Thirty Days Hath September

This is a work of fiction. All characters are over the age of eighteen.

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My god, where to start? With me, I guess, and how I ended up here, a thirty-four year old office-working suburb-dwelling cat-owning married gay man, part of the

fabric of society,

respectable but hardly remarkable...

I might be stereotyping the hell out of myself but I promise I'm not griping. At all. I've been lucky, and I know it. But what do you want to hear a

happy

story for? What's the point, if there aren't any twists and turns, if there's nothing shocking, gruelling, dramatic coming up - how will my character develop?

If it's any consolation, my first relationship was an absolute bin fire. But that was five months of my life, nine years ago, B.G. - before Greg - and though it might've left a scar or two, it hasn't wrecked me.

I was twenty-six when I met Greg and a bit of a baby gay despite having been sexually active for eight years. Of course the first two of those years were exclusively heterosexual. I mean...

in practice

the first two of those years were exclusively heterosexual. There were some intrusive thoughts. And over time a few more. And...you probably get the picture.

I was twenty when I allowed myself to admit - to nobody but myself - that I clearly had some interest in guys. It took another year for me to work up the courage to

do

anything about that interest, and I guess another year and half for me to acknowledge - to nobody but myself - that my orientation was on a one-way street to gayness. Not that there was anything about women, or the notion of sex with them, that disgusted me in any way...but the phenomenon definitely felt like it was in a rear-view mirror, shrinking rapidly, losing definition, approaching some vanishing point...

I came out to my parents and sister on my twenty-fourth birthday. It was a deliberate choice - we were in a fairly nice restaurant and I banked on it being a context nobody would want to create a scene in.

I needn't have worried. Mum just hugged me and told me she hoped I'd find somebody wonderful, and to make sure to be safe out there in the meantime, which was crushingly embarrassing...but I guess that's a parent's right. Joelle smirked at me and told me she'd probably have to move to another city now we were fishing from the same pool - hilarious, since the dinner was doubling as a farewell for her because she'd accepted a job in Christchurch earlier that week...

Dad...put up his arm and waved to attract the floorstaff's attention, and as one of them made their way toward us, he murmured, "We'll have a round of shots, I think." His eyes flicked to me for confirmation as he continued, "Tequila, maybe?"

I shrugged. "Sure." If I have to be throwing back hard liquor without anything to cut it, tequila's no worse than any of the other options...

When the waitress returned with our shots, Dad nodded acknowledgement and said, "Same again thanks, luv."

Shit, I thought, looking over at him just before tipping back my shot, did I break my dad? But with another shot in him, he reached over the table and patted my hand.

"I am a bit flummoxed, okay?" He told me. "But I'm not- I'll come around to it, don't worry. Bit of time, and..."

"...and a bit more tequila?" I prompted.

He nodded, I slid my second shot over to him, and when I saw them next it'd sunk in for him, and everything was good. Like I said, I've been lucky.

Fast-forwarding two years and change and glossing over the catastrophe that was my first foray into properly dating a guy, I arrived at the team meeting one Monday morning to be informed that I was gonna have to spend Wednesday to Friday the following week on a course learning how to use the new software package work had signed a five-year deal for.

To say I was pissed was an understatement - I interacted with that database in the most tangential of ways, usually to create lists for mail-outs, and I could have that explained to me by a colleague who'd done the course inside of half an hour.

Besides which, I have

never

been able to understand why corporations and institutions do this - why they shell out tens or possibly even hundreds of thousands of dollars fixing a thing which demonstrably isn't broken - and that's before we factor in inefficiencies while staff are upskilling and the inevitable giant clusterfuck when data inevitably doesn't migrate properly and the rolling small-scale clusterfucks that follow for months afterwards due to people on cruise control interacting with the new software in the old way, all of which are

damaging to the brand,

which it was kind of my whole job to prevent...

So far as I can tell, I don't understand these things because I'm not, and never will be, a person who occupies a seat at a boardroom table. I am a person who reports to people, who in turn report to other people, none of whom make gigantic purchasing decisions.But they do get to tell me what I'll be spending my time on, and on this occasion both my boss and my boss's boss were adamant I attend the training despite how irrelevant most of it was going to be for me.

On the day of, I even tried telling Bronwen that my work wasn't going to do itself while I was farting around going on courses, but she just looked at me pityingly and said, "You're not

that

important, Hamish."

As a result, I didn't go into the thing with the best mindset, and still it managed to...what's the opposite of 'exceed expectations'? I was monstrously grumpy at the commencement of the second day - the aircon in the room was already failing to deal with the day's heat, I was wearing a sticker that said 'Hello my name is:', I wouldn't be able to get a mid-morning coffee, and the fucker supposedly running the course couldn't even be bothered to show up on time...

Which is another way of saying that I was deeply sunk in sourness when Greg walked into that room and said, "Sorry guys, Tyrrell's sick today so you're stuck with me, I'm afraid. Now I...don't usually do training, but I was involved with writing this software so I'm aware of its possibilities, and hopefully I can communicate them to you adequately. I guess also I have the slides to guide me so we should-"

He broke off for a moment, then said, "Ummm...and my name's Greg. Shall we just...crack on with it then?"

In case you're wondering, I didn't take one look at him and instantly decide he was the hottest thing I'd ever laid eyes on - my mind really wasn't in that kind of headspace. What I

did

notice in that first session was that he had a nicer voice than the guy from the previous day - he was easy to listen to. Good flow, pleasant intonation, threaded a joke in here and there to ease the boredom, of which there was plenty...

I started idly checking him out after lunch. I was still bored, but no longer irritated - we were over halfway through, I had got my caffeine fix, and his delicious voice was lapping around me like water as he explained something I had no intention of remembering...

He was fairly tall and quite built, but without that artificial inverted-triangle torso the truly dedicated gym-bros all develop. His nose was big but balanced in his face, his upper lip was thin but the lower was full, and his eyes had crinkles at the corners. He was wearing a teal blue shirt, sleeves rolled part-way up in concession to the heat, and overall he looked...masculine, but in an understated way. Not like somebody who'd shave and oil his chest and take selfies in front of a mirror, or refer to himself as an 'alpha'...

I'd fortunately moved on to daydreaming about something else by the time he came over to me a few minutes into a practice exercise we were all supposed to be doing to ask if I needed any help.

"Uhh, no I'm good," I muttered. "I'm just...I will literally never use this feature in my role, so I'm...sitting this one out, I guess?"

Greg nodded. "That's fine. Everything else making sense, though?"

I nodded back, pitching my voice low to avoid disturbing my colleagues. "Yeah, no problems. And look...I know you said this isn't what you normally do, but you're actually better at explaining things than the first guy. Also...less douchey."

Greg clapped a hand over his mouth as I said that, but I could see his eyes were laughing. "Poor Tyrrell," he whispered, after a moment. "He's not- he tries a little too hard, maybe. Bit of a rules and policies guy. But he does know his stuff. You should've seen-"

Someone called for assistance from the back of the room and that was the end of our interaction. Which was fine. It's not like I was expecting it to lead to anything, even on the remote chance he

was

gay, because, well...while I loved the reality of sex with men (when I could get it) I was way less in love with the fact that outward appearances came first and second and third in the gay milieu...

Obviously it was resentment behind it because I wasn't anything to look at. Not anything to

anything,

particularly. Small, but not small enough to be 'fun-sized', slim, but not in that concave-stomached longline twink mould...okay, my eyes were nice, genuine blue-blue. But nobody fucks eyes. And the eyes were part of a genetic heritage that included my

goddamn skin.

Any part of me that'd ever seen the sun was covered in freckles, but not the cute uniform little dots - no, the big irregular bran-flakes-looking sort. And I wasn't even ginger! - my hair was so dark brown it was practically black...

Honestly I would probably have preferred to have acne, because at least

that's

a walking advertisement you're oversupplied with testosterone...and there are treatments for it. Whereas if you have freckles...sorry buddy, you have freckles. Plus skin cancers to look forward to in your old age. And if all that wasn't enough, I was packing...nothing much. Too small to be desirable, or even useful really, but not small enough for the fetishists...not that I wanted anything to do with the fetishists.

All of which is to say, a fair amount of my sex life took place within the boundaries of my imagination, but even

there

I didn't let things run so wild that I created scenarios where random men who were several steps ahead of me on the hotness scale singled me out and dedicatedly pursued me until I finally managed to accept they actually wanted me for

me

- but that's what happened.

Friday morning it was Greg again. He told us Tyrrell had spent the night in hospital and was now awaiting tests results, 'so you're stuck with me again', and then offered it as his opinion that if we made good pace and everybody was agreeable to only taking a half-hour lunch break, we could be done by four. You'd better believe we were agreeable...

But by two in the afternoon, faced with the third test/exercise of the day, it was clear some people were flagging. Myself not so much, since I hadn't done any of them. Greg took a sweeping look around the room at all the bent heads and said, "How 'bout I go out and grab everybody a coffee? Hamish, you wanna come lend a hand?" He took out his phone and apparently opened some list app. "Okay folks, hit me..."

One or two people objected to the idea that he'd fund coffees for us all - there were nineteen bodies in the room.

Greg just smiled serenely. "Oh, I have a budget. Of course it's

meant

to be for wining and dining the rubes who

haven't

bought the software yet, but ehhh..."

He got a smattering of laughs - and fourteen coffee orders. Tucking his phone back in his pocket, he opened the door of the conference room and indicated with a tilt of his head that I should precede him out of it.

We rode down three floors in the lift and walked half a block to his chosen café without me feeling self-conscious or uncomfortable at all, because he was a good talker, Greg - he knew how to keep a conversation going, how to draw someone out...

We'd finally got all fourteen coffees arranged in their little cardboard trays and stacked in such a way that they weren't gonna tumble down either of our shirts, when Greg blurted out, "So, um, Hamish? Would you be interested in going for a drink after all this is wrapped up today?"

I stared. Just stared. With my mouth open.

"Yes, that is what you think it is," Greg clarified. "And if I'm way off base then I apologise. But...I had to try."

I had to try, too. To talk, that is...

"I uh. I have a thing. A dinner. At 6.30. I mean, I really do - I'm not making it up. But, um, before...?"

I wasn't making it up, either. Dammit. If it were

any other Friday

- but these were folk I'd known since high school and we'd all stuck together through a lot, and we only did these dinners four times a year...

Greg was unfazed. "Okay. I'll have a bit of admin and packing down to do once everyone's finished up in that room, but I'll be done by five. Meet you downstairs and we can go sit somewhere 'til six? Will that give you time to get to your thing?"

"Yeah," I croaked. "Yeah, that'll be fine..."

"Sorry you're gonna have to hang around for me," he said, backing through the heavy glass door and onto the pavement.

I nipped through the gap behind him. "There's three days worth of unread emails in my inbox - I'll make a start on that..."

I didn't make excellent progress on my emails. My head was too floaty. That guy -

that

guy - just asked me out...that honey-voiced impossibly next-door-hot...asked me. Me. I mean, I probably was the gayest person in that room - but he didn't need to be selecting from a captive audience. With his pleasing looks, his confidence, his conversational abilities...he'd be able to pick up literally anywhere. Well, I didn't mind being today's catch. At all.

I really thought that's all it was for him. Today's catch, reel him in, that's the next fuck lined up...I was mildly surprised, at the end of our little impromptu date, that he seemed to be nervous about asking for a repeat - 'any chance you'd want to do this again?' was how he phrased it. I assured him I was plenty happy to do this again and we planned to meet up on Sunday afternoon.

Greg was dog-sitting for one of his aunts, so it ended up just being a walk on the beach and a shared scoop of chips afterward, fending off said dog's attempt to join in on the fun...

"She is literally the most high-maintenance thing ever," Greg said, sweeping her up to sit in the crook of his arm. "Aren't you, Lola?" He turned to me. "It's always me who has to look after her when Helen goes out of town because I don't already have a school-run, etc. Because this anxious co-dependent little madam can't have sleepovers, so I have to stay at Helen's." He grinned ruefully. "It's not the hugest sacrifice, though. Her apartment's right near the beach in Herne Bay..."

We didn't fuck on that occasion either - I could understand why he'd be reluctant to bring someone back to a place that wasn't his. Instead, we parted at my car, Greg with a bundle of white fluff tucked under one arm.

He touched my cheek briefly, then ran his fingers along my palm, skimming the skin. "I'll call you, eh?"

I dipped down into my car, almost shivering. It was the smallest of touches, but god was there electricity behind it. I really hoped he

would

call...

The following Friday Greg was re-installed in his own place, and we went back there after grabbing some very nice Japanese, which I ate sparingly. This is the point at which I tell you we discovered we had off-the-charts chemistry and both of us instantly gave up the idea of having sex with anybody else, right? Except that isn't quite what happened. What

did

happen was Greg tried to be nice to me, and I dealt with it...kinda badly.

The problems only started after we moved to the bedroom - I'd been kneeling astride his lap as we made out on the sofa for probably twenty minutes beforehand, and that part was blissful. Electric? Yeah, possibly even nuclear. He was a

superb

kisser - able to be fully in charge without ever making me feel like I was in danger of being swallowed by the kraken - a balance that's...rarer than it should be.

We went through to his room and he grazed his hands all the way down my arms and said, "How 'bout you undress for me, beautiful?"

I found it vaguely jarring to be called 'beautiful'. It was clear he was going for a compliment rather than sarcasm, but still...no-one had ever told me I was beautiful. The

mirror

didn't tell me I was beautiful. For sure, some guys had said, in the thick of things, that I had a fine little arse, or that it was hot the way I twerked on them but-

Whatever. I blinked it away, steeled myself, and started stripping off my clothes. In some ways I was happy to have it over with - undressing was always the scary part for me, the part where it might go wrong. Is it better to announce upfront that you have a really mediocre cock, or is it better to wait so you can disappoint them at a stage in the evening where they're (probably) too invested to quit out on you?

Obviously there are a lot of things that can be said at this point. I know that because I've heard them all already. There's 'the internet gives everybody a skewed idea of what normal dick size is', there's 'size doesn't matter on a bottom anyway', and my personal favourite, 'c'mon, we're gay - all dicks are lovely'...

Sure, sure they are, but just like in 'Animal Farm' some of them are lovelier than others - hey, I even thought it myself. And some - like mine - are

actually

smaller than the

actual

average even without regards to the internet. And

some of the people,

some of them called Blair who've spent five months telling you they love your cute lil' dick just the way it is, then say some really shitty things about it when they're breaking up with you...

I finished undressing and threw myself on the bed, trying to come across like it didn't matter. Greg's eyes travelled all over me. He looked...well, he didn't look disgusted, anyway...

"Christ," he whispered, "just so beautiful..."

I felt a lump in my throat, a weird clog of emotion. "Could you

not?"

I hissed.

He came and lay down alongside me fully clothed, propped up on an elbow, all gentle concern. Also not what I wanted.

"I'm sorry," he began. "What did I-"

"You know you don't need to seduce me, right?" I muttered. "I'm here. I'm happy to fuck. I also know what I'm working with. I don't need you to be feeding me bullshit about how I'm beautiful so I'll feel comfortable enough to let you..."

He was still watching me intently, but my eyes, face, now.

"You think I'm flattering you?" He said. "Dishonestly? To increase my chances of getting something I want from you?"

Put like that, it made him sound like a complete shitball. I backpedalled. "No. I think you're trying to be nice. But...like...there's no need."

"Well, I'll be the judge of that," he said. "Is it so unbelevieable that I could genuinely be into you?" When I didn't say anything, he took hold of my hand and brought it down to his groin, pressing me into the fabric there. "What do you think this is?"

"A dick that's a lot bigger than mine?" I guessed. And hard...oh god, it was all the way hard and a really nice handful and-

Greg sighed and reached down for the sheet, pulling it up to cover me. Which...he could've just, he could've just unzipped his fly and let me get my face in there and actually I would've forgotten all my troubles inside of ten seconds, but...

He grazed my cheek with the backs of his fingers. "I really do think you're beautiful," he whispered. "Truly. Like...crazy beautiful."

I didn't know what to say. Or do. I didn't understand why this had to be a thing.

"Listen, baby," he breathed. Remember how I told you he had a nice voice? Well it sounded really

really

good when he called me 'baby'...