he would murmur how nice my body was and how much he’d enjoyed our lovemaking as he carefully wiped his cum off my back. It didn’t sound like much, but David was so beautiful that I think I could have cum just by us sitting there and looking at each other.

I had convinced myself that David had such a loyalty to Tommy that he would only be ultimately intimate with one lover, and I fought with myself for months to respect that loyalty. But I was thoroughly confused and angered one day when I walked in to find him pumping his Thai houseboy from behind across the back of a chair, with both of them screaming with joy as David came. The houseboy had immediately turned and kneeled and cleaned David’s cock with his tongue. And David had let him do this and obviously had enjoyed it—so much for the loyalty theory.

The next day when Tommy left to puff up some ambassador’s wife’s beehive, I stormed into David’s apartment and tried to force myself on him, to make him fuck me like he fucked Tommy and his houseboy. But David, considerably stronger than I was, pushed me to the door as gently as he could and, voicing his regrets that we needed to stop seeing each other, locked it behind me.

From that day forward, David’s door was closed and locked to me. And I hadn’t gotten over the frustration and anger on the day I left Bangkok for my next assignment.

Within a year both David and Tommy—and presumably the Thai houseboy and most of David’s Thai gay crowd—were dead. They had contracted AIDS, something I knew nothing about until long after I had left Bangkok, something that no one openly acknowledged was stalking the gay community in Bangkok while I was there. I had loved freely and frequently while I was in Bangkok, and it was a miracle that I never contracted AIDS myself. But David had made sure that I wouldn’t contract it from him. After he learned of the disease and that he had it and had received a death sentence, he very carefully never again exchanged body fluids with anyone he didn’t know was as infected already as he was.

No lover before or since has given me what David did. He gave me my life.