Nick

I heard about it at the Grapevine.

That’s right - at the Grapevine, not on it.

The Grapevine, you see, is my aptly-named local bar. It’s gay, of course, and it’s the epicentre of all the news and gossip that goes on in our city.

If you want to know who’s sleeping with who, who wants to sleep with who - and who wouldn’t be seen dead sleeping with who… then you’ve come to the right place.

And, inevitably at this time of year, the hot topic of conversation is where we’re all planning to go on vacation next summer.

For years I’d wanted to go to South America.

OK, I’d dipped a toe into the water at Acapulco and Cancun. And I have to admit that I’d loved it.

Those Mexican guys are just so hot - and so darned eager to be cooled down by a visiting Yankee - that the first year I went there I needed a vacation after the vacation.

Whenever I catch the Brazilian soccer team on cable TV, I know there can’t be any more gorgeous men on the planet. But, even so, I’d never gone further south than Mexico until last year when one of the guys in the bar told me about Costa Rica.

According to him, a few dollars worked wonders there and, for the price of a few beers, he told me all about the best places to go and how to make sure I got full value for money.

Within just three weeks I’d found a cheap flight, taken some long-overdue time off work, and was checking into the oh-so-subtly named Big Dick’s Guest House, right on the outskirts of San José.

The owner did actually claim that his real name was Ricardo. But big he certainly wasn’t - and the fact that he was five foot nothing tall and and weighed no more, I guessed, than 120 pounds led me to suspect that his place had probably been named for other reasons entirely.

It wasn’t long before I was proved correct.

The house’s guests were, I soon noticed, exclusively men. American men. And men, too, of a certain sort.

Similarly, the staff, too, were all males.

Not men, certainly, but a wide cross section of boys in their late teens - willowy ones, beefy ones and every possible type in between.

I noticed too that within a day or so of each guest’s arrival, two or three boys would attach themselves to him, spending all their time with him and flirting quite openly. The customers, in return, were pretty generous, much to the boys’ delight, with their tipping.

In my case, it was two of the bar staff who took me under their wings. Nick and José.

I met Nick first, late one evening as I was drinking in Big Dick’s small bar.

And that night, once he’d finished work, he didn’t bother to go home.

When, the next day, I asked him to pose for some souvenir vacation snaps for me, he led me upstairs to a small roof terrace.

I’d expected to get just a few pretty typical shots - the sort which, when you look at them a few years later, leave you unable to recall who that good looking kid actually was and what exactly it was that you’d done with him.

But, from the very beginning, the photos I took of Nick were clearly not going to be ones that ended up forgotten at the back of some drawer.

Anyone could see at once that Nick had done this sort of thing before. And that he knew, as I already appreciated from the previous evening, how to turn on a guy - or even a camera lens - completely with just a single look.

Nick must have done this sort of thing for his patrons many times before. He needed no telling, after a dozen or so “respectable” shots, that it might be a good idea to take off his shirt…

I knew, of course, from the previous night that Nick was genuinely turned on by guys, so it was no surprise when, before long, he found it pretty difficult to contain his very own Big Dick in those oh-so-tight blue briefs.

After a while, he didn’t even bother trying.

I suggested that he make himself more comfortable in the roof terrace chair, noticing, as he did so, several stains on the cushion. The chair had obviously served this purpose on previous occasions.

That day, in broad daylight, on a rooftop on the edge of a big town with plenty of people just thirty feet or so below us, Nick put on one of the sexiest shows I’ve ever seen.