationally, viscerally.

He cried as Benjy's cock plunged up his rear entrance. Benjy's
hands pushed up Rupert's tank top to reach and massage Rupert's
nipples even as he shafted Rupert in that long, thick thrust the
way Rupert always was wild for. The ladder shook and rattled as
Benjy began his fuck thrusts, but it held steady. Rupert ground
his hips back, aching for more of Benjy. His senses overloaded as
he felt himself stretch to accommodate Benjy's cock, and the - ah!
He was coming so hard that he shook and trembled in Benjy's arms.

Every muscle in Benjy's body stood out in deep tension, and sweat
plastered his shirt to his torso as he gritted his teeth and
fucked Rupert harder. Then he gave a wild, triumphant yell and
spilled into Rupert's fiery depths. He arched his back as Rupert
milked him hard, and he could only think of one coherent thought.

He was home.




THREE

"Topher Grace likes you. I swear he looks at you like some hero of
his," Rupert said as he watched the young man in question walk
away with his boyfriend.

"I thought I am too liberal for him," said Benjy. "He espouses so
many radical ideas about the gay movement that even his boyfriend
looks uncomfortable after a while."

"Jared's a rather dim but easy-going guy," Rupert told him.
"Topher runs rings all around that sweet little boy, and Jared
will look at him as if he is the smartest person alive. Pathetic."

"He will make a great politician one day, if he learns to be more
diplomatic."

Benjy was walking on air these few days. He felt years younger and
tonnes lighter as he persuaded Rupert to let him into the man's
life again. They slept in the morning, sometimes waking up to
Benjy in the midst of fucking Rupert even in the midst of sleep.
In the evenings, Benjy rolled up his sleeve and became the new
bartender and curiosity in Abracadabra.

He was in Rupert's life now, and that was all that mattered to
him. He loved how Rupert would use his tongue to pull back Benjy's
foreskin to expose the fierce plum cock crown, he loved how
Rupert's muscular spongy anal muscles would clench around his very
pronounced ridge and squeeze every drop of pleasure out of him. He
loved how Rupert made him laugh and feel again.

Rupert watched Benjy's smile as the man wiped the glasses, lost in
his own thoughts. He was confused, because he wasn't supposed to
be this whole and content with Benjy in his life again. He was
supposed to be making the man pay. Yet... Benjy had been proffuse
in his own admission that he had wronged Rupert. He told everyone
who asked, "I'm the asshole who dumped Rupert twenty years back,
and I'm proud of it. I'm here to ask him to forgive me."

Benjy asked him of that. He gasped out his remorse every time he
came in Rupert, and Rupert could hear and feel the man's remorse
in every touch of hands, lips, and cock.

It couldn't last, of course. Rupert had learned that early. Yet,
maybe, he thought as he worked furiously to rub at a stain that
wasn't there on the counter, maybe he could forgive Benjy. They
would walk out of this with peace in their mind and all their
demons put to rest.



It couldn't last. They published a photo of Rupert's bar and a
shot taken of him when Rupert wasn't looking, along with the
headline "Senator cheated on wife in shocking gay sex scandal!"
The so-called report went on to detail how Rupert had been
sleeping with Benjy all these years while poor Carmen was weeping
her eyes out. Within days, major newspapers picked up the news and
reported it, albeit in a less lurid way. They left the
descriptions of anal sex out of the reports.

How dumb he was, Rupert thought, lost in bliss that he never
expected this consequence of his affair. When his place became a
circus of media frenzy, he closed the pub temporarily and slept in
his friend Antonio's place.

He was miserable. Partly because while he was sleeping in the best
luxury bedroom he had even slept in, Rupert could also hear
Antonio's very vocal evidences of his lusty and enthusiastic
fucking of his young man Ryan almost every night. Disgusting,
truly, how those two freaks did it every night so often that you'd
think fucking was running out of style.

Mostly because he missed Benjy.

Benjy called Rupert's cell phone, and when Rupert never answered,
he called Antonio's number. Finally, Rupert couldn't take it any
more.

"You told Benjy where I am?" he yelled at Ryan. "Fuck you!"

"You have a problem with that?" Ryan answered defiantly. "You sit
here all day and hide as if your world is crashing down. He's out
there alone and being accussed of all the bullshit that will make
Bill Clinton weep. You don't see both Christian fundamentalists
and gay activists condemning Clinton that way they condemned
Benjy, so don't give me that crap about you being the wronged guy
here. He's calling here to see if you are okay. I know you are an
asshole, Rupert, but I never knew you are such a jerk!"

Rupert stared in shock as Ryan slammed the door behind him in his
exit.

Then he collapsed on the floor. He bent over as if he was dying.
Maybe he was. "Benjy," he whispered. "What have I done?"



Benjy put down the gun. He wasn't watching TV - he was just using
the TV as a static background noise to the static in his head.
Alone, lost, and condemned, with nothing he could say or do to
make things right, he was on the verge of pulling the trigger.

Maybe it was just his tears blurring his sight, but he thought he
saw Rupert on TV. He wiped at his eyes, and blinked. It was
Rupert. On that new left-wing talkshow, of all things.

Rupert on TV? Probably milking his five minutes of fame, Benjy
thought bitterly. Why not? Everyone else had. He had thrown Benjy
to the wolves like everyone else. He wished he could hate Rupert.
Maybe he did - but it hurt, this fury at Rupert's betrayal - and
it only made him want to end it any way he could.

How could he live with the knowledge that Rupert never wanted him?

Still, he put down the gun to watch Rupert.

Rupert looked like hell on TV. Considering the man's vanity, this
was remarkable.

And he listened as Rupert defended him on TV. No, he had never
seen Benjy until the divorce was settled. He had an affair with
Benjy twenty years ago, yes, but they broke up before Benjy
married Carmen. Rupert also ripped apart the gay activists that
condemned Benjy, asking them to look at their own lives before
talking their asses off. When Rupert said about the Christian
fundamentalists were mostly bleeped out.

When Rupert started talking about Benjy's achievements, Benjy went
to the bathroom and threw cold water over his face. What was going
on? How did this happen?

Benjy sat down in more shock when he saw his ex-wife walk onto the
show and embraced Rupert. They sat down, and she placed her hand
over Rupert's, before she admitted that her marriage to Benjy
wasn't a happy one. But Benjy was a good man, she said
passionately, and some things just weren't meant to be. She just
wished that Benjy hadn't been dragged through this in some dirty
mud-slinging exercise.

Carmen's parents would have a fit. They would even disown her.

Benjy touched the TV screen. He never loved Rupert or even Carmen
more than he did at that moment.



"You almost lost me," he said when Rupert answered the door. "I
was just about to blow my brains out when I saw you on TV."

"I'm glad you're still here," said Rupert shakily.

"I will hold a press conference tomorrow. They want me in the
party still, but I will lay low and play behind the scenes, which
is how I am starting to like things to be done. Topher even asked
if he can work with me next summer. But I want you to be with me
when I attend the conference tomorrow."

Rupert nodded. "I'm sorry, Benjy," he said quietly.

"I know."

"A new start?" Rupert suggested with uncharacteristic meekness. He
held out his hand. "Hi, I'm Rupert Everett, and I run the pub you
have been frequenting often lately."

Benjy smiled. "I'm Benjy, and Rupert, you have the most beautiful
eyes I have ever seen."