I expected a ‘no problem’, or an ‘sure, whatever’ or something like that. Perhaps, if the world was going to shit on me from a great height, something like ‘fuck you, arsehole’ or ‘I’m going to fucking report you to HR’ might have come out. Instead, Simon said “Pity.”
“Sorry, what?”
“I said ‘pity’,” Simon answered, looking me right in the eyes. “I almost thought you were offering!”
I was dumbstruck for what felt like an hour, but was probably about ten seconds. “I… er… I mean… um… wow! I… I didn’t know! Sorry!”
“Didn’t know what?”
“That you were… you know!” Even nineteen years ago, simply coming out with the word ‘gay’ was a big thing.
“I’m not,” Simon replied. “Well… not entirely.”
“I… er… What?” I was flummoxed.
“I like girls,” Simon explained. “But I don’t dislike guys.”
“You’ve slept with guys?”
“And girls, yes.”
“But you’re just a kid,” I said, incredulous and ironic, seeing as I was only a few years older than he was.
“So? Sex is sex, man,” Simon answered. “I’m young – I get it where I can, when I can and as often as I can for as long as I can!”
“Huh,” was all I could muster. Yeah, that’s me. The last of the great conversationalists! I thought for a moment, before continuing with: “I still didn’t mean anything by it, you know. It was… just something I say.”
“And as I said, pity,” Simon answered. He was looking at me with an intensity I found oddly disturbing.
As was my wont at the time (and still is, to a degree), when utterly confused and cornered like this, I threw myself into the ridiculous. Flamboyantly, in a way that I thought looked and sounded like a guy who knew what he was about, but came off sounding like Dame Edna, I said “so, if I just came up to you and kissed you, you’d be fine with that, huh?”
“Probably,” Simon answered. “Assuming you’re a good kisser?”
“The fucking best,” I said, affecting a self-confidence I certainly didn’t feel.
“Then yes,” Simon said.
“Oh.” I deflated a little, here. My mock-confidence was shot.
Seeing that I wasn’t about to step over and mash my mouth onto his, Simon did it instead. I had no time to react before he closed the three feet or so there was between us at this point and kissed me, lightly on the lips. I was completely dumbfounded and just let him do it.
Finding no obvious resistance, Simon leaned back in, put his hand behind my head, and kissed me, deeply. For a moment, maybe two, I kept my mouth closed, but it felt so good and I’d not been kissed like this since my wedding day and I missed it and I needed it and, fuck it, I wanted it. So I kissed him back.
Tentatively, at first, you can be sure. That first real kiss with a new person matters so much, I find. You can learn a lot about a person by how they kiss. It can be the start of a long-term thing or it can kill a relationship stone dead. I didn’t realise it at the time, but I wanted, so much, for this to be the former.
Still, Simon was insistent. He understood, I think, that I was nervous and he knew I was inexperienced with kissing a guy, so he took the lead and I happily let him. But after only a few moments, I had my hands on his face and we were kissing like our lives depended on it.
It was the hottest, most erotic thing I think I’d ever done. All the time (and times) with Sarah, the dates and kisses (and more) with my previous girlfriends, they were nothing compared to this. Not that they weren’t nice – they were. Many of them extremely so. Some of them nicer than this. But there was an intensity and a feeling of wrongness that was, yet, so right, that made this kiss the most intense I had ever had.
We kissed for forever, it seemed. There is something… I don’t know… intrinsically masculine about kissing a guy. Girls are soft, pliable. Their faces are smooth and their lips are velvety and slightly moist. Guys are rough, rigid. Unless they shaved less then five minutes ago, their faces are stubbly and their lips are rough and dry. It’s just so totally different. And I was loving it.
After a lifetime of kissing, we parted lips and Simon, once again, looked intently at me. “I want you,” he said, simply. “But only if you want me.”
I paused for a moment. Did I want him? I’d heard enough about gay sex to know how it was done and, as explained earlier, Sarah and I were no strangers to back-door fucking, but this was a line I wasn’t sure I wanted to cross.
Except, I realised, I did.
“Yes,” was all I said.
He took my hand and led me to the steps. We climbed them, hand in hand, like two young teenagers heading to a bedroom for a heavy make-out session. We entered my bedroom. Jade, who had begun sleeping through some months ago, was in her nursery a door further down the hall.
My bedroom contained a bed, a wardrobe, a wall-mounted TV that hadn’t been on for about a year and a bedside table covered in the myriad of bottles of fuck-knows what, that Sarah had bought for her daily beauty routine and that I hadn’t been able to bring myself to throw away. That was it.
Simon, without a word, led me to the bed. He knelt on it and turned around to face me. “Last chance to say ‘no’,” he said in a stage whisper.
I had no intention of saying ‘no’ at this point. I didn’t know how to express that, though, so I settled for kissing him again.
“Good answer,” the stage whisper said. We smiled at each other.
I shouldn’t really describe the slow, sensual and – at times – comical way we removed our clothing. Suffice to say, when you’re about to have sex, double-knots in shoelaces are not conducive to quick removal! The bullshit simple, quick, shirt rip-off that you see in Hollywood movies is either extremely well planned or some sort of camera trickery, because all I managed to do was undo a couple of buttons, try to remove the shirt, get it stuck on my head and then argue with the damned thing for a moment until the pair of us finally managed to get it off me.
Ties! Ties are another thing that simply aren’t designed to come off quickly. I don’t know what kind of knot Simon had in his tie; apparently there are over 177,000 different ways to tie a tie. Whatever one it was, it didn’t come undone easily! For a moment, I thought we’d never get it off, but eventually we forced the fucking thing into submission and it joined an increasing pile of discarded material on the floor.
Socks, too. Nice things, socks. I’ve always had a weird fetish for looking at socks. Nothing sexual, as such. Just – I like looking at them. But when you’re about to fuck someone, they are oddly awkward to take off. You could leave them on – they don’t interfere with the important stuff, after all, but they just look weird on an otherwise naked person. So, off they came as well.
All of this sounds more like a Keystone Cops farce than an erotic denuding, but actually, it kind of was. The intensity we both showed in removing each others clothes proved to both of us just how much we wanted this. Had there been any doubts in either of us, the problems we had with our unhelpful clothing would have been sufficient to stop us and end the whole thing. Instead, we ploughed through it all purely because we wanted to get to the end result, so to speak.