Into the fire
Ivo always knew he was gay - knew it viscerally at birth, the same way he knew his father was his preferred parent and his sister his other half. Knew it at the age of two the way he knew that he disliked eggs in any form and harbored a strong aversion to hot weather. Knew it before he felt the first stirrings of desire in his tiny organ and long before he perused the magazines his school mates procured from older brothers and realized he was the only one not staring at the female anatomy.
Ivo knew he liked boys. Period. He liked all ages, all races, all physical types. He liked athletic boys who made his muscles work for domination and intellectuals who made his mind quake. He liked artists who showed him that living was one dimension and creation another and laborers whose simple existence he coveted. He liked the look and the feel and the smell of other males. A decade before he and the Arab boy he encountered in the Baghdad market tried their hand at oral sex, he was keenly interested in the male touch. He relished the rare physical contact with his father, those moments when he would press up against the man and feel the hard heat of his body melding with his own. He welcomed unabashedly the sensation aroused when riding his steed - his cousin - to rescue the Princess Isabella. It was his favorite game henceforth and even at the age of ten, when such childish games were to be set aside in favor of gentlemanly pursuits, he still tried to mount the older boy. He was a sensual animal, driven by pure instinct and his mother's utter negligence in educating her son on propriety with regard to the physical urges meant that they developed unchecked.
The years spent in foreign lands afforded him extensive opportunities a proper English boy would never have known. The roaringly masculine culture of the Latinos and the gentle tactile world of the Arabs educated him in ways that would have made his mother cringe. The secrecy of the Chinese and the underground of the Europeans taught him subterfuge. The former instilled an appreciation of the sexual arts; the latter, a quietude that would serve him well throughout his life.
He learned early on to hide his preferences from others – to save himself embarrassment as well as parental reprimand. Like so many of his kind, he discovered whole arenas of contact that permitted surreptitious exploration, namely sports. An intellectual child, it might have seemed contrary to his disposition but he threw himself into every sport imaginable and his mother, bewildered, permitted it as she really had no choice with her obdurate son. And so he participated in wrestling, reveling in the sensation of the tense body thrashing underneath him until he tamed it; in swimming, that weightless suspension in a man-made current that pulled him this way and that and gently bumped him into others; even in the brutal combat of rugby, his fleet prey crashing to the wet earth beneath him, sweat-soaked and mud-stained.
He always knew he would be dominant, that he could never be the effeminate character parodied in film and literature. His maleness was as integral a part of his character as the color of his eyes, imbued in the womb when Isabel was made female and he was chosen to be a man; steady and sure in its development; unshakable in its quiet strength. So confident was he, he refused to marry as did his classmates, opting for bachelorhood over false representation. He neither trumpeted his sexual preferences nor hid them from his friends. He simply was and what others thought mattered little. It wasn't that he wasn't aware of discrimination, real and potential; it's that he felt no need to rebel against it. Focused entirely on questions that intrigued him, those conundrums from the past so desperately in need of answers, he all but ignored the world around him. Indeed, he might well have been driven to the brink of insanity like so many mad geniuses before him.
But he was much too rational for that.
Very aware of his personal needs, he set aside weekends and holidays, structured time for incursions into the outlawed existence he relished. There, he rarely smoked or drank and shunned entirely the drugs prevalent in that milieu. He didn't want anything to cloud his mind and diminish the sheer pleasure of intimacy. He was a manic lover, more real than most could handle. There was nothing he wouldn't do or try in his search for understanding. There was a raw honesty to him that burned many and frightened others. Like the surface of the sun, the intensity of his very being left scarred bodies and charred nerves in its wake.
Until Danny.
Danny was all swagger, an attitude much deserved, and rose to any challenge, the more unattainable the better. He was a heat seeker, bold in the face of fire, resolute in conquest. That he sought Ivo out should have come as no surprise to anyone. Ivo was everything he dreamed of, everything he craved.
Everything he feared.
Like Athens and Sparta coming together, theirs was a warriors' fusion of power and creativity, a violent merger of complex intellect and artistry, pristine emotions that somehow retained their purity in the cauldron.