fruit & veg -- 1
fruit & veg -- 1
by Emenos
Some people just do it for you. There's no rhyme nor reason to the attraction but they just turn you on. It may just be a one night stand. It may be the marriage that lasts a lifetime. But it all starts with that sudden rush.
But the rush can come at unexpected moments. Like when I first saw Matt he did absolutely nothing for me at all. He worked in the local greengrocers and I could see him standing in the window when I walked by. He stared at me and I imagined he thought he knew me from somewhere. Then I kept walking by (not to see him, he just lay on my route) and he kept on staring.
Too young for me, for a start. Too young and too slim. I went in one day to buy some nice peaches they had on display and took them over to Matt. He sort of looked at me from under his eyelashes in a strange way. His voice was very high-pitched, almost squeaky. Funny kid, I thought. I wondered if his balls had dropped yet. But he wasn't that young. Must have been at least twenty.
I went in there a couple of more times when they had some good fruit on display. There were some good ripe fresh smells in that shop. The boy himself always looked and smelled good, even though I didn't fancy him, like he was part of the produce. And he always gave me that half-ripe look, a cross between embarrassment and come-on. I made up my mind he fancied me and sort of enjoyed the crossplay of eyes and hands with the coins. Sometimes I let my coins fall into his cupped receiving palm so that I could feel the flesh of his hand against mine. He blushed and wouldn't meet my eyes. I thought "You'd make a nice fuck." But I'd had too many nice fucks in my life, and where had it got me? Lonely-ville. I wanted more.
And anyway I was at least thirty years his senior. I knew that some young guys liked that sort of relationship, had even met a couple before now. But they had mostly bored me after the first flush and grope.
This little game went on for a couple of years while Matt filled out nicely but still retained the squeaky voice. We never had what you might call a conversation. His parents and sister worked in the shop with him and I noticed that he only made eyes at me when he thought they couldn't see him. Sometimes, when he half turned to get something off the shelves, you could see that he was developing nicely in a physical way, nice curve to the arse like some ripening young fruit, sweet curves on the thighs which were filling out. He had a round face too, very dark eyes and fairly long dark lashes. But he reminded me of a young man I had worked with many years ago and for some reason this turned me off.
All the time fruit, fruit and veg! The connection made itself with no help from me. Feeding and good tasting and licking the lips where the sweet juice ran down. Perhaps, if his family weren't there, I might...
Might what? I hadn't the foggiest.
This other young man, the one I had worked with when I was not much more than a kid myself -- he was David and he was like Matt. Same round face with a boyish look.
David was a couple of inches taller than me. It was the time when everyone wore tight trousers and David had a fantastic arse and wonderful long legs. We just acted like a couple of young guys together. His desk was at a ninety degree angle to mine and he often sat there stroking himself through his trousers and saying to me "Fuck, I am so horny today!"
I was inexperienced and just took this as banter, having nothing to do with me. I often felt horny myself at inappropriate moments.
Sometimes if I was in the single loo David would knock at the door saying he was dying for a piss and could he come in. Sometimes I let him in and stood freshening up in the mirror while he unzipped and pissed and stroked his cock and said how he felt like sex. I was stupid and again didn't see that this had anything to do with me.
I can see now that David was eager for experience. He had a friend who had a girlfriend and he used to say to me how women's periods revolted him and he could never go near them. David's friend and his girlfriend used to neck in front of David, but David didn't like this. He told me all about it, disgust written all over his sweet young face (sweet to me now!) with his long shapely legs thrust out in front of him, feeling his bulge.
I must have been so stupid then, not to take David up on the implied offer. It was like my conscious mind refused to acknowledge what my unconscious knew. Freud had some good ideas after all! If I had waited until the office was quiet and gone around to David's desk and bent over him while he was stroking and then (secretly, so no one could see) have placed my hand upon the curve of his young cock and gently squeezed the engorged meat...
If I had let him into the loo while I was there and he went to have a piss and I stood behind him stroking myself, and he turned to see, and I got out my own hard cock and we started to play and he leaned back into my arms while I started to pull on that sweet hard meat of his...
But none of this happened. None of these opportunities were taken up. Is this why I no longer liked to think of David and why I did not react positively to Matt?
As I said at the start, it's a mystery why some people turn you on and others, however desirable, do not. And the moment is the moment when you suddenly see them in all their glory and as if you had been blind before.
The funny thing is that the moment for David came when I had long ceased to see him. Now, in imagination I see those delicious long and meat-padded legs, half open, resting against my thighs as I kneel against him and as I begin to push my cock against his arse I stroke those lovely legs with my trembling hands. I see him, young, round-faced, leaning back and stroking his own hard cock and smiling at me in that cocky way he was master of.
I again am in the single loo and he comes in and I have not put the light on and it is a twilit scene and he brushes gently past me and goes across to the bowl and begins to sprinkle it with holy golden sacred water, legs apart, delicious swelling buns outlined against the soft and clinging material of his trousers. He has only just started to shave seriously and his cheeks are soft against my own as I stand behind him and reach around him with my carressing and stroking hands, unbuckling his belt, feeling the firm flesh of his infinitely alluring and comforting body.
He turns his head so that his breath is on my mouth and then we mouth and lip lock, sucking and licking and closing our eyes, breathing each others very breath. This is the breath of heaven which purifies and cleanses us all and takes away all sin -- especially the sin of coldness and unlovingness -- and turns us into passionate angels.
He's got his shoulders against the wall but his waist is thrust towards me, his shapely thighs together, cock sticking up. I stand with legs apart, his buns in my hands, pulling him right against me. He looks at me from under his eyelashes, like Matt, a real smoulder look that says more than any words.
"Mmmmm, Brad," he sighs as my mouth comes down on his to shut him up.
Then I turn in bed and find I have got a hardon and am dreaming the same dream again. Matt and David so closely intertwined in my imagination that it is hard to see them as separate people. Past and present coming together to create a third and different time. Mind time. Imagination time.
Sometimes these intertwining dream sequences can go on for hours. And I am rarely completely asleep when they occur, which is what makes them seem so real. Endless copulation with no orgasm. Love that has no close.
In these dreams I am not always myself. Sometimes I can be Matt or David, or both simultaneously. Sometimes Matt and David are athletes with wonderful bodies but the faces of innocent boys, resplendent muscle-Marys with the bodies of athletes beautifully toned but always smooth with none of those horrible cords and straining arteries of the professional. These, with the young man faces, the sweetness and innocence of budding masculinity. And also like gods, gods of masculine love, gods of the pagan worlds, the enduring images of the dawn years still eternally living in the human psyche, the collective mind whose presence we can feel but whose validity we can never prove.
In the real world, this world (but for me no more real than the other one) the vision of Matt standing in the big plate glass window of the greengrocery shop was a perpetual beckoning, as if from one world to the other. The level of the shop was raised above the pavement, so that it seemed as if he stood upon a stage, as though it were the stage of the inner mind where the gods still lived and breathed.
About two years after I first noticed him -- and all this time the long looks that of late had changed into nods and smiles when he thought the family were not observing him were still in mysterious evidence -- I began to be more and more intrigued. As I say, he had filled out nicely, now more curves than hollows. For a while I had stopped going into the shop at all, for reasons that were not clear to me, but which had something in common with the young man's bashfulness in front of the adored person.
But did I adore him? No, I was now too old for that sort of game, or so I told myself. I was intrigued, or so I told myself! I was desperate, I told myself, a sad old bastard fantasising about a much younger man.
But although I no longer patronised the shop he persisted in nodding and smiling in my direction. The first time he did it I nearly tripped and fell flat on the pavement. And there was a curious quickening of my heartbeat which should have told me that something was not quite right.
Then came a new revelation when I had looked for none, one that made me think even more. An old lady of my acquaintance who lived just across the road from me was chatting with me one day about the local shops and how she found it a bit of a drag with heavy bags of goods.
Alice (the old girl's name) happened to mention the greengrocers where the young man served. Alice was chatting away and said that Matt (the name of the boy -- how I treasured that first knowledge like a secret jewel!) was unmarried.
"Oh, is that so?" I asked, glad to hear it.
"Yes," she said, "I often have a laugh with him and tease him a bit and I asked if he had a girlfriend and he said he couldn't be bothered with girls. He is more interested in the open air. The family live on a farm and he loves horses, goes riding whenever he can."
Goodness! how this moved me. No women and a fascination with horses. I could just see him astride a beautiful horse, a sort of gay Galahad who needed no shining armour and whose nakedness was glory enough in itself. I had to tell myself to be sensible and to calm down. But the smiles and the nods: what did they portend? Was it a come-on or just an innate friendliness with someone seen every day and who posed no threat (or none that he could imagine) to this younger man? Have you noticed that young people will often chat quite happily to someone much older than themselves whereas they can be suspicious and withdrawn to people of the same age?
Matt. Matt. Matthew. I savoured the name as if it were some new and delicious wine. I revelled in the knowledge that women turned him off. But then I thought, perhaps he's just saying that to Alice to avoid further questioning. You know how inquisitive some people can be and are never satisfied until they have you cut and dried and pinned down on a page like a dead butterfly specimen.
It felt as if I now possessed a part of him, as if he had stepped across the threshold of unknowingness into my lighted room. The process had almost begun. Next time I walked past the shop he was serving a customer and didn't see me. He was wearing a black golf cap which made his dark eyes look darker. "Matt," I thought to myself. And then I thought of Aschenbach in `Death in Venice' and smiled to myself. It was almost as if the strains of Mahler came floating down the street, yearning, yearning. But my Tadzio was a grocery boy and there was no shimmering beach.
Or rather, there was a beach, but it wasn't the Venice Lido. And a week or two later there was a sort of meeting there.
I live on the coast in a small village wedged between two other bigger resorts. Being now retired, I have my daily walk along the front and a visit to the shops before lunch and an afternoon nap. One day my routine was interrupted and I went out later than usual. It was a cold blustery day in early spring and the wind was like ice. But I must have my exercise and so I persisted in taking my usual route. The sea was grey and unattractive. The only hint of Italy was the church tower on the promontory opposite. I always kid myself that we are as good as the Amalfi coast, but today was more like Wick in the middle of winter.
I have premonitions -- you know what old queens are like! And today, in spite of the foul weather, there was a song in my heart, and a sort of buzzing in the ears that told me something was up. And a tingling in the testicles that made me wonder!
The coast here is full of inlets where the sea has eaten its way through the chalk and I was coming round one of these corners, striding along the concrete promenade purposefully, when I saw something that confirmed me in my feeling of excitement. It was he, the mysterious Matt, walking along with his sister from the shop. He stared at me intently as we passed and I stared back at him. His sister was looking quizzically from one to the other of us. It crossed my mind that she might suspect that her brother...Or was that wishful thinking on my part?
After they had gone past me, I waited a short while and then looked around at them. Matt at that moment turned his head to take a last glance at me. His sister was slightly ahead of him so without thinking I waved my hand. He nodded and smiled and passed on. Again that nod. Was it a signal of assent or just friendliness? Was he saying "OK, come and get me?" "In your dreams, baby!" I told myself.
And it was now that it came. The sudden rush. The recognition that something was afoot. The feeling of some sort of future. And Matt's figure shining in reflected glory from the inner vision that I now had of him. I shuddered, knowing the danger.
I staggered home somehow or other.
*
To be continued. Feedback welcome at emenos@supanet.com