The epilogue to the 'Butt Monkey' series of stories by Robert Furlong
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Jake looked over at me and we grinned at each other.
I was desperately pleased to see him and I could see that he was pretty chuffed to see me, even though he hadn't found the time to phone home in over a fortnight.
Traffic was fairly quiet and I managed to pull out of his university residence onto the main road.
I looked over at him again once we'd got past some parked cars. His bright blue fringe and goatee beard didn't really suit him. I hoped they were just temporary quirks of undergraduate self-expression.
When he'd first met me in the doorway of his student flat, I'd thought for one horrible second that he'd had a swirly tattoo etched on his neck. I'd been relieved to realise it was just a stray thread of cotton from the black t-shirt he was wearing.
"Have we got anyone coming over during the holiday?" he asked as I slowed down to flash a middle aged couple across the road. They had the weary look of parents who had, like me, come to collect a son or daughter for the holiday.
For some reason his voice sounded deeper. I wondered if he'd taken up smoking or if it was just a testosterone surge.
"Well, Debbie is coming for Christmas dinner with us," I replied. Things had been going rather better for us recently, now that my sexual needs were largely being taken care of by other men. I was beginning to wonder whether, in spite of her obvious enjoyment of my friendship, she might, like me, prefer her own gender for sex.
"What about Bradley?" he asked. He was always keen on Bradley coming over. The two of them got on remarkably well.
"I assume Bradley will want to spend Christmas with his fiancée and baby daughter," I said, glancing over at him. I didn't like the way his earring was stretching a large hole in his lobe. I'd already told him he'd regret it one day.
"He'll probably come over once or twice while I'm home, though, won't he?" Jake persisted.
"Quite likely," I said, turning right onto Woodhouse Lane.
"And what about that other bloke?" he went on. "The one you met in the summer..."
Did he mean Deshi, who had come to fix the satellite dish and had gone on to make several other installations? I didn't think I'd told Jake about him. In any case, his visits had fizzled out in October.
"Was he called Hugh or something?" Jake asked.
"Oh, you mean Hugo," I said. Hugo Clarke. We'd met in Debenham's toilets; an inauspicious beginning to what had turned out to be tumultuous relationship. "He and I parted company a while back."
The thieving bastard had nicked my watch when I was asleep – I was convinced of it.
Hugo's first visit had been the only time Jake had seen me rimming another man. Thinking he'd gone to bed, we'd become playful on the couch, groping each other through our trousers and sniffing each other's bottoms. In the middle of that, Hugo's trousers and briefs had somehow become yanked down and my face had somehow planted itself firmly between his legs. While I'd been feeding hungrily on his splayed hole, my nose nuzzling into his big, hairy balls, he'd abruptly stopped masturbating and I'd heard him say, "Er...."
I'd looked up and found Jake ogling us from the doorway, muttering something about forgetting his phone. He'd come into the room to collect it, the two of us staring at him, frozen in the middle of the most intimate act one man can perform on another. He'd smirked at us, making no bones about the fact he was taking it all in – from Hugo's pink and spit-soaked arsehole to my shocked face with anal hairs sticking to my lips – and then had thrown us a wink and closed the door behind him.
When I'd challenged him about it the following day, he'd just shrugged and said, not altogether unreasonably, that if we wanted to get up to "private stuff" we should do it in the bedroom. When I'd commented on how much he'd stared at us, he'd grinned and muttered, "Well, the two of you looked kind of hot like that."
As I stopped at a crossing, he asked, "What about that Italian guy... with that weird surname? Delgado, was it?"
Marco had been his first name. He'd been extremely physical, almost unmanageably so, and I'd wondered whether all Europeans were so unrestrained.
"He fell in love with some woman and felt he should be faithful to her."
"How quaint," Jake observed with a wry smile.
"Quite," I agreed.
"He was the one you were in the shower with that time, wasn't he?"
I looked across at him and at first I pretended to still be annoyed, but I couldn't keep it up and we ended up smirking each other. There was no need for an answer; he knew full well that Marco had been the one he'd walked in on me playing prison showers with. Marco had been acting out the part of the new arrival who'd unfortunately dropped his soap and I'd been the seasoned inmate behind him exploiting the mishap for all it was worth.
Jake certainly hadn't been anxious to extract himself from the awkward position he'd found himself in, hovering in the bathroom doorway like he'd hoped to get drawn in as the prison guard. He must have watched us as silently as he could until we'd become aware of his presence, and even then I'd had to pause what I was doing, crouching over Marco and with my arms around his chest, to ask him if he'd mind kindly leaving us to it.
As if enjoying working his way through my address book, he went on to ask, "You'll be seeing Guy, of course, won't you?"
I pulled out onto the ring road, following signs to the south-bound motorway. The rear view mirror was largely useless, Jake's stuff was packed so high. He probably wouldn't touch the bulk of it during the break but would just reload the car and dutifully bring it back up to university with him in January.
"We haven't arranged anything," I replied. "He tends to just turn up out of the blue when he needs a bit of... er... company."
Jake chuckled. He was well aware of the sort of company Guy enjoyed. I still blushed to think of one Friday evening back in March or April when Guy had come over and, even though he knew that Jake was in the next room, had been so brazenly impassioned and sexually unrestrained that it had felt like my bedroom had been shaking in time with his grunting and pounding.
Any pretence I might have tried to maintain up until then that Guy and I were just into rimming had been brutally and noisily dispelled. Jake could have been under no allusions that he was hearing his dad being very roughly buggered by his friend's father's cock and it had seemed like the whole house had been steeped in the crude stink our hot, sweaty exertions had managed to produce.
And yet, the next morning, Jake didn't seem in any way disapproving of the very obvious homosexual shafting I'd received in the next room to his. Indeed, he had had quipped that I could think of him as sitting on the subs bench if ever I found I needed a break from Guy's demands.
I'd asked him what he meant and he'd just laughed, saying it had been a joke. But I'd suspected if I really had knocked on his bedroom door with a request for him to fill in for me for half an hour while I was taking a breather, he would have been in there like a shot. And I doubted I could have persuaded him to come out again when I was ready to resume.
I knew for a fact that he masturbated when he could hear me having sex with other men: something he never did when I had Debbie to stay over. Whenever the other guy and I would pause in the middle of sex, perhaps to adjust our position or when it was time to change places, a gentle thudding would continue through the bedroom wall, like a delayed echo of our rhythm from my son's bedroom.
And once, when I'd had two men to stay and we were experimenting rather messily with double penetration, I'd popped out to the bathroom for a new box of tissues and had found him outside my bedroom door, claiming to be en route to the kitchen for a glass of water as he struggled to conceal how much his boxer shorts were tenting outwards.
He liked male-to-male sex and had, over the course of the past year, become more and more expressive of that fact.
But at the same time, since starting at university, he'd started talking a lot about a girl called Ellie and would occasionally refer to her as his 'girlfriend'.
