Several months after I had parted from Jeff and a few weeks after my experience with Lionel (recounted in Chapter 15) three things happened virtually simultaneously. Firstly my wife, in a regular phone call with our daughter, told her that her lover was ill and being taken to hospital. I was not sorry for him, indeed I hoped that he would soon be dead, but I was sorry to think of the anxiety it would cause her. The second thing that happened gave me a shock. Chris's wife had set off to see her mum with Amy and I had arrived at his home and was sitting down at the table in his kitchen, drinking a cup of coffee before we repaired to the bedroom, when her car drew up outside the house and Amy came flying into the room. She had left behind a present she had bought for her grandmother and her mother had been forced to turn round and go back to get it. Maybe it was just as well that her mother had stayed in the car with the engine running. She said "Hello, who are you?" to me and I stumbled into the excuse Chris and I had prepared to cope with such an emergency.
"I've lost my dog," I said. "Have you seen him? He's a black and white terrier and answers to the name of Jim."
She shook her head, said "Hope you find him" and bounded out of the house.
Unfortunately that used up our excuse and we couldn't use it again nor could we risk Amy finding us on a further occasion. It was lucky she hadn't come back ten minutes later! We agreed, therefore, not to meet again for a bit.
The third thing that happened - and this made me very excited - was that after about thirty years I was going to meet Steve.
I had several times had the idea of meeting him again but as I had only an out-of-date address for him my letter had been returned "Gone away". Then I remembered that the school we had gone to might have his up-to-date one. It didn't, but it did have the e-mail address of one of his sons, who gave me his father's e-mail address. I wrote; and in due course received a reply, ending with the words "Keep in touch."
Now "touching" was something I definitely had in mind, though whether or not he did was a question I needed to resolve. When we were 18 and in our last year at school he had been uninhibited about sex, whacking off in the toilets during the morning break and revelling in my wanking him before we went up to our dormitories at night. I've never forgotten his thick dick with its foreskin so tight that it didn't retract at all. It left a hole just sufficient for him to pee without difficulty and to shoot a tremendous wad when he reached orgasm. His load was fantastic - each spurt of sperm was equal to some men's full output – and he spurted five or six times. Underneath that tight foreskin was a glans which he'd never seen but which was of imposing size and shape. Also I'd never forgotten that when he was about to shoot, his dick stiffened even further, bending slightly into a banana curve and lifting a little as it reared to ejaculation. It was wonderful to see and over the thirty years since I had last seen him I had often jacked off thinking about it.
Now I was going to see him again – and I was nervous and excited. An aunt of mine had died and the funeral was fixed on a Saturday about two hundred miles south of where I live. I wanted to support her family, but my daughter was reluctant to come all that way for relatives she had hardly ever seen. And Steve and his wife lived not far from where the funeral was taking place. I therefore phoned him and he invited me to stay on the Friday evening.
The day was sunny and warm as I drove south and I got to his house at about 6.00 pm. It was a three bedroomed, detached house in a small village with a large garden. Steve was in the garden when I arrived and came forward to greet me. He was immediately recognizable, though his hair had gone grey and he had lost the "puppy fat" I remembered him as having. He looked fit and well as he shook my hand, without any trace of consciousness for what had happened last time we met. He took me indoors to meet his wife, Anne. She was easy to talk with, pleasant and took pride in her home. She smiled and made me welcome, showed me to my room and invited me for an aperitif in the garden when I had freshened up from the journey. My window looked due west over the garden and I could see Steve and Anne carrying drinks out to a table and some chairs set out on the lawn. I went down to join them and we started to chat. Steve told me that he was Managing Director of an Engineering firm with premises near the local town; and Anne told me about their two boys who were now grown up and had left home. They had moved to their new house a few years ago when the younger boy left home and were happily settled. In fact it was a picture of contentment in middle age! I wondered whether Steve even remembered that we had been sexually intimate at school.
Anne soon left us to prepare the evening meal and I told Steve about myself, my job and my family. We had much to talk about. He said we might walk down to the village pub after the meal and just then Anne called us in to eat. It was a cheerful occasion with a good bottle of red wine which I had brought as a present and at the end of it we had liqueurs and coffee in the sitting-room, reclining in deeply comfortable arm chairs. Steve then looked at his watch and said "Time to go to the pub" and as Anne said the washing up would be done in the dishwasher, we set off at a leisurely pace, giving me time to admire the village as we did so. I also needed to think. Steve seemed different – much more in command of himself (as befits an MD) than he had been at school. I wondered whether he ever remembered his past. How was I going to introduce the subject in the pub?
When we got there the pub was all that an olde worlde English pub should be, with low beams, small rooms and a welcoming landlord. We ordered our beers and found a non-smoking room with a corner seat where we settled in round a table. We made small talk for the first pint, but when Steve bought the second round, what with the aperitif, the wine, the liqueurs and the two beers, we were shedding our inhibitions and Steve was less the successful business man and more like the boy I had known at school. I asked him whether he had a good sex life, and he laughed and said "OK". Then, because I knew he had sent his boys to our old boarding school, I asked him if he hadn't been worried that they might get up to the kind of activities that we had done. He thought for a moment and said "Well it didn't do us much harm, did it?" I said "No – it was fun" and he agreed. Then I asked him whether he had any regrets and he shook his head and said "None at all."