Chapter Two
10:00pm
I dream about football a lot. My happiest dreams are scoring for Man U. My worst ones are missing penalties for England. Still cradling Paul on his bed, I guess I stopped worrying about his wallet being empty or his heart being full and fell asleep. What came next was my worst footy fantasy ever.
It began all right, with me running out onto the field in full kit, knowing I looked hot and feeling powerful; being clapped by blokes and hearing women wolf-whistling me. But there was only one other player on my side. I was confused and scared, but he kept smiling over at me - giving me confidence - and when the match began the opposing eleven were nowhere near us.
We scored easy goal after easy goal. It was real, skilful teamwork. I felt fantastic. Then the other guy and I were off the pitch, alone in the tunnel. I wanted to talk to him; to tell him how good he'd made me feel, but then - for some fucking reason - I wanted to hug him as well. I asked him if I could hold him and he looked angry, but he let me. I could smell the sweat he'd worked up. I could feel the thin glossy material of his shirt and the warm, tidy body underneath it.
He got more pissed off the more I felt him up. He had hold of my bollocks and began squeezing them harder and harder. The more faggoty I was towards him, the more he hurt me; but I was too turned on to stop.
Without any clue why, I really wanted to touch him through his shorts. I knew he didn't like it but I had to feel his dick. As my hand went round his nuts, I woke up.
I was pressing against Paul, rubbing myself against him; my cock and his leg slippy with fresh come. My come. Sleeping with the twat had screwed me up enough to bring on some kind of fairy-boy wet dream. I felt sick.
I was angry as hell with myself but even wilder at the fully-fledged bender who'd tricked me into staying with him and brought on this weird bloody dream. Before he had a chance to do anything about the accident I'd had, I grabbed my jockeys from the floor and wiped away any trace of my come from either of us.
Without thinking any more about football, Paul or anything, I got my clothes together, got out of his room and bolted for the shower.
I shut and locked the door, dropped my clothes and lent back against the wall. When I'd arrived at Paul's it had been a sunny summer evening, now it was dark.
I'd have to make something up for Sarah to explain what I was doing getting back too late to have been at the Sports Centre but not drunk enough to have been at the Union.
I looked exactly like the cheap mess I felt. Paul's hands had fucked up my hair; I was feeling lousy enough to be standing with a stoop; I stank of Paul's student-priced deodorant, my dick was ragged from the beating it had taken and there was come in my pubes. I took a good look at the state I was in then turned the shower full on to cold and tried blasting away my contempt for myself with freezing water.
It worked. As I scrubbed Paul's spunk away I stopped blaming myself and began putting the blame where it belonged: on the bastard who'd led me on with stories about wanting to experiment only to end up making me listen to all that shit about love. I rubbed harder with the cloth, scouring my skin till I was sure I'd cleaned away every trace Paul had left on me.
When I stepped out to dry myself I was panting with cold but confident I was myself again. My body was tight, my dick was clean and all I smelt of was myself. I got dressed feeling steady but furious, ready to rip Paul up with some news about the future that I knew he didn't want to hear.
I had to go back to his room to get my jacket. Otherwise I would have pissed off without a word. I trusted myself, but I'd felt sorry for him before and there was no way I could be like that again.
He was still naked and snoozing on top of his duvet. I shook him awake while I picked up my jacket then got on the other side of the room. I knew he'd be in a weak position since he was in the nude and sleepy and I was dressed and feeling fresh. My pants were damp with come and a bad reminder of what had happened so I'd left them off. I was going to use them as a way of getting the message across to Paul that his only significance to me was that that he was desperate enough for sex from me to pay for it.
"I'm off. You can have these for a tenner if you want," holding up my CKs. "Wear 'em when you're making out with your porno mags. Other batty boys like you that I've been with like that kind of stuff. And remember, this isn't ever happening again, so don't ask."
"What? Can I pay you next week for them, Noh? Can't I...aren't we..."
I chucked my shorts over, put a hand on the door.
"OK. Next week. Pay me at training. No, we aren't. We aren't ever going to do another deal, Paul, because you're too fucked up. The last thing I need is to be stared at in corridors and blubbered over in lecture theatres."
He looked panicked: he was in even deeper than I'd thought, so I made sure he'd got the message. "I think you're soft as shite to tell you the truth. If you aren't grown up enough to handle a casual fuck, you shouldn't mess with rent. What would the guys think if I told them you'd had to pay for it? That you'd been crying about my dick?"
He was distracting himself from what I was saying by reaching round for his clothes. It was a sorry sight.
I'd made a good move to pick on him for snivelling because now he couldn't do it again. If I'd thought about it, I might have softened towards him: it wasn't his fault he was gay or his fault he'd fallen for me. I didn't think about it, though. I concentrated on my contempt for what a mess he was in, watching him trying to cover himself up, biting his lip and trying to hide his eyes from me so I couldn't see how close he was to breaking down. Behind cold eyes, I was laughing at him.
"Anyway. You get dressed. See ya."
He stopped me as I turned to leave. Between big pauses his voice was breaking with the effort of keeping his feelings in check
"Noah. I wasn't crying about your dick. I know I can't have you...I still want you, though...more than sport, my course or anything. I feel like I love you or something. I'm sorry. I am fucked up. You're all I think about. You're killing me, man. I've fancied you since I got here...seeing you keeps me going, Noah.
"I waited ages getting ready to ask you for sex...you're the only one that even knows I'm into guys. If I can't be your friend now, I'm going to fucking die...I'm going to fucking die of it, Noah."
Yeah, I thought. Yeah, right. He was going to die.
"Well we'll see won't we, Paul? If you try committing suicide it's your Mum and Dad that'll suffer, not me. And that's a fact. But if you're talking about dropping dead from having the horn for me, you're kidding yourself. Go get pissed with your mates and leave me the fuck alone."
I genuinely didn't want to see him again. He'd shaken me up. I left his room hoping the usual thing: that he'd notice how good the curve of my ass looked under tight grey khaki now I wasn't wearing any pants, but the cocky rent boy thing wasn't what was going on deep down.
Deep down I was raging at having been tricked. Paul had fooled me into losing my distance from things. I'd stayed with him for free. I'd fucking well hugged the little arse-bandit. And for five minutes or so, he'd turned me. I'd had a wet dream about another guy.
As I went downstairs I thought about smashing something. I'd have torched the place and told the other lads from his house I'd saved them from Paul trying to turn them queer, except I knew the one who was most to blame for all this bullshit was me. I should have run a mile the moment Paul began asking me about selling myself. I checked the mirror in the hall and stared out the angry stud looking back at me.
I'd have to start smiling less often; I looked good when I was mean.
I shrugged my jacket into shape, put Paul out of my mind and opened the door.
Just like always, being out on the street after dark made me wonder how many cashed-up punters might be around and ready for my ass. My anger was fading into speculation about making money. I wasn't worried about Paul any more. He really could top himself for all I cared. So long as I made sure the only sex I had was meaningless sex, no one could touch me. I had Sarah; the rest of the world could fuck off.
Like I've said, the way I look has been getting me attention since I was seventeen. At secondary school, girls fancied me but I wasn't bothered. During the summer before Sixth Form, though, it was like suddenly everybody had decided I was a film star or something. I went on studying, playing sport, hanging out with my mates, keeping myself to myself, but regularly I'd be talking to someone new and notice things were going awkward: the other girl (or guy) would be red-faced, stammering or gazing into my eyes like they'd never seen eyes before. A couple of my Mum's friends, then a few of my mates, then a stranger on the street in London tried persuading me I should be modelling.
At first, I was embarrassed. I liked being good looking but being stared at - especially by other blokes - was annoying. I tried having relationships but I wasn't interested in going out with anyone more than once and, after I'd had each of the girls I'd fancied at college, I started getting bored of being chased. By the summer before my A-levels I was pissing my mates off at clubs and in bars by getting properly drunk every time we went out, on drinks paid for by people who were trying to chat me up. I didn't care whether it was young women, older women, ugly women or other guys. These people bought me stuff, and no matter how ungrateful or horrible I was, they'd go on doing what I wanted. I thought they were mugs.
When Mike Archer, the trainee Sixth Form cricket coach, began asking me to the pub and inviting me round to his house when his wife was away, sex was nothing to me except a way of getting things I wanted. Mike made me realise I had no problem with wanking or sucking cock and from then on I was making as much money selling my dick as a couple of my mates were making dealing hash. The only difference was my head was straight enough for me to ace my exams and get to Uni.
I thought moving away from the small town I grew up in would mean my looks got noticed less; that I might have to manage without the money I'd been making. But inter-railing that summer, guys still seemed to be throwing themselves at me. Some of them would be paying me to gob them off while their girlfriends waited round the corner wondering where they'd gone. I didn't bother hiding it from the mates I was travelling with because I knew if they'd had the guts, they'd have been doing it as well. Who wouldn't?
So, I arrived at Manchester with a tan and the confidence I could make enough money with my body not to have to worry about a student loan. Walking away from the nightmare Paul had just laid on me, it was doing me good to remember the stuff I'd got up to.
It took until the third day of Freshers Week for my first university customer to make his move. The Hall of Residence I was in had a charity slave auction where they sold off first years to whoever would bid most to buy an hour of their time. The idea was we'd tidy up or make them lunch or whatever. But it was obvious - with ten of the best looking new students standing on tables at the bar dressed in nothing but bed sheets - that another thing someone might want to do with their own personal slave was get them into bed.
Until I came up for sale, it had been men bidding for the girls and girls bidding for the men. I didn't feel especially pleased with the situation, but The Union rep running the thing told me I was her star lot and would get the most interest so she kept me back. What no-one was expecting was that the group of girls who'd planned to bag me would be out-bid by a guy called Drew, the third-year president of the Athletics Union. He made up some bollocks about wanting to humiliate me for having captained the fresher team that had won a football match against him and his mates on the first day, but I was pretty clear he was hot for me. And I knew he wasn't going to get a stitch more of my clothes off without shelling out a lot more cash.
I didn't like Drew. He was an arrogant bastard. It was as if he still thought he was the public school head boy his mummy and daddy had loved so much.
When I got to his room at noon the next day, he really thought he could humble me. Like I was going to apologise to him for beating him and his third year bumchums at football. He told me I had to get back into my bed sheet while he was posing around in nothing but a pair of grey sweat-shorts. Maybe the fags at his grammar school had been swooning to see the cock he was always boasting about; I just thought he was a tosser.
About five minutes after I'd started picking up his books and chucking his dirty laundry into a bin-bag, he stopped trying to laugh at me and started getting matey: maybe thinking I'd be flattered by him taking pity on me. Five minutes after that, I was sitting down while he made me a cup of tea and five minutes after that he was asking if I worked out because I obviously took care of myself which he liked. Did I reckon I had as good a body as him and look at this muscle, was mine that defined and why didn't I show him and on and on.
So - within twenty minutes of getting inside this big, pride-of-the-Athletics-Union-woman-killing, heart-throb's bedroom - I was being asked to undress while he did nothing to cover up the fact that under his shorts his dick was as swollen over me as it had ever been over his girlfriend.
Yes, I got bare-assed for him, and yes, I gave the conceited twat the handjob he'd been hankering for, but while I was in his shower washing his spunk off, he was busy with one of his neighbours asking if he could borrow thirty quid to pay for me. I went back to my new mates with enough money for a good night out, a keen new trick right on my doorstep and the confidence anyone would get from knowing they've just made their Hall President spill his wad.
I was a third of the way home by now. Laughing to myself about fleecing Drew had taken my mind off Paul but I knew he was still a problem. I smiled back at two nurses waiting near the hospital bus stop and remembered a girl called Esther who'd been more like the kind of intense, troubling trick Paul had turned out to be.
By my second year at Manchester a lot of people had heard rumours I'd sleep with them for cash. Esther was a first class finals student who'd already been offered a job on Fleet Street. At the Union Disco one night she'd made out to me that she wanted to know about student hustlers for a newspaper story she was writing. She was averagely sexy in a wiry kind of way, she went on about my looks a lot and she was buying all the drinks so I spun her some juicy details about being a male whore. Even pissed out of my mind with the music screaming away I knew she wanted to do more than just write about me.
When I left with my mates at 2am, I struck a deal with her that I'd go round to her flat on Sunday after my football match. She'd been particularly clear I was to wait for a shower till I got to her place, and right off I guessed there was some pretty weird kinkiness going on under that ginger crew-cut of hers.
Waiting outside her front door I tugged up the back of my shorts so my bollocks were on show for her. Once she'd given me my money, she didn't mess around. In her lounge I had to stand to attention while she told me I was only going to get my fuck if I could swear I'd been the best of the lads on the pitch. I said I had been and she asked who on our side had the biggest dick? I said I did and she made me take my shirt off. She said she knew I'd played my best cause she could smell my sweat and she could see my dick was big but why wasn't I hard? When I tried answering that she stood up and got me to drop my shorts. She looked at me naked for a while, rubbing herself through her skirt while I showed her my body and my balls. Then - can you believe how people are - she told me I was a really good boy and I'd get my pussy as soon as she'd helped me wash myself.
All this domination stuff followed by the long soapy bath she gave me certainly kept the clock running, so when she finally got me to nail her I only had to spend ten minutes on the job for her hour to be over.
The more complicated the people who hire me make sex, the more they pay and the less I have to do. And the more I laugh.
The only trouble with Esther was she didn't stay funny for very long. Around college, she was still ok, but I couldn't keep up with the demand for dates from her. By the third week I'd found out Esther didn't want a hard-playing footballer, she wanted a man-size schoolboy. She even put together this buff-looking uniform with a blazer, white shirt, tie and tight grey trousers that left my arse and bollocks on display for her.
I'd sit at her kitchen table while she gave me lessons on stuff like how bad and horny boys' dicks made them; how even well-behaved prefects like me needed to fuck all the time because of all the spunk inside us. If I'd just been down to the Union bar or in lectures, sometimes I'd wonder what the fuck Esther and I were up to. But then she'd be leaning over my shoulder undoing my fly, and my dick - hard as iron in her hand - never seemed to be bothered about how dumb I felt.
As the weeks rolled by I realised she was getting to be really crazy about me. I was getting thousand word hard porn e-mails from her nearly every day. Obviously, no guy had ever let her use him like I let her use me.
It wasn't long before Esther's freak side got the better of her common sense and she was asking, was I into being disciplined at all? In fact, a couple of guys had taken a trainer to my ass but I'd been sure they knew they were fooling around; Esther was nuts: really desperate for it. So I sold my backside like gold, telling her that bruising my ass cheeks might affect my football, but - if she was offering me some kind of bonus for each slap she gave me - yeah, sure, I'd take the risk.
Esther knew what she was about. The first time I lent against her bedroom wall with my bottom stuck out and tensed up, she was more or less patting me so I had to pretend that I was being hurt. She came down a bit harder when my trousers were off, but my butt's made of muscle - I've worked out on it - so I just kept my cheeks tight together and counted the money I was making.
After a week I was relaxed enough to let her tie me up.
That's never happening again no matter what I'm offered for it, because the second she had my wrists and ankles roped the real Esther came out of her shell. I knew showing fear would make her worse so I stayed calm, even when she came back from her wardrobe with a riding crop. It wasn't until she was convinced I wasn't going to make a fuss about the welts she'd cut into my ass that she untied me.
I'd been oohing and ahhhing a moment before, but the second I was free I was ready to kill her for what she'd done to me. I let her see her escort was angry enough to do her real harm then left, smashing up her hallway on the way out.
The night was getting cooler. I was striding along raging as I remembered Esther. Esther and her pathetic attempts to control me after I'd got rid of her. The threats of revenge, of squealing to the college authorities, of five page features about me by her friends on The Guardian. Each new thing she came up with made me ignore her harder on campus; but there was a real, deadly fury inside me and only the fact that inside a month she'd fucked off to London stopped me from doing some real damage.
I knew I had to chill before I got home to Sarah or she'd know something was up and try digging it out of me. I calmed down as soon as my mind came up with the experience I'd been searching for, the guy I'd known who'd been much more like Paul than Esther, my Faculty Dean's son, Alex Royal.
Like every postgrad management student, I was eager to kiss ass in order to get on, so I'd been crawling to Alex's dad, John Royal, since day one. It was an easy job since the old man was a vain, twisted fuck who swallowed my kind of man-to-man flattery whole.
By the end of the first term, I was a family friend, drinking each week with Royal at his local and becoming a regular visitor to his home. Buttering John up as he ranted on in the pub about blacks taking over sport or queers running the university would have been less easy to stomach if it hadn't been that Alex was always there too. He was a quiet, dark-haired eighteen-year-old, into amateur boxing, living with his girlfriend and working as an apprentice electrician.
In the pub, I'd leave John and his wife alone at their table, to shoot pool with Alex, neither of us talking much, but both of us looking and smiling at each other a lot. Soon after the Christmas of my first year at Sheffield, Alex and I started training together. I'd just bought the house Sarah and I lived in and Alex offered to re-wire it in return for me helping to coach him for his boxing. It became a normal thing that I'd get back from college to find him lifting floorboards or coming up from the fusebox in the cellar. Naturally, being friendly with him didn't do me any harm with his dad, but Sarah and I really liked having him around, he was such a nice, solid guy.
Looking back, I knew early on that Alex wanted me; but I didn't like thinking that about him: I didn't want to see homosexuality in someone who felt close as a younger brother to me.
It was a tricky moment when I got back one afternoon to find him squatting in my room wearing nothing but an old shirt of mine with my team photos spread out in front of him and a big young hard-on in his fist.
For me, fucking around with other men - despite the odd hassle - has never been anything more than a lucrative laugh. For Alex Royal being found out was the end of everything. Catching him jerking off over me was an embarrassment, but I couldn't have walked out like nothing had happened. Alex stood up, his face still red from the effort of working the thick pole sticking up against his stomach. He was stammering: trying to find some way of explaining how a promising boxer with his own woman came to be masturbating over photos of me wearing my shirt in my bedroom. It was awkward for that second, but really I couldn't have cared less that he liked me that way so I wasn't bothered about his excuses. And in any case, I was distracted from listening to him by admiring his build: the perfect tanned muscle, his height, that thick sapling stretching up from between his thighs.
It wasn't just because I wanted to talk to him that I stopped him when he tried to bolt out the room, it was because I wanted to comfort him, I wanted him close to me.
"Fuck, fuck...fuck", he was half-sobbing as I forced him to be still.
"Look, Alex. Shutup. You're all right. Calm down."
He looked at me with clear green eyes that showed nothing but desperation.
I squeezed his broad, bare shoulders as I felt his softening cock lowering against my own hardening one. I pulled him against me and hugged him, just like I would have done if he really had been a younger brother in trouble.
He never talked much anyway so I didn't let him stress himself with speech that afternoon. In the light of what happened, maybe we should have had a proper conversation so I could put his mind at rest. But once he'd finished crying and had shaken his head when I asked him if I could do anything for him sexually, I let him get dressed, said he was welcome anytime and told him he'd always be my mate, no matter what. He went home and the next thing I heard about him was from his Dad who stopped me after a lecture to say Alex wasn't talking to him, did I know what was wrong?
I went with the rest of the family the following week to see Alex fight and watched him let himself get beaten up. His mum was as scared as me at the difference in him but - in the changing room afterwards - we both kept quiet while John balled him out for being a disgrace.
He yelled about Alex being a waste of his time while blood was still running from the cuts on his son's face. Within forty-eight hours, Alex had gone. A month later his girlfriend and I received blank postcards from Christopher Street, New York with the address in his hand-writing. Both of us agreed that if Alex had made up his mind, no-one was going to persuade him to come home so - that was that - Alex had gone.
It had taken me an hour to get from Paul's to my place. I wondered what Paul was doing now, hoping he'd be asleep and would wake up tomorrow ready for everything to be normal between us, but worried he might be sitting in the dark thinking about razor blades or Paracetamol and a farewell letter ratting on me to John Royal.
Crossing the park a few yards from home, I stopped to slow myself down. Taking deep, slow breaths of the soft night air, I realised nothing from my past was any help to me. Drew had been meaningless, Esther was a mad bitch I didn't care about and Alex had disappeared before I'd had a chance to find out how to do the right thing for him.
I began feeling angry again. I couldn't believe how unfair it was that I was ready to help out anyone who wanted sex with me but kept getting into situations where people expected more from me than they'd paid for. I didn't want to be fucked around by bullshitters like Drew, stirred up by nutters like Esther or made to care too much about guys who were supposed to be mates such as Alex or Paul. Why did people keep straying from the tidy cash deal I was offering them? Why couldn't they just have sex and forget it like I did? Why the fuck did everybody need so much?
I decided I wasn't going to get over all this shit no matter how long I spent thinking about it and that I might as well go home and risk Sarah picking up on my temper. Maybe I could talk to her; break her rule about keeping her in the dark. At least that way I didn't have to worry about Paul going nuts and getting in touch with her. God knows she owed me. What other woman on campus had a bloke that was professionally trained to please her sexually? Yeah, Sarah owed me. It was time for her to pay a bit back.
At the edge of the park I crossed a main road and turned into my own street. I could see there were no lights on at the house so Sarah had probably gone to bed. I was tired too. If I was going to ask her what she thought I should do about Paul, maybe it could wait until morning. What I wanted most was a couple of beers watching some tv then to climb into bed next to her and fall asleep. The memory of lying with Paul flashed into my mind. I was instantly confused because I knew part of me was more interested in thinking about the muscularity and firmness of Paul's body and the smell of his after-shave and his sweat than in the thought of Sarah's soft tits, wide hips and sweet perfume. My teeth clenched as feelings I didn't like twisted around inside me. Instead of letting myself into the house at the front, I went round the side to my back garden.
The bedroom light was on so Sarah was still awake. For the second time that night I felt keen not to see her right then and moved silently over paving slabs to the lawn furthest from the house and got down on my back on the cool, damp grass.
Above me was sky so far away it had managed not to get fucked by the orange fuzz of the city lights. I looked up at the distant, silent stars and let them take my mind off all the crap I'd been dwelling on. I drifted into a daze, noticing that my dick was stiff again and thinking absent-mindedly about pulling it out and having a good rub about fucking Paul. It wasn't until my hands were actually reaching for the buttons of my fly that I came to my senses.
I sat up and punched the earth. Man, what the fuck was wrong with me? I blamed Paul's faggotry for blunting my straightness that's for sure. But I also blamed myself. I didn't want to end up a sleazy liar like Drew or an outcast like Alex. And if I let myself slip any further I was pretty sure that's what I'd be: queer for ever. I stood up, looking towards the light coming from my girlfriend's bedroom window and recognised how wrong I'd been to consider telling her I'd slept with a bloke who was in love with me.
I had to start doing more for Sarah. I didn't treat her well enough. If I worked harder at liking her, it was obvious there'd be less time for whatever sleeping with Paul had infected me with to produce flitty thoughts about men. I couldn't even believe I was thinking this stuff: Sarah was my woman and she was all I cared about. Why was I on the game anyway? In a few months my postgrad course would be over and I'd have a career in leisure that would bring in more than enough money. How could a director of recreation risk some gobby client going to the local papers or threatening to out him to his staff? The rent thing was going to stop. I was putting all that bullshit behind me. Paul going soft on me was the last straw. If he came near me again he'd get the same treatment as Esther, mate or no mate. And if he had thoughts about talking to anyone else it would be the worse for him. Maybe I could get Sarah to consider making things permanent between us. She was a woman of the twenty-first century all right, but even they liked the sound of wedding bells, didn't they? I wiped grass from my backside ready to go inside the house. As I pulled my jacket into shape and checked my dick was under control again, I cut off whatever was at the back of my mind and headed back down the garden.
When I first started dating Sarah at Manchester I'd finally won her over with some Romeo and Juliet shit outside her student digs. It was weird that just as I was thinking about calling up to her like I used to two years before, Sarah herself appeared at the window. Maybe she was planning to pull the blind but she stopped, smiling and looking out as if she was listening to something she liked. I grinned to myself imagining her playing one of our making-out CDs. She was wearing a red silk basque I didn't recognise and it occurred to me she might be waiting up for her man to get home. I wished I hadn't come earlier because I wasn't sure I still had it in me to make love to her. But then, if it meant putting distance between me and the stuff I'd got up to with Paul I'd have fucked my own grandmother.
It was at that moment I realised Sarah hadn't been listening to one of our tunes. She'd been listening to someone talking to her. To someone talking to her who - right then - appeared behind her. Someone who had shoulder-length blonde hair, who was shirtless and who - as I watched - put his arms around my woman and began kissing her neck.
Real Time
20
COPYRIGHT ( Alistair Stevenson 2002