The Secret Tunnel

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THE FLYING SCOTSMAN RUNS 392 MILES DOWN THE EAST coast of Great Britain, between Edinburgh and London, in eight and a quarter hours, nonstop. It is one of the most famous trains in the world—as famous as the Twentieth Century Limited, the Orient Express, and
le Train Bleu
—a train steeped in tradition and history and romance. For many passengers, a trip on the Flying Scotsman is as exciting as anything they might find at journey’s end. For some, it’s worth finding an excuse to go to London or Edinburgh simply to enjoy the ride.

For me, the Flying Scotsman has additional attractions. As an avid reader of detective fiction (and a would-be amateur sleuth), I find all train trips exciting and potentially thrilling. Did not Agatha Christie, fast emerging as the leading British crime writer, title her latest novel
The Mystery of the Blue Train
? And then, for a lover of men, there are the fellow passengers, everything from soldiers to lords, the railway staff—the sooty, greasy engineers, the impeccable stewards, the pert young porters—all of us thrown together, far
from home, for a few hours, never to see each other again. I never set off without a sense of excitement, a tingling in my head, in my heart, and in my pants. Just the thought of rail travel—all that steam, the pumping pistons, the fiery furnace, the tunnels and cuts—gives me a hard-on.

I was traveling from Edinburgh to London to see my old friend from Cambridge, Harry Morgan, for the first time since his marriage just over two years ago, in the autumn of 1925. Harry—or “Boy,” as we always called him at Cambridge, on account of his youthful looks and enthusiastic personality—was now a respectable family man with a promising future in banking. True, I had fucked him on the eve of his wedding, and could not help thinking, as I watched him walk down the aisle in his beautifully tailored morning suit, that just a few hours previously his legs were over my shoulders and my dick up his ass. Was he doing the right thing by marrying Belinda Eagle? Could he ever really be happy? The answer, I knew, was yes. It depressed me at the time, and it depressed me still, even though I had found happiness with another man, Vincent West. But there was something about my friendship with Boy Morgan, forged in the hopelessly romantic atmosphere of Cambridge, tempered during our almost lethal adventures that long-ago weekend in Drekeham Hall, that I could never relinquish. Perhaps it was the knowledge that he would never fully be mine, that it was to women that he would always turn for love and security, however much he liked fucking, and being fucked, by me. Perhaps it was that still boyish personality that spilled out from every word of his letters. I wondered if he had kept the looks that went with the character, or married life had fattened and aged him. I half hoped that it had.

So it was with mixed feelings that I was traveling to London on a gloomy winter morning in 1928—that Vince and I were to have traveled together—to attend the christening of Boy’s firstborn child, a daughter to whom I was to be
godfather. The invitation had been sent to both of us by Belinda, accompanied by a personal note from Morgan to me, in which he begged me to come, despite the distance, hinting—or was this my imagination?—that there was more than baptism in the cards. But, at the last minute, Vince had canceled; work would not let him leave Edinburgh, and I would have to travel alone. I was half cross, and half excited. Perhaps more than half.

I left home at nine in the morning, in plenty of time for the ten o’clock departure. It was one of those winter days that never really gets light, when the sky changes from a dull dark gray to a dull light gray and then, as if exhausted by the effort, fades to black. Those days are gloomy all over the world, no doubt—but there is something particularly grim about the Scottish winter. Perhaps it is the Edinburgh rock that absorbs all the light—that mixture of basalt and sandstone that even in brilliant sunshine looks dull. Perhaps it is the fine drizzly fog that shrouds the city, cutting out what little daylight manages to penetrate the high uniform clouds. Whatever the reason, I stomped into Waverley Station in a mood that suited the weather. I was angry and indignant; woe betide the insolent porter or clumsy passenger who crossed my path.

I blamed Vince for spoiling our holiday, and thoroughly enjoyed playing the wounded party, knowing full well that it was not his fault that he had to work throughout the long weekend we had planned. God knows, I had canceled enough dinners, theater trips, and parties because I had to stay late at the hospital, where I was now a junior doctor, well on the way to qualification—and Vince seldom, if ever, complained. But now that he was obliged to accompany a prominent author on a lightning tour of Scotland—a prestigious job, fiercely contested by his colleagues, and a sure stepping stone to full editorship—all I could do was rant. He had told me over dinner, which I’d ruined by sulking, and
tried to reason with me in bed, but I turned my back and turned off the light.

There had been time, this morning, for a moody rapprochement. We were both awake at five, even though it was still night. The leisurely clip-clop of the milkman’s horse approached our window, passed under it, and receded, the jingle of bottles in metal crates barely audible in the attic where we slept. I counted the footsteps as they came and went, and felt very forlorn. Vince must have been doing the same thing, as he sighed and shifted, pulling the blankets over his shoulder. I didn’t feel like talking, as I knew we’d only get into the same round of recriminations and explanations that had ruined the evening, but I did feel like fucking. I’m nearly always rock hard in the small hours, sometimes painfully so, from sleep or dreams or the need to pee—but on this occasion I was also aware of the fact that I was about to be separated from my lover for three nights, and wanted to leave at least one load up his ass.

I moved across the mattress, which creaked and twanged—we had become inured to these nocturnes—and threw an arm around him. He had his back to me, so I had no trouble pressing my cock against his buttocks. It was not quite flesh on flesh—unromantic it may be, but the chilly Edinburgh nights, not to mention the need for some vestige of propriety, meant that we habitually wore pajamas in bed. Even though we had our own self-contained flat on the top two floors of the house, there was always the chance that the landlady might let herself in on some pretext and, finding two naked men in bed together, go running to the police with hysterical tales of sodomites in the attic. She was a great churchgoer, our Mrs. McPhee, and only put up with our cohabitation because I was a doctor, and an American to boot, and therefore allowed my eccentricities. Vince, as an Englishman, was only just this side of the Devil himself, but our promptly paid rent stilled her wagging tongue.

My dick made contact with Vince’s ass through two layers of flannel—but even so I could feel the rubbery firmness of his round buttocks, which I had parted so many times in the two years we’d been together. He sighed again at the contact, and pressed back into me, twisting his neck so that our tongues could meet. We kissed hard, our unshaven faces scratching, our nighttime breath sour. I reached down and started fumbling with the drawstring of his pajama bottoms; Vince had a bad habit of tying them in a double bowknot, something he’d learned at boarding school and had never been able to unlearn, and when I was in a hurry—as I was now—the knot tended to stick. Thankfully, he had a fly through which I could draw his cock, and I caressed it until he was just as hard as I was. I was ready to rip a hole in the seat of his pants, and started tugging at the fabric, but Vince had other ideas.

Throwing the blankets and sheets to the floor, he pushed me onto my back, pulled down my pants (no knotting for me) and started sucking my dick as if it was breakfast. Vince had become, in the last two years and under my exacting tuition, an extremely accomplished lover, and he fucked like a god—but if there was one thing at which he really excelled, it was sucking cock. If he continued, I would come in his mouth, which he loved—but I wanted to punish his ass first, as a way of expressing my displeasure at his “abandonment” (as I thought of it) and, simultaneously, letting him know that I loved him more than ever. Sex, for me, is equally capable of expressing positive and negative emotions, often at the same time.

Vince knew what I had in mind, and eased off when he felt my cock hardening even further in his mouth. He pulled the jacket over his head; I could see the outlines of his pale, athletic body in the faint glow of the streetlamps that penetrated the curtains. He straddled me, shifted my legs up, gripped my cock, and wriggled out of his pajama pants. I
was still wet from his sucking; that was all the lubrication he was going to get. We both wanted this to be a rough ride.

And it was. Vince wasted no time lowering himself onto me, and I provided the necessary pressure by bracing my pelvis upward to shove my cock right into the base. When the hair above my dick met the hair around his crack, I was ready to start pumping. We had done this often enough to establish a rhythm quickly—fucking really is one of those activities that “practice makes perfect”—and soon his motions were synchronized with my thrusts, taking me deep inside him. His prick was bouncing up and down, slapping against his taut stomach, and when I grabbed the head I could feel sticky fluid, which I gathered between my thumb and forefinger and brought to my mouth. This was not going to take long.

When I’m fucking Vince, I like to make him come first, because in his postorgasmic state the last few thrusts as I come send him into a kind of trance. And so I wrapped a fist around his dick and started jerking him off. I could tell he was getting close; with one hand he was pinching his nipple, with the other he was reaching back to feel my dick stretching his ass lips. Some hard fucking would do the rest. The bed was creaking so loudly that it must have been audible all over the house.

The first shot of his spunk went above my face and hit the headboard; the next caught me on the chin and ran down my neck. I kept fucking and jerking until I knew he had no more to give me and then, grabbing him by the upper arms, threw him onto his back, never letting my cock slide out of his ass. I let him take my full weight through my cock, just balancing on my toes and elbows, and fucked him as hard as I could. He sighed and moaned and then went silent as I covered his mouth with mine, smearing his face with his own spunk, and squirted far up into his guts.

“That’ll teach you to work when I want you to come
with me,” I said, half in jest, wiping my sticky cock all over his chest. I got shakily to my feet and left him to recover alone.

By the time I had washed and dressed, Vince was in the kitchen making a pot of tea and cutting slices of bread for my breakfast. We ate and drank in silence, but it was an amicable silence compared to the frostiness of the previous evening. I watched his throat working as he swallowed his tea, marveled at the paleness of his skin where his bathrobe fell open. When it was time to leave, I stood behind his chair, kissed him on the neck, and thrust one hand into his robe, pulling it open. Soon he was hard again, as was I inside my spiffy black pants—but I did not have time for another elaborate farewell. I grabbed some butter from the dish, smeared it around his cock and balls. He rested his feet on the table, pushing aside plates and mugs, which clattered to the floor, and, leaning back against me, allowed me to finger him and caress his cock until he was squirming his way to another orgasm. There was less outcome this time, but still enough to make a fan pattern across his belly.