Part of the 'Butt Monkey' series of stories by Robert Furlong
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A few months after Linda had left me, when it was becoming clear even to me that my ex-wife wasn't coming back, I'd signed up to become a member of a couple of online dating sites in the hope that I might yet meet my soul mate. The endeavour had proven largely fruitless as the women who responded to my ad would either turn out to have an aversion towards children-from-a-previous-relationship or would behave in weird ways that couldn't be dispelled as merely eccentric.
Needless to say, since I'd been looking at galleries of male rimming on the internet, I had all but stopped perusing the pages of women looking for dates and had given up on checking my mailbox to see if anyone wanted to meet up with me.
In any case, my own profile rarely got any takers. For a start, my picture looked like the sort of mug-shot they show on the news when the police have managed to infiltrate a paedophile ring. Coupled with that, my interests made me sound far too boring and I figured my new-found hobby, while acting as an eye-catcher, might not attract the sort of woman I was after.
Nevertheless, a few weeks after the trip to Liverpool, I logged into one of my accounts and found that I had a message from a woman who was a couple of years younger than me, recently divorced, lived local-ish and, as a rare bonus, didn't sound like she might be barking mad.
She was called Debbie and she suggested that we might e-mail each other for a while to see how well we got on before deciding if we wanted to meet up.
It was a positive step – more positive than anything else that had happened to me in the romance stakes recently – and I agreed at once.
In the weeks which followed, Debbie and I established an amicable e-mail friendship. Her letters were usually just three or four paragraphs long, but her style was witty and her observations sharp, and I found myself chuckling at the stories she told me about other staff who worked with her at a veterinary clinic. For her part, she said she enjoyed my e-mails in which I rambled on about stuff that had happened to me at work or with Jake; indeed, I was thrilled when she revealed at the end of one her letters that she looked forward to finding a new message from me in her inbox.
In spite of enjoying the distant attentions of a female for the first time in over a year, however, my thoughts kept returning to my newly-discovered interest in my own gender; or, more specifically, in one particular part of them. It felt odd to go from reading an e-mail from Debbie, with a warm tingle of anticipation as to what might happen between us, to open a new webpage and trawl through screens of thumbnails of men being intimate together and feel a different sort of tingle in a more physical place.
It felt odd, and yet not odd enough to stop me doing it.
My visit to the library had elicited many more references to rimming across a much broader sweep of books than I could ever have anticipated. In spite of my lack of success with the librarian in the storeroom, I had at least emerged from it wondering which, rather than whether, other men in my acquaintance might share such a base attraction. Could my fetish – I could now accept it as being that – be more widespread than I had suspected? Perhaps it was something that lots of straight men fantasize about but few will admit to – the way that some men are sexually interested in their wives' clothes and others have a thing about wearing leather.
I began to wonder if Adam, my long-time friend and former schoolmate, could be concealing a smouldering desire to get his face stuck into my backside when we occasionally met up for a pint. Or whether Steve, a guy I sometimes played squash with, was secretly checking out the back of my briefs in the changing room after a game, wishing he could stick his nose into the sweaty material between my buttocks. It was comforting to speculate that every ordinary-looking guy I knew might share my newly-discovered fetish, but I rather doubted that any of them really did. None of them ever showed the vaguest interest in me sexually – not even a furtive glace at my backside if I gave them an opportunity – and yet I found that I started to dwell on theirs, especially late at night as I played with myself in bed as quietly as I could so as not to disturb Jake in the next room.
Ever since Linda had left, my masturbatory fantasies had revolved around fairly mundane female imagery: the breasts of the girl in the sandwich shop who sometimes smiled at me; Jake's hot-looking Biology teacher who always fondled her hair as she talked to me about his work; the new secretary at work with the most amazing legs. I'd construct scenarios about how I might get into bed with these women and what we would do together as I stroked myself through the fly of my pyjamas.
Since Debbie and I had started exchanging e-mails, I would sometimes try to fantasize about meeting up with her and where things might lead between us.
And yet, try as I might, I now found that often couldn't even maintain my erection if I tried to restrict my thoughts to the opposite sex. I began to allow myself to relive what I'd done with Guy and then, by a natural progression, to explore what I'd like to do with other men who I knew. As well as Guy's backside, my thoughts would turn to those of some of the men I worked with and the fathers of some of Jake's other friends, and I'd enjoy imagining how their arses might look based on their build and how hairy they seemed.
But most often I would fantasize about Adam and Steve, whose backsides I didn't need to invent because I knew full well how they looked.
Over the thirty-odd years I'd known Adam, I'd seen him naked on many occasions from our embarrassed dashes into the school showers through to when we used to go swimming together in our twenties. The most recent time I could think of was when we'd shared a room the night before my wedding, where he'd acted as my Best Man. I remembered noticing, in a disinterested way back then, how hairy he'd become since our school days when he'd slept with his back to me in his single bed, his duvet thrown askew so that his arse was exposed, albeit concealed within a saggy pair of briefs.
Now I regretted missing the opportunity to explore his backside as he'd slept off the pre-wedding booze-up. Obviously, at the time the idea would never have occurred to me and if it had I would have been both revolted and confused. But now it provided fuel for my nocturnal musings, reawakening my slumbering cock between my fingers after female-orientated thoughts had softened it.
Lying in the bed I'd once shared with my wife, I would imagine creeping up and kneeling alongside Adam's splayed-out body in the hotel room, and leaning forward to sniff the crevice between his buttocks through his stripy briefs. I'd use my own underwear, discarded after a day's wear, to help me imagine what Adam's might have smelt like, nuzzling my face into the material where it had been riding upward so intimately close to me.
I'd sniff the sweaty odour on the damp material which had been between my legs, imagining it had seeped there from the raised hairy ridge behind my friend's balls. Then, while my hand gently worked up and down the hardening length of my cock, I'd work my way back from the gusset and relish the stronger, richer odour behind it. While I knew this was the smell of my own arse – a not uninteresting fragrance, I have to confess – I'd be telling myself that this was how Adam's backside would have been; that I was really inhaling from where his cheap-looking briefs had been pushed upwards by his trousers to caress his moist, puckered hole.
This was really the smell of my Best Man, if only I'd sneakily sniffed him as he'd gently snored that night before my wedding day.
Stroking myself more quickly beneath my duvet and rubbing my large hairy balls with my other hand, I would imagine easing his underwear to one side so that I could lick his moist hairy cleft, allowing the heady, pungent taste to guide me to his small, puckered anus. I would lap at his hole as if feeding from it, and imagine him pushing himself towards my face, unwittingly enjoying being gently entered by my warm, wet tongue in his drunken sleep.
