Straight Submission, Part 2
David watched Heather make her way towards the drinks counter. Before reaching it she was stopped by someone and drawn into a conversation, well out of earshot from where David and Andrew were sitting. The coffee was clearly going to take a while. David turned his attention back to Andrew, who was checking his smartphone.
"So... where were we?"
"Were we anywhere?" Andrew asked without looking up.
David thought for a moment. There were numerous things he wanted to talk about. There were things he didn't understand, things that would normally plague him in silence. But here was someone who didn't seem to mind talking openly, calling things what they were, provided that Heather was out of sight and out of mind.
David had no doubts about his heterosexuality, and the way Andrew spoke and behaved with him now had David convinced that Andrew was indeed entirely straight and comfortable enough with himself to have no need to emphasise the point. If there had been anything remotely gay about Andrew, David wouldn't have minded; it would certainly have made everything much easier to understand. But here, sitting opposite him, was an attractive, masculine, sometimes even slightly gruff heterosexual male whom the girls seemed to notice. And this man had just declared that he didn't harbour an overall desire to be spanked by David, but that he would go along with it. He didn't long to play the beta male to another man, but he had declared quite openly that he would agree to it if David were to be the alpha: Andrew's alpha. Granted, the precondition to everything had been that it would all happen at Heather's request. And it was true that Heather's involvement in the whole thing was what seemed to appeal to Andrew.
But should David feel a sudden need to embark on a quest of self-discovery, driven by an urge to explore his alpha side, Andrew had made it clear that he would support him in that, even if it meant David making him his beta, dominating him, putting him over his knee and spanking his pert young bottom. David knew that he would never be prepared to help another male discover or confirm his status as an alpha.
He had initially wanted to ask Andrew about what went on between him and Bruno, and why. But just bringing up the subject had brought so many other questions to the surface that David was finding it hard to focus. Then there was the scene with Heather and everything this scene implied.
For the sake of simplicity, he decided to go back to his initial question.
"We were talking about Bruno," David started.
"Yeah," Andrew answered, looking up from his smartphone and across the table at David.
David raised his eyebrows as if to urge Andrew to continue. Andrew, however, just sat there looking back at David. He was prepared to answer David's questions, but he wasn't going to help David formulate them.
"So you were..." David thought for a moment. "Can I really ask you anything?"
"You can. I can't guarantee I'll answer, not knowing what you're going to ask, but you might as well ask me.
"So you started letting him experiment on you, right?"
"Yeah."
"You said you'd let me experiment on you a minute ago," David commented unintentionally, thinking aloud.
"Look," Andrew started, "don't go getting the wrong idea. I don't just offer my body to any male who wants to double-check his heterosexuality. I said before that I'm not into men, but loads of gay men are into me for some reason, and that's flattering but otherwise irrelevant. I don't want to brag, but they'd all be coming to me, pretending to be 'straight but a bit unsure about just how straight', as an excuse to have their way with me. So... just so we're clear on that. I said earlier on that Bruno had privileges, and they're exclusive to him."
"You did. So you would never have ended up granting these privileges to anyone else?"
"No."
"And before all this started, had you already decided that you would let Bruno have your body if he wanted it?"
"No. I mean... there were all kinds of things I would have done for him - things I never would have done for anyone else. But this took me by surprise. I hadn't seen it coming. Not that Bruno wasn't constantly full of surprises... still is, actually..." Andrew trailed off, smiling as he remembered something.
"Was it a difficult decision? How long did it take you to decide?"
"Just a few minutes," Andrew answered, bringing his mind back to the present. "Was it a difficult decision? No. Nobody I knew came anywhere close to being the kind of person Bruno was - and still is."
"What do you mean?" David asked.
"Well, you know him, right?"
"Not personally," David answered, but I know who he is and sometimes we've had the same lectures or seminars. He's also reasonably good friends with a girl I'm into..."
"He's friends with a lot of people, I know. He's popular. That's why it means so much to me to be his best friend. Okay, so if you know him, you know he's black."
"Can't say I hadn't noticed that," David replied with a smile.
"Right. Well he was my first black friend. That shouldn't be an issue, but somehow it was, because he sorted out any white kid at school giving black kids a hard time for being black. He'd teach the other black kids how to do the same. He had a way of manipulating those white kids, helping them see that they knew nothing whatsoever, making them feel inferior to him. I'd watched him do this countless times, sorting out the world around him, when we were all just kids. Kids that age don't normally do that kind of thing. I remember admiring him from early on, and that's what made me want to be his friend."
"So you just went up to him and asked him to be your friend?" David asked.
"I can't remember exactly how it happened. But I do remember that feeling of admiration. I remember wanting to be more like him, and I remember that I didn't want to be one of those white kids who were inferior to him."
"But did you feel inferior?" David began.
"I don't know if 'inferior' would be the right word. But I remember how I watched him in awe as he went around putting stuff in place around him and doubting whether I would have had the guts to do that. I remember being someone who stuck up for myself, and sometimes others, but it was nothing compared to what he did. He was my hero, and you know how boys are with heroes."
"And did he want to be your friend from the beginning?"
"That was what surprised me," Andrew went on. "It was as though he'd had his eye on me. He knew who I was, and when I shyly approached him, it felt like he'd been waiting for me, or as if he'd known what had been going through my mind. It was only later that I found out that he'd always wanted to have me as what he would call a 'special friend'."
"What did he mean by that?"
"Not what you might think," Andrew laughed, "we were just kids. He just wanted to be best friends with me. He wanted to make sure that I was always okay, to look out for me, to stick up for me and have my back. That came as a shock because I couldn't see what I'd done to deserve that. I think it was only much, much later that it started to dawn on me why I had become important to him long before we actually met."
"Because he fancied you," David said, answering the question.
"That's simplifying it a bit, I reckon. But he had his reasons for being intrigued by me, and the fascination was, after all, mutual, if not for entirely the same reasons."
"So how long had you been friends before all this how's-your-father business started going on," David asked, grinning.
Andrew smiled before saying:
"Look, our friendship is more than that - much, much more. Let's not lose sight of that."
"I get that," David said. "Don't get me wrong; I have good friends, but I admit I wish I had friends like that; friends that are like blood brothers. I can sense how much he means to you just by listening to you. And I know it doesn't all hinge on the sexual bit; if anything, it's the other way around. The fact that he has such an important place in your life is what led you to make concessions on the sexual stuff, right?"
"Er, yeah...!" Andrew exclaimed, pleased that David seemed to understand.
"But the sexual stuff is still the part I'm finding it hardest to get my head around. I mean... actually having to go through it."
"Hold on," Andrew said, narrowing his eyes and holding up his hand to stop David. "This is coming from someone who wanted to take me upstairs a few minutes ago to pull my underwear down, put me over his knee and spank me for as long as he felt like spanking me, or am I mistaken?"
"I'm not quite sure that those were my exact words..." David began, "Did I say that?"
"You didn't need to. You were turned on by being the alpha and making me your beta, by the thought of putting me in my place."
"Okay, so I was, but don't all men want to be alphas?"
"Think about it. When I said that I'd let you be the alpha and make me the beta, you didn't think to ask me why I wouldn't challenge your alpha position, and yet you assume that all men want to be alphas."
David thought for a moment, realising that what Andrew had said was true.
"Look," David began, before stopping. Had they ended up talking about things he'd wanted to save until later? He needed to get back to the subject in question, but it didn't seem fair to ignore Andrew's question.
"We were both turned on by Heather deciding for us who would be in which role. And we would have found it hot if she had been there, in charge of the whole thing, right?"
"Yeah..." Andrew sighed, suddenly turning around and looking over to where Heather was standing, still immersed in a conversation.
"Can I ask you..." David paused, wondering how to word his question, "...exactly how it came about? I mean, when he first experimented on you?"
"We often stayed over at each other's houses," Andrew explained. "Each of us had an extra mattress in his bedroom because it had become such a frequent occurrence. He'd been talking for a while about how he thought he might be into men. I asked him if he'd tried it out and he hadn't. When I asked him why, he said that he couldn't think of anyone who'd let him use them sexually, not that he'd asked anyone. I asked him if he could think of anyone he was attracted to who he'd like to try it with and he nodded coyly. I pressed him on that and he wouldn't tell me at first. But in the end he told me it was me. I hadn't been expecting that. I remember lying there on the bed, staring at the ceiling in surprise, I can remember it as if it were yesterday. We were listening to a Toyah album."
"Toy... what?" David interrupted him.
"Toyah. Eighties stuff. Bruno had inherited his uncle's record collection when he'd died, along with the record player. It's weird how our parents had to go through the motions of putting a record on every time they wanted to listen to music. Bruno taught me how to use a record player. We spent hours in his room listening to those records, and I got to know all kinds of new stuff... I mean old stuff that was new to me. It turned out my parents knew most of it from their school days. They even knew the lyrics to a lot of the stuff."
"Yeah, my parents are a bit like that," David mused. "They listen to a radio station that plays stuff from the eighties, and they're always singing along to it in the car or in the kitchen. Some of it's really weird, like one with a bloke, I think he's a soldier, singing to Churchill about standing out in the snow in the cold, or one by a group they say was called Red Box that sang a song that took the piss out of the USA."
"Yeah, Red Box. Tom had that. It must have been weird living in that time, without the internet and mobile phones, with all that wacky music. And the constant underlying threat of a nuclear war."
"I know," David said, "but my parents say that you just lived with it, and that no one used to talk about problems with Islamist terrorists back then. They say the only thing apart from a nuclear war that people used to worry about was the I.R.A. And AIDS. But... okay, so you were listening to Toys Are Us..."
"Toyah," Andrew corrected him.
"Yeah yeah, I'll google her later. Go on."
"Well, I lay there listening to the lyrics of a song she was singing: 'It's a mystery, it's a mystery, I'm still searching for a clue... A shot in the dark, the big question mark in history.' It seemed to fit what was going on; I know it sounds corny, but it felt like we were in a film and this was the accompanying music. I started fitting all the lyrics to our situation. When the song ended, I turned to look at him, and he was watching me. When our eyes met, he apologised and said that he shouldn't have said what he had."
"And how did you answer?" David asked.
"His apology confused me. That wasn't like Bruno. He always... well, he always said what he meant and meant what he said. He never beat around the bush. It wasn't like him to peddle back. It was the first time I'd ever seen him like that, and I didn't like it. That was the only bit that v0bothered me."
"He had probably gauged your silence as a negative reaction. It's not hard to imagine that he was worried he might have ruined your friendship," David reasoned.
"You're right. Sometimes you just need time to digest stuff, to let it sink in, to understand it. And when you're focussed on that, you don't notice that there's someone next to you who's panicking. But when he apologised it unnerved me. I just didn't like him being sorry. I thought about how he hadn't felt comfortable about telling me and that made me feel bad. To me, Bruno wasn't someone who should feel bad or sorry about anything he did. But here he was being very sorry, and it didn't suit him. I'd always known him as someone who knew what he wanted and pursued that goal, looking on any obstruction as a challenge."
"I can't imagine what it's like to realise you're different to everyone else, though," David said. "It can't be easy, wondering who to come out to and worrying that you'll always be attracted to the wrong people. Let's face it, the odds are that the person you're into will be straight."
"That's just it though," Andrew said enthusiastically. "If any gay man on the face of this earth could be successful in getting a 100% straight man into bed, it's Bruno!"
"So you decided to help prove that point?" David asked, his eyebrows raised.
"Look... I witnessed the one weak moment I'd ever seen Bruno have. It was unsettling. I wanted the old Bruno back, the warrior."
"That almost sounds selfish," David offered cautiously.
"I know, I can see that now," Andrew said, shaking his head. "But we were young, and at the time I saw it as a win-win situation. I wanted Bruno the steel warrior back, and Bruno wanted me. Why not let him have what he wants? Bruno always gets what he wants, and I admire him for that. If I'm what he wants, then that's what he should get."
"And there was no sexual desire whatsoever on your part?" David asked, looking carefully at Andrew.
"No. I mean, I remember wondering what he would want to do with me. But as far as I was concerned, my best friend wanted something, maybe even needed something. I felt that I would do anything to help him get that if I couldn't get it for him myself. And right then and there, that something was me, and I could give him that. He wanted my body; he wanted me. So I decided to let him have me."
"Right there and then, just like that?" David asked.
"Well, no, not 'just like that'. We talked about it a bit more. He asked me what I'd let him do to me, and I was so in the dark about what one man would ever want to do to another that I just asked him to tell me what he wanted to do to me. And I told him to be honest - not to hold back."
"And was he honest?"
"Without getting inside his head, I'll never know."
"But what did he say?" David asked, laughing to himself at how riveted he was by this story.
"I remember him not saying anything for a couple of minutes. But maybe I only remember that now because he made a point later on of explaining that silence. It turned out that he was unsure about coming clean because he didn't just want sex with me. He was attracted to me, to my body, to my personal scent, but also to me as a person. He was unsure about having sex with someone he may end up wanting to have completely."
"As in... having you as a boyfriend?"
"Yeah, although it's always been so much of a privilege to me to have Bruno as a friend that I wouldn't really like the idea of anything being withheld from him."
"So you'd sacrifice your body..."
"If you mean giving him access to it, why not?" Andrew asked.
"I can imagine going to all kinds of lengths for a good friend," David answered. "But I think I'd draw the line at that."
"Right," Andrew countered, "but you said yourself that you've never had a friendship quite like what I have with Bruno. I sometimes think he could persuade me to do anything. Quite honestly, if letting him have my body makes him happy and gets him what he needs, then why begrudge him that? At least until he finds a suitable match."
"So it's been happening ever since then?"
"You could say that, yeah. But I don't think I really see it like that?"
"Go on..." David urged.
"To be honest, I don't really think about it."
"Hold on," David protested. "You don't mean to say..."
"Well, I know this is a weird analogy, but it's a bit like a dog that an aunt of mine used to have. Whenever we used to go and visit when I was a kid, the dog used to jump up my leg, using its front paws to hold on to my leg while it humped its body against my leg. The first few times it was weird. But the dog was okay, and I liked my aunt and I knew how much her dog meant to her. So I just kind of got used to it and let it hump my leg. I think I knew that the dog was using me to get some kind of physical pleasure that was lost on me. But I just decided not to make a big thing out of it."
"So Bruno..." David began.
"No." Andrew answered firmly. "Don't even go there, or we can stop this conversation now. I'm just saying that you can get used to being involved in things that you yourself get nothing out of, just for someone else's pleasure. Bruno means a million times more to me than some dog ever could."
"Okay," David conceded, wanting to return to that first evening in Bruno's bedroom. "So there you were, listening to... what was that singer's name again?"
"Toyah."
"And did Bruno tell you what he wanted to do?"
Andrew looked at David.
"You sound really interested in this, you know..."
"I am," David admitted, looking back at him. "My curiosity's just getting the better of me. I'd heard rumours, and there was just this gut feeling I had that you aren't actually into men. It was a bit like a game of Cluedo or an episode of Miss Marple."
David was interrupted by Andrew laughing.
"He wanted me alive. Agatha Christie would have had a job making a meal out of that," Andrew mocked. "It's not rocket science. It's just a friend helping another friend out."
"Oh come on," David protested, "it's more than just lending him your favourite pair of trainers."
"Yeah, I get that," Andrew nodded. "But I still can't imagine I'm the only straight man in the world helping out a gay friend who means a lot to him."
"We'll never know, will we?" David said. "It's not the kind of thing you can look up on Google. But... don't you actually want to tell me what it was he wanted to do with you? If you'd rather not..."
"No no," Andrew interrupted him. "I suppose I'm just as intrigued by your avid interest in this. And I don't suppose I've ever really spoken to anyone else about it, except Bruno of course."
"And what about Bruno? Does he talk to other people about it?"
"I've never really asked him, but I'm quite sure he does. He's got a lot of gay friends, and sometimes when they come around..."
"Come around where?"
"To our place. We share a student flat."
"Who? You and Bruno?!" David asked with a look of astonishment.
"Yeah... what's wrong with that?"
"This just keeps getting more and more interesting," David said, shaking his head again. "Okay, so when his gay friends come around...?"
"He kind of makes a joke out of sitting me on his lap in front of them all when we sit drinking beer together. But I don't know exactly how much they know."
"How much is there to know?" David asked, before adding: "No, sorry, we keep getting side-tracked. This is all over the place. So on that first evening..."
"He told me he wanted to see my body, to touch it, to taste it. But he wanted to kiss me. So I thought about how I'd try to get things going with a girl and imagined that we'd probably start by kissing. So I told him he could kiss me if he wanted to. He said he wanted a proper kiss with open mouths and tongues and so on. I told him he could have that. So he leaned over me and started to kiss me. I'd kissed girls before, and kissing a girl always sent sparks through my body. I imagined that those sparks were probably now going through Bruno. So I kissed him back the way I would a girl."
"And how was it?" David couldn't help asking.
"Admittedly, there were no sparks for me. But on the other hand Bruno was a much better kisser than any of the girls I'd kissed, and probably much better than I was. He kissed me hungrily and made me feel like his prey, and that made me submit to him willingly. I just felt honoured to be his first kiss, and privileged to be closer to Bruno than anyone else had ever been. That did actually mean something to me."
Andrew stopped and looked at David, who was listening to every word. So he went on.
"Then Bruno suddenly stopped. I thought I'd been doing something wrong, or that maybe he was regretting it, scared of ruining our friendship. So before he could say anything I reassured him that nothing could come between us as friends, and that he could take what he wanted, have whatever he wanted. I really meant it. He surprised me by telling me that he now had every intention of doing that. He told me I could start by not closing my eyes when we kissed, to leave them open and look into his eyes while we kissed. We tried that and he liked it, because it made him feel like I was giving myself to him."
"But wasn't that going a bit far for you?" David asked.
"I wouldn't have done it of my own accord," Andrew admitted. "But when we tried kissing with our eyes open, I could see him from close up and definitely saw a change in him. He took on something animal-like and shifted his position so that he was lying on top of me. I could feel what felt like a fire extinguisher in his jeans, and I had to shift around a bit underneath him because that thing was crushing my balls."
"This is..." David began.
"Is what?" Andrew asked.
"It's weird. Weird that you weren't finding it weird."
"Weird, maybe..." Andrew began. "But when my best friend's face was that close to mine, I could sense how overwhelming this was for him. I could read it in his eyes how he hungered for me. And obviously... what was going on in his jeans was hard to overlook. I'd always known that Bruno could outsmart anyone in that department, but as I lay underneath him it was impossible to ignore his manhood. All I could do was find the best position to protect my balls. I thought about certain girls I really wanted to kiss and tried to imagine a situation in which they offered me what I was offering Bruno. It was impossible to imagine a girl doing that."
"Probably," David agreed, "but it's not the same. It's just..."
"I know; it's different," Andrew agreed, nodding.
"So... you were saying..." David urged.
"Well, the kissing went on, and I think I got more and more fascinated in what it was doing to Bruno. I was experiencing a side of him that I'd never seen before, and yet his determination didn't really surprise me. Bruno's personality often has an overriding effect on people in that they become more aware of him than they are of themselves. That's how it was for me. His eyes were millimetres from mine, consuming me as he kissed me, ravaging my mouth. At some point I was so immersed in the power he had over me that I wouldn't have stopped. It was like being under a spell; the whole thing just took on a mind of its own. It felt like an invincible force of nature. I'm not sure how long it went on for. I was so immersed in it, so hypnotised by it that I lost all sense of time and self-will as he continued to stare into me like a wild animal. But at some point he started to grunt, his eyes widening as though he'd been shot. He grunted and I felt his body jolt several times, I don't know how many times because it seemed to go on for ages. I could feel the fire extinguisher that was pressing into me pulsating."
David listened, captivated by the story and amused by the way Andrew had casually nicknamed Bruno's manhood.
Andrew looked up, wondering if David was going to ask a question. All he could see was a young man taking in every word of what he was saying, looking as though he was visualising it. Andrew wondered about leaving the next part out, but concluded that David seemed to want to know everything, so he would give him the whole lot.
"Obviously, he was coming - coming on me. I know we were dressed, but it still felt like he was marking me with his seed. As soon as the jolting and grunting subsided, Bruno relaxed and looked spent but contented. But his eyes never left mine, although their expression changed. The primal hunter, the alpha, the predator retreated, although his eyes remained locked on mine. What I now saw was someone at peace, someone who could now make sense of things, someone who loved me very, very much. He had been gripping me so tightly up to his orgasm that I actually found bruises and marks on my skin later. It was just one more way he had marked me, and I didn't mind because it didn't feel wrong in any way. It was as though he had taken possession of what he was entitled to. When he orgasmed, he relaxed his grip but held my gaze, keeping his tongue in my mouth. Then he tightened his grip again, but this time it felt different. It felt more like an act of protection. And just as that thought was going through my mind, he withdrew his tongue and told me that he would always be there to protect me, that he would never let anything happen to me. I believed him, just as I still do now, and at that moment I wished more than anything in the world that I was gay and could feel the same level of physical attraction towards this person who I loved so much. I told him that I knew that, and that I'd always felt his protection. That was when I started to feel it."
"Feel what?" David asked, in a bit of a daze from what he'd just heard. Andrew had been talking about feeling so many different things.
"His sperm. He'd shot a tsunami load inside his undies, and it had gradually soaked the entire crotch area of his jeans before seeping into my jeans, soaking my underwear until it was on my upper thighs, on my cock and balls and in my pubes. But it was just like with the other stuff - it didn't bother me. It felt once again as though he'd marked me, and that didn't feel wrong at all."
David stared at Andrew for a while, and it was only when a smile began to creep across Andrew's face that he felt a need to speak.
"So... so you pushed him off you and made a run for the shower..." David immediately regretted saying that. He just hadn't wanted to prolong the silence and had forced himself to say something. But that idle comment did absolutely no justice to the story Andrew had just shared with him, and he felt embarrassed. "Sorry," he added.
"Don't be. Most people wouldn't have let Bruno do that to them, and if most other straight men got their crotches soaked in another man's sperm, they would make a beeline for the shower. I get that. But to me it all felt right. The only shortcoming in any of it was the fact that my heterosexuality now felt like a problem, like something needing a cure. I told him that he could have my body whenever he wanted; that he had every right to make love to me. And I really meant it. Then I apologised for not being gay. He winced when I said that, and I wished I hadn't said it. But I reassured him that that was just a minor detail, and that it needn't make any difference."
"Now you're starting to remind me of James Franco," David laughed. "I read something he said about being straight but leading a gay lifestyle, or something like that."
"I can see the similarity," Andrew agreed. "I know that in previous times people had to pretend to be straight, leading straight lives and putting their true desires aside. But for all the wrong reasons. I believed in Bruno getting what he wanted, and I still do."
Andrew saw David's gaze move to look past him with the hint of a smile on his face. Andrew turned around and saw heather coming towards them with two espressos.