My God, every time! Best thought. He never grew tired of John's Body. He could watch it over and over, achieving an utterly spectacular climax every time. Apparently John's army of fuck zombies couldn't get enough of it either. As he passed through the place with Callen, he saw several groups of them in their black t-shirts and Speedos clustered around glowing screens, worshipping at the shrine.

Out in he great world, many people -- those less attractive than Best -- had given up on cruising entirely, preferring instead to spend their Saturday evenings with their beloved John and his monumental proportions. For those who continued to go out, casual sex was often a matter of going home with a trick to watch the video together. Bar business was down, a fact lamented in the local gay papers, though the writer completely failed to pinpoint the cause, citing greater "gay maturity" as the stimulus. Idiots. As if gay men were ever going to mature.

When he felt he had regained motor control, he sat up. "Bathroom," he said to his beautiful trick, who claimed to be a law student. Callen had a decidedly macho look with his muscles and his large, thick-knuckled hands which contrasted weirdly his demeanor, which was hopeless faggoty. He was the nelliest queen Best had ever met.

Best stumbled out the door. It was not necessary for him to decorously cover himself. Not in this place. He rounded the corner and ran right into John, who was emerging from the next room covered with some kind of oil.

"John."

"You again."

Best looked into the room, where a gloriously gorgeous young man lay on a simple pallet, obviously exhausted. "What's going on?" A ridiculous question.

"Filming. How did you get in here?"

"I picked up one of your... fuck zombies, is it? At the Roundabout. Could have knocked me over with a feather when he brought me here."

"I'll bet. Were you similarly astonished when Andrew, Arnold, and Lamont also brought you here?"

"It's a spooky world." Best had found that John's drones, their brains turned to mush by months of subservience, were pathetically easy to manipulate. He had arranged assignations with one after the other.

"Right."

They stared at each other. Best looked down coyly at his feet. "I just want to be near you, John."

John took a deep breath. Obviously, his banishment of Best wasn't going to take. The little shit was endlessly ingenious. Perhaps another tack was needed.

"Can you do anything, Best?"

"Do? What do you mean?" Best knew exactly what he meant. Once he discovered that all of John's slaves performed some kind of practical task besides rendering up their asses, he had immediately enrolled in accounting school.

"Do you have any professional skills? I have no use for a librarian."

"Well, I'm studying accounting."

Accounting. Well, now that was interesting. John and Carson had just been discussing the other day the need for a full-time accountant. His previous accountant had become completely obsessed with sex, spending all day every day looking for someone or something to ram up his ass. He blathered endlessly about cum and pussies. John had to send him away.

"There's a lot of money pouring into the coffers these days. It needs looking after. Are you interested? It would be a full-time job."

Best lit up. "I'd love it! Yes!"

This would be Best's punishment, then, John thought. Clearly, he was thinking that proximity to John meant regular sex with John. Usually it did. But not for little Besterton. John would keep him close, keep him at a constant fever pitch of sexual excitement, and never touch him. Yes, that had a fine sadistic ring to it. An exact reversal of their former relationship.

"You're hired," he said with a smile.

Best smiled back. He was in.

----

John kept him busy. In the first year, John's Body sold almost ten million copies. The second production of John Films, Inc. was entitled John's Love and featured only John and one other, the ravishingly beautiful youth Best had glimpsed the day he was hired. His name was Rupert and he was so beautiful it brought tears to the eyes. Blond, exquisitely muscled and with an ass to rival John's, he was the most extraordinary creature Best had ever seen. He was German and spoke no English. He was also incurably stupid. John had done some traveling to find the perfect costar and he had succeeded.

"But don't you see that he has some kind of power?" Best said.

He was talking to Todd and Gary, John's resident torturers. John now called them the Guerney Brothers, after the medieval assassins who murdered the faggot king Edward II by ramming a hot poker up his ass. John had encouraged them to persist in their sadomasochistic experiments on Lamont's body. The results horrified Best and aroused John uncontrollably. They were sitting in a park across the street from the residence. "What John has, honey, is the bod," Todd said.

"And the attitude." Gary added. "That's his power. He does it because he knows he can do it."

"There's something else," Best said. "Some kind of strange ability."

"Well, I hope he keeps usin' it on me!" Todd exclaimed. He and Gary cackled like two fairy tale witches.

----

Best walked through John's closet making an inventory. The space was the size of most people's basements and was packed like a sausage with John's amassment of erotic casual wear. Best was accounting for all of John's possessions in preparation for the move to Los Angeles that John had recently decreed.

A shadow passed by the door, vanished, returned. Best's sex response was immediately provoked, which told him who it was. John seemed to love torturing Best by keeping him desperately aroused but doing nothing about it. Best had done it enough to other people to recognize the technique.

"Busy at work, little Best," John said.

"Yeah. You sure have a lot of stuff, John."

"I wouldn't know.".

Indeed, John had no idea how much he had. His accounting needs were fairly simple: piles of money flowed in and got put in the bank. Sales of John's Body were over eleven million and still climbing. The second video looked like it was going to outstrip it. Best had made things more interesting for himself by hiring consultants to help him invest John's fortune, which was now percolating away in a variety of fecund repositories. He had also set up a trust fund for himself that was amply provided with embezzled cash. No one would ever know, certainly not John.

Best continued making notations on his clipboard. John stood where he was and watched.

"You're doing a really good job for me, Best. That pleases me."

Best cringed slightly, not enough for John to see. He felt a great storm cloud descending on him, a threatening mass. He had realized early on that John's refusal to touch him was a sexual punishment for some misdeed or other -- Best could not remember their earlier relationship very clearly -- but Best, rather than feeling chastised, was more than happy with the arrangement. He was surrounded by evidence of what John's sexual attention did to people.

"Here's your drink, master," Lamont said, sidling up with a frothing glass.

"Thank you, Lamont."

Lamont was the only fuck zombie who addressed John as "master." It was an outgrowth of his ongoing sadomasochistic degradation. The Guerney Brothers were wildly enthusiastic torturers. John enjoyed their exertions not so much because he liked to inflict pain -- pain was an alien concept to John -- but because Lamont's willingness to be defiled showed his utter subservience; any evidence of his own power excited John terribly.

Best turned and looked at Lamont and then quickly looked away. They boy was a horror, his body a mass of scars and fresh wounds. Huge purple bruises mushroomed on his dark flesh like cancerous lesions. John was intensely aroused by Lamont's slavish willingness to be disfigured for his amusement. Best had figured out that as long as John was in the room, no one could be physically damaged. An aspect of his power, apparently. But when Gary and Todd had their little private sessions without John, Lamont was vulnerable to all manner of outrage.

"You dress strangely, Best."

"Do I?"

"You're clothes are so baggy. You don't display yourself to me."

"I'm not one of your fuck zombies, John," he said, writing assiduously.

John cupped his hand around one of Best's fine, round buttocks. "Perhaps, I've let that go to long... "

Best stopped writing and looked him in the eye. "Why don't we not do that."

John blinked in astonishment. No one had ever not wanted to fuck with him. "Why on earth not?"

Best persisted, though his attraction to John was almost uncontrollable. "Because you're going to need somebody who isn't under your power, who isn't enslaved."

"Need someone?" A ridiculous idea. John needed no one. John had full access to anyone in the world any time. What could Best be talking about? "We're not talking about Harvey Kell again, are we?"

Best's self-discipline, the same self-discipline that had built his famous-all-over-town body in the first place, held him fast in the face of John's lethal attractiveness. "You're all alone in the world, John. Okay, you're the king of it, but kings are solitary people. A king needs a consort, someone to talk to."

John laughed, a hearty, manly laugh. "Little man, the only serious conversations I have are about making more money. The rest of the time, I fuck."

"You must be a very lonely person, John."

"Yeah, right. With every hunk in the world kneeling at my feet. And that's why I need you, someone to talk to? About my private inner thoughts? I need you, little Besterton?"

"You will," Best said with ominous portent.

John laughed, patted his ass and walked away. Best released his tension in a voluminous sigh. That was a close one.

But the loneliness angle, which had popped out of his mouth serendipitously, had potential.

----

John lay on his bed and felt his power. His naked body displayed itself to the empty air. On either side of him, two fuck zombies lay, completely devastated. They had fallen asleep the instant his attentions were withdrawn. Their perfect asses, slick with lubricant and internal juices, pointed perkily at the ceiling. He patted them both. What were their names? He couldn't remember. There was such a glut of enthusiastic slaves in his residence now, he lost track of them.

Andrew, his secretary, a deliciously statuesque Cambodian boy with a tiny cock but a spectacular rear development, gave the daily report. "Kevin's finished with the bedrooms and wants to start work on the living room. He wants you to get with him about your schedule. He doesn't want to inconvenience you. And another fan club started up this week in Boise, Idaho. That makes 157 globally."

"Not enough," John muttered.

"And there are rumors of a suicide club in Manhattan."

John raised his head. "Suicide?"

"Just a rumor. We're checking into it."

"Interesting... "

Andrew droned on, but John's mind wandered.That Best. What character. Lonely! Him, John, the sex emperor of all time and space, he was lonely!

It had been so long since John had been denied any sensual gratification that he had forgotten the experience entirely. He felt no guilt over the enslavement of his sex partners because he knew the pleasure they received was equal to his own. They all lived in uninterrupted ecstasy. Doing things that kept John happy was a sexual experience for them in and of itself. Keeping house made them get hard. They would do anything, surrender anything -- their jobs, their ways of life, their very identities -- to keep receiving what only he could give them.

Kenny came in, silent as always, and began to rectify the carnage created by John's sexual prowess, righting lamps, collecting plates and glassware, and cleaning spots of semen off the walls and furniture. Kenny was not looking so good. His zeal to please John, and to rekindle their previous relationship, had turned into a kind of frenzied obsession. He hovered sheepishly around John when John had not summoned him and had to be batted away often. He had redoubled his efforts at the gym, pumping himself up to enormous size and obviously making copious use of steroids. The results were not attractive. The graceful Greek god had been replaced by a dehydrated-looking, lumpish muscleman. His body had lost its elegance. His tan made him look like he'd been cooked in an oven. His face was leatherish. Something would have to be done, and soon. John felt a certain pang of regret when he considered their earlier love. But that was then. And his present needs and pleasures took precedent over anything, as he had just demonstrated to the two fine specimens that lay next to him.

He stretched and felt the singing exultation of his body. Since his transformation, the experience of pleasure had not diminished by even a fraction. His strength twanged in his muscles, and his cock, after a dozen orgasms, tumesced slightly. He was young, fresh, beautiful, irresistibly sexual. He was strong as ten men. His will could cancel out that of any other. Man, he had the world by the short hairs, and he wasn't letting go any time soon! The drive to pleasure was so great that it blotted out any old inhibitions he might have left. The need for gratification grew to explosive pressure within him and he would commit any act to fulfill it, consequences be damned. As a result, there were no consequences. Tiny annoyances -- like the state's investigation of him for trafficking in pornography -- were easily dispatched.

He stood and walked to the maze of full-length mirrors at the other side of the room. They were arranged in a walk-in configuration that reflected his body back at him from every conceivable angle. He gazed lovingly on himself. He began to stroke his chest, his arms. His cock immediately became fully hard. He would worship himself for a few hours. Andrew fell silent. His slaves knew better than to interrupt him.

That Best! Where did he get his ideas? Lonely! •